From April 01, 2026 to April 30, 2026
Alpine Hiatus: The Snow No Longer Tastes Like Snow
Between the summit and the abyss, between the untouched whiteness of the childhood snow and the worn stone of an artificial present, a hiatus opens. A brutal crack in time. A silence that is not peace but rupture: where there was snow, now only dust. Where there was descent, now disfigurement. This photographic work is inscribed in that breach: not only as an act of denunciation, but also as mourning. A visual elegy to the body of the mountain, to its wounded memory, to its slow erosion and to the certainty of its finitude.
The motivation rises from the depths of Filippo Poli’s family archive and from the desire to document the injured anatomy of the Alps, intertwining his intimate biography with the devastated geography of place. The author returns with his son to where it all began — the Aosta Valley — Cervinia, 1983 — but the landscape does not answer. The mountain that shaped his imagination is no longer there. Only fragments remain, remnants, fossil structures of an unfulfilled promise. Where previous generations learned to ski, others will have nowhere to fall. As an architect, Poli recognises in this mutation not only a cultural space: the relationship between the inherited landscape and the forms that have deformed it cuts through him, for it also encodes a personal loss.
The images that compose this project inhabit multiple layers of time. There is a yesterday revealed in black and white negatives: childhood, ritual gestures, the mountain range as refuge and narrative. When sliding down and tracing a path was almost a spiritual act. Snow was not merely matter: it was promise, root, belonging. That snowy territory, intimate and welcoming, seemed suspended in a luminous eternity. The framing of each photograph matters: every image in the family album is a room that preserves a way of being, of seeing, of caring.
The present, by contrast, erupts in colour, yet it is wounded. The gesture is now technical, repetitive, forced. An artificial reservoir deforms the slope, holding back what once fell freely. The season is no longer lived: it is simulated. The views have become a desert of concrete masses, coiled hoses and metal pipes. Where once there was ritual, now there is mechanics.
And yet the family album and the contemporary gaze do not form a linear narrative. They do not look at each other tenderly: they confront one another. What is exposed is not a simple transformation, but a loss of meaning. Those peaks that once drew a robust horizon are now symptoms of fragility. A warning sign. And the data confirms the wound. In Italy, to this day, 265 ski facilities lie abandoned. Ninety per cent of slopes relied on artificial snow in the 2021–2022 season. To cover a single hectare, one million litres of water are required — the equivalent of the consumption of 10,000 people. Circular reservoirs are being built — 165 by 2025 in Italy alone — to feed an ephemeral illusion that lasts only a few months. They are not lakes: they are open scars on the land. They are not solutions: they are surgical interventions on a body already exhausted.
The toponym “Alps” may derive from albus, white, or from alp, stone. In that semantic crossing lies the heart of Alpine Hiatus: between the whiteness that once covered the surface and the hardness of what emerges when the veil dissolves. The sublime splendour embraced by those who came before has given way to a shadow of suspicion and unease. What once seemed immortal now reveals its inconsistency: retreating glaciers, absent snow, machines fabricating winter where transitions no longer exist.
And yet the possibility of looking persists, though crossed by the trauma of a natural environment made vulnerable and domesticated. To remember becomes a complex act, tense, charged with nostalgia and irreparable loss. The photographs do not seek comfort, but to awaken an uncomfortable awareness. They do not romanticise an idealised past, but question it from within a hostile present. What is at stake goes beyond ecological crisis: it is an ethical matter. How do we love a territory that is being destroyed in the name of progress? How do we transmit a legacy when the landscape that shaped our identity no longer exists, or has become uninhabitable?
Alpine Hiatus is an attempt at an answer. Not a closure, but an open fissure. A gesture of attention towards what is crumbling. A form of mourning that becomes poetic resistance: because even if snow no longer tastes like snow, it is still possible to look. It is still possible to remember. This project clings to that possibility. And in that gesture, minimal yet firm, snow becomes word.
It becomes act.
It becomes persistence.
Still, perhaps, there is time.
© Mireia A. Puigventós
Filippo Poli, an architect by training, is based in Milan and has worked as a photographer since 2008 with architecture studios, foundations, and publishers.
His personal projects explore the cultural landscape and the evolving relationship between humans and nature, along with its consequences.
His work appears in leading international magazines and publications.
He received numerous accolades: 5th National New Photographic Vision León (2025), Enaire Foundation (2017, 2025), Architecture Photography Master Interior, PX3 Paris, ND Awards, Hopper Prize, Arles OFF (La Kabine), IPA Prize, Monochrome, FotoDoc, Arte Laguna, and PhotoEspaña Master Scholarship.
Exhibitions include a solo show in León (2025), Dispara Gallery (collective Quatro Amigos), PhotoEspaña (2017, 2025), Venice Biennale, Climate Summit (COP25, 2019), ARCO Madrid (2018), and Vila Casas Foundation.
His photographs are in public and private collections, including Enaire Foundation, Deutsches Architekturmuseum (Frankfurt), and Basho Gallery (USA).
