Photo: Mathias Kunferman
The URL https://areweclimateneutralyet.fail asks one of the most pressing questions of our time and answers it right away with »Nein« (»No«) built into the landscape below Alp Brün in Safiental, Switzerland. The word »Nein« blocks the view of a landscape that has been created over millions of years and is rapidly changing due to the climate crisis. The letters are formed by roughly put together tree trunks coming from the poles of the forests further down the valley. The landscape thus becomes a live ticker for an issue whose negotiation will be central to us as a society in the coming decades. The materialization of the ticker in tree trunks can thereby be read as a concession to the historical dimension of this question: Not only will the transition to a carbon-neutral society take decades, the effects of global warming will only slow down decades after this goal has been achieved. The inertia of the material corresponds to the inertia of the action space.
The no in the landscape implies the yes as a goal. The Brüner Alp becomes a status indicator for the central question of the next fifty years, a live ticker that refreshes not in seconds but in years or decades.