Nomadic peoples, Inuits and American Indians inhabit a space by traveling its length and breadth, by attaching themselves to a thousand places. Virgin space has no raison d’être. Everything is inhabited, nothing is uninhabitable. In the mountains, most of the landscape is virgin; the uninhabitable is everywhere. Everything becomes a matter of what can be reached and what is unattaina- ble: living in the mountains is alpinism. How can peaks and needles be inhabited? Sedentarized humans withdraw from virgin space, willingly or not. What is the di erence between the Inuits’ virgin space and the mountains’? The Maurienne is halfway between an uninhabitable space and an exploited space. The wide valley the Arc River flows through spurred the growth of a large- scale aluminum industry fed by hydroelectric power.


TEO BECHER
Born 1991, Nancy, France.
Lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.