Caring for Naturecultures
Glaciers

Single-channel video projected on a geotextile, 4’48’’. Music: Paul Jebanasam; colorist: Joan Roig 

In his large-scale single-channel video installation Conservare, photographer and filmmaker Pepe Molina Cruz centres on glaciers covered with geotextiles—a recurring motif in this exhibition. Known as forms of “white geoengineering,” geotextiles are temporary technological membranes designed to shield ice from solar radiation and slow melting caused by rising summer temperatures. Employed across Alpine regions as emergency interventions against glacial retreat, they function as short-term protective measures against the accelerating disappearance of glaciers. Yet Conservare does not simply document a technical solution. Rather, it confronts us with a deeper paradox of contemporary conservation. What does it mean to preserve ice through synthetic coverings derived from the very industrial systems implicated in planetary warming? How do such gestures reshape our perception of glaciers, conservation, and the environment? The work ultimately asks whether conservation today increasingly operates not through permanence, but through temporary acts of postponement, care, and managed loss.

Video documentation, 4’7’’.

In Arbeiten am Rhone-Gletscher (work on the Rhone glacier), artist and documentary filmmaker Stefan Rohner turns his attention to the labor of covering the Rhône Glacier in the far eastern end of the Canton of Valais. His video documents this process without commentary or dramatic staging, leaving viewers to confront the ambiguities and contradictions of these seemingly absurd and Sisyphean gestures of care. The workers carry out their task patiently and methodically, rarely acknowledging the camera. There is no music and no narrative voice—only the sounds of labor, sewing machines, wind, and movement. The starkness of these scenes is telling. Like vast carpets of regret, the protective coverings appear as belated responses to a crisis already underway. Resembling medical bandages placed over a wounded planet, the geotextiles embody both care and futility: temporary acts of preservation that may slow melting locally while simultaneously introducing new ecological tensions.

Photography, video with sound 11’, artistic book with white vinyl record (in collaboration with musician Stephan Eicher) 

Gletschermilch—literally “glacier milk”—refers to the pale, milky meltwater produced by glaciers, coloured by finely ground rock particles that give Alpine lakes their luminous turquoise hue. Developed over several summers spent on Alpine glaciers, Ester Vonplon’s work reflects on glacial retreat and on attempts to slow processes that are, ultimately, irreversible. Alongside these images, the recorded murmur of Gletschermilch flowing from the ice became the point of departure for a haunting soundscape by musician Stephan Eicher. Working with analogue photography, Vonplon foregrounds the material conditions of image-making: light leaks, fractures, chemical traces, grain, and surface irregularities remain visible in the final image. These marks echo the fissures, folds, and erosions of the glacier itself, allowing photographic process and glacial surface to correspond. Moving between abstraction and documentation, the photographic images do not simply record environmental transformation. Rather, the work comes to share the glacier’s condition of instability, vulnerability, and material decay.

Courtesy of the Archaeological Service of Graubünden / Office of Culture and the Glaciology Division of the Laboratory of Hydraulics, Hydrology and Glaciology at ETH Zurich

As glaciers retreat under rapidly warming climatic conditions, they release objects long preserved in ice: tools, textiles, wooden implements, animal remains, ritual deposits, and traces of past human movement through alpine landscapes. Emerging from the ice through processes of thaw rather than excavation, these materials challenge conventional distinctions between natural and cultural heritage. Preserved through freezing rather than intentional conservation, they bear witness to ancient travel routes, hunting practices, trade networks, ritual activity, and environmental transformation across centuries and millennia. Yet what constitutes an archaeological object is not always self-evident. Materials dismissed as mere “civilisation waste” — abandoned equipment, debris, or discarded traces of human presence — may acquire historical, cultural, or environmental significance once released from the ice.

Glacial archaeology thus not only uncovers the past; it reveals glaciers themselves as archives and conservation objects shaped by climate, memory, material transformation, and human intervention.

4K HDR video, single-screen version, 7’12’’. Recording of cracking ice courtesy of Jonna Jinton.

Known to Inuit as kassoq, these luminous formations of translucent glacier ice originate deep within the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq), where ice has been compressed under immense pressure over millennia before being carried outward by the flow of the Qarajaq Glacier. As anthropogenic climate change accelerates the melting of Greenland’s ice masses — now believed by many scientists to have passed critical tipping points — these icebergs are increasingly threatened with disappearance. In anthropoScene XII: iceberg care, disappearing icebergs are repetitively swept, polished, and cleared of snow and sediment through gestures of care that appear at once tender, awkward, and futile. The artist’s Sisyphean actions foreground the contradictions of contemporary environmental stewardship: intimate acts of maintenance performed in the face of overwhelming planetary transformation.  Oscillating between care, mourning, and absurdity — and echoing contemporary attempts to preserve glaciers through protective coverings and other technological interventions — the work asks whether relationships to the Arctic might shift from extraction and exploitation toward forms of responsibility, stewardship, and coexistence.