Reading about | La Montagne Dorée

Very happy to have bought a copy of La Montagne Dorée, by Myriam Ziehli, in which she edited, and adapted, found footage from a field trip in Switzerland into a fictive script for a play. The trigger for the book was a fait divers, a newspaper notice about an Egyptian real estate developer intending to build “a series of hotels, a number of cottages, some retail spaces and a golf course for about 1.8 billion Swiss francs.”

Interestingly, Ziehli went as far as rewriting the image captions of the fictitious play, making the reader co-responsible of the possible outcome of the narrative.  “The ambiguity of this position (that of both being a passive onlooker as well as an influential director), echoes the contemporary issues related to tourism in the Alps. An issue as philosophical as political. Should we preserve an attractive industry or leave the mystical landscapes untouched?” (Source: foreword)

It will be no surprise to Field Essays readers that Ziehli happens to be a good friend of Brynjar Sigurðarson, the protagonist of the upcoming issue… Quality indeed attracts quality!