In collaboration with Montura and Grivel

(In)sustainable mountaineering

Meeting with.
Edu Marin and Yannik Graziani

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Oliviero Gobbi

There are mountains, walls that are almost impossible to climb, with at their feet, on their sides, glaciers languishing in the sun, white ever-shortening plumes, melting away uncovering rock and debris, human remains, ancient encampments, objects resurrected from different eras and civilizations.

There are men who continue to dream of climbing them, of designing and creating incredible routes, with the lesser or greater awareness that those rock giants are perhaps not there solely and exclusively for them, but, like the other beings on this planet, live lives dilated in time and space, also subject, in different ways, to epochal changes.

From the meeting of these two realities, these two entities were born, something like two hundred years ago, the mountaineers, "The conquerors of the useless," as someone called them.

Today, this futility, in addition to always questioning itself, must necessarily question the snow we (for the moment at least) tread, the rock we cling to ... the air we breathe.

Edu Marin is an athlete and a mountain lover. He loves competition, but what he is most passionate about is exploring new places and drawing new lines on the wall. A versatile and determined climber, he lives in Catalonia, where he enjoys good weather, family, friends and crags. He started competing at the age of 13 and won every youth competition he entered. From 2005 to 2012 he took part in World Cup competitions, winning numerous podiums. In 2012 he decided to retire from competitions to start a new life path and rediscover his true essence: climbing multipich routes, traveling all over the world in search of the longest and most difficult climbing walls, especially at high altitudes. So far he has climbed the routes Pan Aroma (8c, 600m, Dolomites - Italy), Wogü (8c, 250m, Ratikon - Switzerland), Orbayu (8c, 500m, Picu Urreillu - Spain), Mora Mora (8c, 600m, Madagascar - Africa), Arco (Iris, 200m, 8c+ FA, Montserrat - Spain) and Valhalla (9a+ FA, 380m, Getu - China).

Yannick Graziani is a French mountaineer born in 1973 in Cagnes-sur-Mer, in the Maritime Alps. He has been a high mountain guide and member of the Compagnie des guides de Chamonix since 2001. In the Alps, he has done the American direct on the west face of Les Drus, the Via Gamma on the south face of the Écrins, the MacIntyre, No Siesta and Desmaison Gousseault routes on the north face of the Grandes Jorasses, the direct on the Nez da Zmutt on the Matterhorn, and the Frêneysie Pascale and Hyper Couloir gullies on the south face of Mont Blanc. He has made numerous very high altitude ascents, including: the solo ascent of Aconcagua from the south face (6,962 m), Chaukamba II (7,100 m), Shivling (6,543 m), Baghirati I (6,856 m), the south face of Annapurna (8,091 m) and Chomo Lonzo (7,790 m). He was awarded a special mention at the 2014 Piolets d'Or.