Ice Memory

A talk by Susan Schuppli.

This presentation encourages us to reconfigure and de-centre the anthropocentric bias that often pervades memory studies by exploring the ways in which the material enfoldments of ecological matter like glaciers and ice sheets both archive and re-compose their complex entanglements with planetary processes and human histories, producing what Schuppli refers to as “ice memory”. Drawing from her multi-year research project Learning from Ice, which includes fieldwork in Canada, the Himalayas, and Svalbard, Schuppli reflects both on the archival capacities of cryospheric landscapes as transmitters of environmental information as well as the ways in certain cultural memory practices organised by ecological crisis — in particular — those concerning glacial recession and loss — have found their ideal material representation in the changing states of ice. While some might say that to speak of climate histories and ice memory is to attribute cultural conceits to the geophysical realm, this presentation asks: What would it mean politically if we were to consider human history and memory alongside much broader expressions of spatio-temporal re-orderings and re-assembly, which by extension must include the innumerable ways in which environments themselves are registering and archiving change? 

Please register here.

Susan Schuppli is a researcher and Director of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths, University of London. Her fieldwork and documentary film practice is situated at the intersections between environmental struggles, climate science, and affected communities with a specific focus on the cryosphere. Investigations span legal analysis and public advocacy as well as theoretical reflection and creative exploration in order to understand how the transformations brought about by global burning are generating new forms of evidence. Granting agency to the more-than-human as a material witness informs her attempts at expanding the fields of action and justice. Recent films include: Moving Ice, Signals from Svalbard, Listening to Ice, Gondwana, Arctic Archipelago and Ice Cores. The Cold Cases (2021) investigations on the weaponisation of temperature were produced in collaboration with Forensic Architecture. Schuppli is the author of Material Witness: Forensics, Media, Evidence published by MIT Press in 2020. 

@susan_schuppli 

This event is hosted by BAK Basecamp in collaboration with the Utrecht Forum for Memory Studies and the EcoViolence project.

Image Caption: U.S. National Science Foundation Ice Core Facility (NSF-ICF) — formerly the U.S. National Ice Core Laboratory (NICL). Credit: Peter Rejcek