GROENLANDIA

In letters visible from afar – formally based on the iconic ‘Hollywood’ sign – the word GROENLANDIA is emblazoned on the walls of the historic Franzensfeste Fortress. The installation by artist Leander Schwazer uses popular iconography to break with familiar associations and evoke new ones: what does Greenland – the remote island shaped by ice and geopolitical ambitions – have to do with this former military bastion in South Tyrol?

The work is intended as an intervention in public space and a deliberate blending of spatial and political distance. Schwazer chooses the fortress as a landmark for a reflection on global power shifts, ecological tipping points and the continuing mechanisms of colonial appropriation. Greenland, often imagined in the collective consciousness as peripheral, becomes here a symbolic centre – a place where the major lines of conflict of our present intersect in condensed form: climate change, resource struggles, postcolonial narratives and new geopolitical alliances.

The fortress itself becomes not only the bearer of the text, but an integral part of the artistic statement. As a closed, inaccessible structure, it stands in paradoxical relation to the visibility of the intervention – visible to thousands of people driving past on the nearby Brenner motorway, who register the work as they pass by, perhaps only fragmentarily, thus reaching a far larger audience than the exclusive art world.

GROENLANDIA merges language, signs and space into an open structure of meaning. It is not merely a marker of place, but a poetic-political statement that deliberately eludes unambiguous interpretation. The discrepancy between place and designation creates productive confusion: has the fortress become a symbol of a new geopolitical order? Or is Greenland already everywhere?

In the spirit of broadening public awareness, Schwazer involves the diverse audience of the transit society in his work. Their reactions – fleeting or thoughtful, approving or disapproving – are part of the work. The fortress thus becomes a discursive platform, a sounding board for questions that extend far beyond its geographical context.

Greenland is everywhere.

Curated by Sandra Mutschlechner
Photo by Tiberio Sorvillo
Installed by Leander Schwazer & Hanspeter Eisendle
Sponsors Salewa, Oberalp Group & Windisch Design