At 2,300 metres above sea level, Italy’s newest – and most remote – cultural outpost is visible long before it becomes reachable. A red shard on a ridge, it looks first like a warning sign, and then something more comforting: a shelter pitched into the wind.
The structure stands on a high ridge in the municipality of Valbondione, along the Alta Via delle Orobie, exposed to avalanches and sudden weather shifts. I saw it from above, after taking off from the Rifugio Fratelli Longo, near the village of Carona – a small mountain municipality a little over an hour’s drive from GAMeC, Bergamo’s Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea – the closest access point I was given for the site visit.
The Frattini Bivouac is not staffed, ticketed or mediated. Anyone can enter it, but only after a six-to-eight-hour ascent on foot across scree, moss and snowfields. When I visited, I only saw it from the helicopter for the press preview; in every other circumstance, the only route is the long climb.
The interior has nine sleeping platforms, a wooden bench and a skylight. Photograph: © Tomaso Clavarino
Perhaps surprisingly, there is also no art inside this museum. The inside is austere: nine sleeping platforms, a wooden bench, a rectangular skylight framing a strip of sky that becomes the only artwork on view. There are no vitrines, labels or interpretative devices. Instead, there is temperature, silence, altitude. Sound travels strangely here: breath, boots, rain on fabric. The museum, usually devoted to protecting objects from the elements, has instead exposed itself to them.
Designed by Turin-based Studio EX with the Italian Alpine Club (CAI), the bivouac opened in this autumn as the final chapter of Thinking Like a Mountain: an expression coined by the American ecologist Aldo Leopold, and the title of the museum’s two-year experiment in relocating culture from the gallery to the ecosystem.
The museum, usually devoted to protecting objects from the elements, has instead exposed itself to them
According to GAMeC director Lorenzo Giusti, the premise is that curating can be a form of geological thinking: slow, durational, attuned to forces larger than the human. Over two years, the project has unfolded across the valleys and pre-alpine villages of Bergamo: performances in former factories, installations in biodiversity oases, sculptures in mining districts. Each commission appeared for a season or a day, often reachable only on foot, involving local communities as co-actors rather than audience. The Frattini Bivouac is the project’s most distilled iteration: the point where the museum leaves the museum entirely.
You could also say it’s the point where the project’s claims are most robustly tested by reality. The bivouac replaces a 1970s steel refuge that had become structurally dangerous and contaminated with asbestos. That previous shelter, though hazardous for humans, had become part of the mountain’s texture: local ibex used its metal siding to scratch their horns, leaving bright arcs on the surface. The new structure had to be safe for people, ecologically lighter, and climate resilient – yet there is no guarantee the surrounding wildlife will welcome it.
The architects are unsure how the the experimental materials (technical fabric, cork, lightweight composite frame) will respond to animal contact over time. Photograph: © Tomaso Clavarino
Even the architects admit they have little certainty about how the experimental materials (technical fabric, cork, lightweight composite frame) will respond to animal contact over time. Altitude tests ideas as quickly as it corrodes metal.
Studio EX designed the new refuge to weigh just over two tonnes. It was airlifted to the ridge in four rotations, each drop a calculation of balance and wind. The building is a paradox in all the ways its designers intended: permanent yet reversible, robust yet flexible, insulated yet breathable. Its red shell is technical fabric stretched like skin; its interior is lined with cork that expands and contracts with mountain temperatures. Solar panels on the roof power basic lighting and emergency outlets – no heating, no running water, no phone line: enough to keep a stranded hiker alive, but far from comfortable. The building is a shelter first, an artwork only by consequence.
If only a few hundred visitors can physically reach a commission, can it still be said to serve the public?
At this altitude, however, accessibility is never neutral. A high-mountain shelter is not a luxury pod – there are no helicopter tours, no exclusive stays – but it is still reachable only to a small portion of the public: alpinists, seasoned hikers, and the rare journalist flown in for a preview. The museum’s mission, historically tied to public access, is stretched thin here. If only a few hundred visitors can physically reach a commission, can it still be said to serve the public? Or is this an inevitable tension of ecological art – that the closer a work gets to the land, the fewer people can stand before it?
There is also the question of overtourism. The Alps are experiencing a surge of recreational pressure, driven in part by gorpcore culture. The architects insist their bivouac is a counterpoint to that aesthetic – lightweight, reversible, modest. But even as a refusal of the Instagram-friendly refuge trend, it risks becoming its mirror image: a gorpcore in reverse, where instead of peak-performance gear, it is peak-performance culture that claims the ridge.
Solar panels on the roof power basic lighting and emergency outlets, but there is no heating, no running water, no phone line. Photograph: © Tomaso Clavarino
And then there is the matter of symbolism. A museum ascending to 2,300m (7,546ft) inevitably reads like a form of institutional assertion: the tiny red point on the summit, the planted flag. The team is acutely aware of this and has repeatedly stressed its intentions – care, coexistence, humility. But architectural gestures, especially at altitude, can carry meanings their authors never intended. The bivouac can be read simultaneously as an act of love and an act of hubris: a structure that wants to merge with the mountain while also marking it.
Still, there is something quietly radical about the Frattini Bivouac’s proposal. It asks whether culture can withstand discomfort, whether a museum can inhabit a site where climate, not concept, determines the terms of survival. It reframes the curator not as someone who selects but someone who adapts – to weather, to terrain, to the limits of the human body.
Watching the ridge after the helicopter lifted away, I was struck by how small the building looked. Whatever else it may be, it is also a reminder that nothing at altitude stays fixed for long: not buildings, not intentions, not even the ground beneath them.
The Frattini Bivouac is located at 46°02’27.60”N 9°55’14.90”E and open throughout the year. Visitors are advised to check weather and trail conditions with the Italian Alpine Club
