This Is Not a Glacier

Thickening Description for Thinning Ice

Symposium: 26 Jan, 15:00–18:00
Additional Exhibition: 26 Jan–2 Feb
Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri: 13:00–18:00 /
Thu: 13:00–20:00

Glaciers are often portrayed as icons of global warming because of their physical loss through melting and the loss of climate records stored in glacial ice. From a historical perspective, we can see that they in fact gained value through different narratives: as natural hazards, as sublime landscapes, as scientific laboratories, as sites for recreation and mountaineering, and as remote places left to conquer. These narratives, and the ideologies and power mechanisms that they embody, are hidden behind the ‘endangered glacier’ narrative of today (Carey 2007) making it a treacherous portrayal in the fight with global warming.

If we take a step back from what they have become symbols for, what can we unlearn and learn from being with a glacier?
Applying dilettantism as a method of joining scientific and artistic research, we deliberately acknowledge the difficulties of knowing the glacier and interacting with it in a non-exploitive way. We search to be affected, recalibrating our thought patterns and habitual reactions to achieve unconventional data collection.

After days of dilly dallying, lollygagging and bracing the glacial climate we welcome you to our symposium and exhibition to sit together, share observations, ask questions, and reevaluate preconceptions about the glacier’s being and our own complicity in the destruction of this landscape. Using our own field research at the Suldenferner as a starting point, the aim of our event is to share reports and materials from the glacier, through discursive and spatial means, and expand on these experiences with a curated program of invited guests. It is an attempt at a more multifaceted, heterogenous and thicker description of a glacier, beyond its current reductive stereotype.

Exhibition and field research by
Chloë Lalonde (Artist, Writer & Educator), Lindsey Nicholson (Artist & Glaciologist), Sabrina Rosina (Artist & Vegetation Ecologist), Sophie Olivia Taleja Schmidt (Artist & Surface Designer), Márton Zalka (Multidisciplinary Designer & Visual Researcher)

Initiated by
Brishty Alam (Senior Artist, University of Applied Arts Vienna), Valerie Deifel (Senior Scientist, University of Applied Arts Vienna) & Lindsey Nicholson (Assistant Professor, Institute of Atmospheric & Cryospheric Sciences/Centre for Climate, University of Innsbruck)

Photos: Lindsey Nicholson