Zeit der Titanen

Between 1950 and 1966 thousands of men moved up to the Alps in the Valais, a natural landscape of rocks and ice. They built a civilisation limited in time: villages made out of barracks on the cliffs of the mountains similar to Tibetan cloisters. They blew up a 160 km long tunnel labyrinth into the rocks, beneath the Matterhorn and several other gigantic mountains, through which the water from 35 glaciers runs to the highest dam of the world, the Grande Dixence. Miners and intellectuals like the writer Maurice Chappaz travelled again through this immense dark abyss in search for the places, where overcrowded barack villages stood and where we can only find leftover ruins today. It was here, where they grew beyond themselves. The confrontation with their own psychological and physical boundaries towers above the life of these men. They mastered lifecrisis and escaped the poverty of their families. Here they found a future and lifelong friendships developed, but they also met with loneliness, sickness and death.