Artificial spaces and walls. Bright colors, geometric shapes, people climbing. This is what visitors see when they go to a rock-climbing gym. Rock climbing (bouldering) is a quintessentially contemporary, urban sport—shaped both by a longing for nature and a fear of it.
People surround themselves with colorful, artificial spaces; the walls of the climbing gym “clumsily” imitate the protrusions of natural rocks. However, all of this serves the urban dweller’s comfort, athleticism, and relaxation. Many choose it because it offers a very intense sense of presence in a safe environment—a fully physical here-and-now experience—in contrast to the virtual world’s absence of presence.
Most people climb in company, though it is fundamentally a solitary sport. When we climb a wall, we focus on the next hold and don’t dwell on our everyday worries. While climbing, the holds are in “just the right” places — far enough apart that you can still reach them, yet challenging enough as you move from one fixed point to the next, higher and higher.
It’s thought-provoking how well the bouldering wall can mimic real nature. Where, for example, there isn’t a rock ledge in “just the right” spot to plant our feet. The climbing gym is human-scale, a built environment dominated by humans, in contrast to nature, which is unpredictable and beyond human control. The climbing gym is a finite space, bounded by a ceiling, unlike rock climbing, where the sky is above us and, if we’re lucky, the mountain peak is the goal, beyond which there is nowhere else to go.
There is no “summit” in the bouldering room; in a rather mundane way, it simply ends on a horizontal plane, and most climbers don’t even make it that far. For me, wall climbing as a motif is a symbol of modern humanity’s ultimate artificiality and ultra-urbanization, while the tension within it gives voice to solitary, romantic longings for nature, movement, and challenge. Just like within us.
Veronika Jakatics-Szabó