26 Jan 2024, 15:00
This Is Not a Glacier
Thickening Description for Thinning IceGlaciers 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. This is an attempt at a more multifaceted, heterogenous and thicker description of a glacier, beyond its current reductive stereotype.
Symposium Program
(please take these timings as an approximation)
15:00–16:15
A Glacier: Thickening description through transdisciplinary research on Suldenferner
Moderated by Brishty Alam
Brishty Alam
Concept, glacier as endangered species, role of representations
Lindsey Nicholson
Getting to know Suldenferner through glaciological-artistic research
Chloë Lalonde & Márton Zalka
Landscapes are the issue; the subject is the glacier – a conversation on landscapes in visual arts and Suldenferner in practice
16:15–16:30 Break
16:30–17:15
Guilt-tripping on the loss of Wilderness
Moderated by Sabrina Rosina
Sabrina Rosina
Purity politics and nature conservation – relating to nature
Mo Nachtschatt
Artivism in theory and practice – a funeral for a glacier
Kilian Jörg
The entanglement of ‘wilderness’ and car infrastructure on the Pasterze glacier
17:15–18:00
Discussion – Political ecology as research in the wild?
Moderated by Bernd Kräftner
Bernd Kräftner
Versions of risks and what kinds of risks do we each take?
Open discussion with participants moderated by Bernd
19:00
Exhibition Opening
Biographies (in order of appearance)
Brishty Alam – Senior Artist, Transcultural Studies, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Brishty Alam works with slippages between models and what we might call social, cultural, political or economic processes. Themes such as migration and value systems permeate her work, which finds expression in sculpture, video and drawing. Recent exhibitions include ZONE1, viennacontemporary, Galerie Wonnerth Dejaco, and Belvedere 21, Museum of Contemporary Art. Alongside her artistic work, she is also co-president of the VBKÖ (Austrian Association of Wom*n Artists), and has taken part in conferences such as the ‘6th Forum Carpaticum – Linking the Environmental, Political and Societal Aspects for Carpathian Sustainability’, as well as publications such ‘C.A.T.: Catastrophic Animals on Terra – A guidebook to life elsewhere’. She completed her degree in Natural Sciences from the University of Cambridge, before graduating from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, with a year in HFBK Hamburg. She has taught at the University of Applied Arts Vienna since 2014, where she is Senior Artist at the department of Transcultural Studies, and also lectured at Sculpture & Transmediale Space, University of Arts Linz.
Lindsey Nicholson – Assistant Professor, Institute of Atmospheric & Cryospheric Sciences/Centre for Climate, University of Innsbruck
Lindsey Nicholson is a scientist and artist. Alongside her academic research and teaching, her artistic work is rooted in environmental philosophy and deploys multimedia approaches to explore the boundaries of scientific and artistic inquiry and how they generate meaning in society. Born in the UK she has a degree in geography from the University of Edinburgh, a PhD in glaciology from the University of St Andrews and a Habilitation in atmospheric and cryospheric science from the University of Innsbruck. She has 46 peer reviewed publications on glaciers and climate and Suldenferner was a key research site for her FWF funded Elise Richter grant from 2014–2018.
Chloë Lalonde – Multidisciplinary artist, researcher, writer & educator
Chloë Lalonde is an artist and cultural worker born in Tiohtià:ke / Mooniyang / Montreal (so-called Canada). They work following a circular, slow painting and drawing practice that centres intersectional feminism and places an emphasis on accessibility and sustainability, while drawing from their experiences of synaesthesia. Chloë holds a Bachelor's of Fine Arts with distinction in Art Education and Anthropology from Concordia University and a Master’s of Arts and Science at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, Austria. In 2021, Chloë was awarded the Sustainability Research Award and Sustainability Champion Award from Concordia University for their work at the Centre for Creative Reuse, and research into zero-waste art education.
Chloë emphasises knowledge sharing through writing, publication design, content creation, and the design and mediation of immersive experiences, educational workshops, installations and exhibitions. A member of the programming and writing committees at Art Mûr and articule in Montreal, Chloë has written for publications such as ISSAY! Mag, Maisonneuve Magazine, Esse art + opinions, among others. Currently based in Montreal, they work at Ada X, a feminist tech artist-run centre, and teach painting, drawing and sculpture at the Westmount Visual Arts Centre.
Márton Zalka – Multidisciplinary designer & visual researcher
Zalka Márton (born in Hungary) is a Vienna-based multidisciplinary designer and researcher. He graduated as a product designer and is currently doing his Master’s in Art & Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (AT). He is working with topics of aesthetic recognition (visual and conceptual) of sustainable and circular methods and the cultural preconceptions that surround them. Exploring the ways of physicality and materialism with a special focus on decay and degradation in an ever increasingly digital age. Mainly designing and building furniture and exhibitions.
Sabrina Rosina – Artist & vegetation ecologist
Sabrina Rosina graduated from BOKU (University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, Vienna) in Landscape Planning and Landscape Architecture. Over the course of several projects in many nature-conservation and -preservation parks and programs in Europe she specialised in vegetation ecology. Her work colleagues are often invasive species, which she befriended over the years and from whom she is able to draw inspiration on matters of surviving and the counter-case. Thus, her artistic as well as scientific work deals often with New Ecology, wastelands and post-anthropocene speculation, expressed through performance, data studies and visualisations.
Moritz Nachtschatt – General Manager, Protect Our Winters Austria
Moritz Nachtschatt is the General Manager at Protect Our Winters Austria and a photographer. In photography he specialized in press-, advertising-, sports-, landscape- and reportage photography. As a creative mind and multimedia talent, he also does graphic design, video, project management and too much social media.
Kilian Jörg – Artist & philosopher
Kilian Jörg works at the multimedial interfaces between philosophy and art. Their main research interest is the effects (and narratives) of the ecological dilemma and how its transformative forces can best be thought of and used aesthetico-politically. They are the founder of the performance philosophy collective philosophy unbound and a member of the performative research cluster Stoffwechsel - Ecologies of Collaboration and the artist initiative im_flieger. Furthermore, they have published books about Clubculture (Die Clubmaschine), the political backlash from an ecological point of view, working conditions and utopias in the art world, and a culture of dis-involvement in times of ecological catastrophe. Currently, they are working as a post-doc at the SFB Affective Societies at FU Berlin. In their research project "On the Utopia of the Car-Free World," they want to reflect on our material and toxic entanglements with the anthropogenically altered matter of the Anthropocene through a focus on the car.
Bernd Kräftner – Artist, Researcher, Co-founder of ‘Shared Inc. – Research Centre for Shared Incompetence’
Bernd Kräftner studied Medicine and graduated from University of Vienna in 1988. He works as an artist and researcher. Since 1998, as co-founder of “Shared Inc.” (Research Centre for Shared Incompetence, aka Xperiment), he investigates method development in the fields of Science(s) and Art, Transdisciplinarity, Science and Technology Studies. He conducted various artistic research projects funded by the Austrian Science Fund (FWF), the WellcomeFoundation London; the ZKM, Karlsruhe, Austrian Ministry of Science, the Humboldt University, Berlin, the Vienna Science and Technology Fund. He lectured on transdisciplinarity at the University of Applied Arts, Vienna, at the departments of ‘Art & Science’ and ‘Digital Arts’ until 2021.
Sophie Olivia Taleja Schmidt – Artist & surface designer
Sophie Olivia Taleja Schmidt is an artist and surface designer. She studied textile and surface design in Berlin, Glasgow and St. Petersburg. She is currently completing the Art & Science Master's programme at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna and is part of the Center of Art and Culture Semmelweisklinik in Vienna.
Her work ranges from textile art to painting and sculpture. She deals with themes such as the intangible, interstitial/threshold spaces and often has a strong connection to human behaviour in the form of optical and physical perception processes. Due to her processual and experimental way of working she keeps exploring new materials and is strongly interested in their limits and transformation due to different techniques.
Valerie Deifel – Senior Scientist, Institute of Fine & Media Art, University of Applied Arts Vienna
Valerie Deifel studied theatre, film, and media studies and philosophy in Vienna. From 2007 to 2010, she was a fellow at the research training group ‘Senses, Technology, Mise-en-Scène: Media and Perception’ at the University of Vienna. From 2007 to 2017, she did her doctoral thesis on the representation of empty spaces as aesthetic strategies in experimental films. She is currently teaching at the master programme Art & Science at the University of Applied Arts Vienna, where her research is focused on multispecies studies and environmental humanities, exploring ecological and non-hierarchical ways of working together.
About the project:
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.
Additional Exhibition: 26 Jan–2 Feb
Mon, Tue, Wed, Fri: 13:00–18:00 /
Thu: 13:00–20:00
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