Mountains as Cosmic Sensoriums
Benedetta Ferrari is an Italian visual designer and researcher currently based in The Netherlands. Through editorial practices, moving images, and image-based installations, she explores the relationship between forms of knowledge production, territories, and sensing infrastructures. During her MA in Information Design at Design Academy Eindhoven, she deepened her interest in how landscapes—especially alpine and high-altitude territories—are represented, exploited, measured, and imagined.
Floating above the clouds and materializing out of the mists, mountains—real or mythical—represent more than just geological formations; they are cosmic axes, junctions between the Earth and the Sky. Perceived as places of connection between the terrestrial and the celestial, between the visible and the invisible, mountains seem to have the power to shape human experience and anchor imagination, helping spatialize invisibilities and concretize cosmic visions.
Symbolizing places of isolation—and, therefore, revelation—mountains were rediscovered during the Enlightenment by Western astronomers as sites where scientific knowledge could be obtained and propagated: a self-contained space that remained distant, isolated, and remote from mundane concerns.
Situated at the intersection of cultural geography and media studies, this research examines the dual significance of mountains as tools for encountering the cosmos: both as metaphysical axes and as scientific instruments enabling clearer observations of celestial bodies. Through filmmaking and image-based editorial, this research explores the historical evolution of mountains in relation to cosmological inquiry across diverse geographies, cultures, and time spans. In doing so, it calls into question the legacy of Western scientific community in mountainous regions, showing the failure to ‘make place’—a sterile scientific one—except for the most temporary kind, in the space of mountains. If the metaphor of the mountain as an isolated place to pursue research abstracted it as a placeless site, the reality of experiments showed that any detachment from the world, if there ever was one, was only temporary and illusory. Rather than being detached, isolated, and governable nowheres—devoid of cultural and geographical specificity—mountains emerge as specific, localized somewheres—sites of resistance, anti-utilitarian by nature, and inherently ungovernable.