Above the Threshold. Height, Boundaries, and Everything in Between

Above the Threshold examines height as a limit state: as a space in which order becomes unstable, and the relationship between body, landscape, and meaning must be renegotiated. The starting point for this work is Victor Turner's concept of liminality, which describes transitions not as a linear movement but as a suspended state – a phase of in-betweenness in which certainties are challenged, and transformation becomes possible.
High-altitude mountaineering appears here as a liminal practice. Leaving the valley behind means leaving behind social norms, familiar physicality, and stable orientation. The ascent leads to a liminal space where different laws apply: oxygen deprivation, cold, and exposure alter perception and self-relationship, decisions become more concentrated, and control becomes precarious. Altitude is not a goal, but a state – neither arrival nor dissolution, but a temporary stay in heightened fragility.
This experience is inextricably linked to the mountains that form border regions. The mountains photographed — Pik Lenin between Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan, and the Parinacota and Acotango volcanoes on the border between Bolivia and Chile – mark political, geographical, and existential dividing lines. Mountains appear restrictive and forbidding, inscribing boundaries into the body and regulating movement. At the same time, they serve as projection surfaces for longing: their resistance generates the desire to cross them. The mountains thus become a paradoxical place that reconfigures separation and connection.
From this borderline situation, the photographs destabilize the relationship between inside and outside. The extreme external space of the high mountains penetrates the body, while internal states – concentration, fear, exhaustion – become visible to the outside world. Ascents and descents, high camps, glaciers, and crevasses do not appear as heroic motifs, but as liminal image spaces in which orientation, identity, and scale become unstable.