“The Ice Life”, a cross-disciplinary project
Fostering embodied aesthetic experience and increased sense of responsibility
The Ice Life project connects its components (music, images) and scientific knowledge within a socially engaged practice in the field of environmental concerns, namely the life and the receding of glaciers.
Through this practice we are re-thinking the values of the artistic work, in order get critically engaged with the environmental aspects that nourish our artistic practice (Barrett 2016).
We see the artwork as a connection with the world, in the continuity of relational aesthetics (Bourriaud 1998, 2002) and socially engaged art (Bishop 2004). Considering glaciers as “the other” requires openness to understanding their distinctiveness and enacting “love” and mutual dignity.
Music and art, with their immersive nature, can facilitate this process of enactive listening and perception, bridging differences and approximating time scales. Making the past, present, and future of glaciers perceptible within a human time span may be able to enhance engagement and love for these natural entities.
This audio-visual staging based on field recordings of the Vatnajo kull Ice Cap (Iceland), offers an immersive experience of the metamorphosis of ice that transcends human and natural timescales, fostering an experience of mutual dignity.
By encouraging enactive listening, fostering loving sense-making, and inspiring agency in the face of climate change and glacier disappearance, the project seeks a more impactful connection with its audience.
Mariana Ungureanu, Stefan Schneider
University Paris 8, Universität Wien https://theicelife.org/
THE ICE MATTER, A Threshold State
“The glacier as a patient
The melting of the glaciers in Iceland is impressively brought to the ears in the Mariana Ungureanu’s music. Accompanied by scientists from the Hornafjordur Research Center (University of Iceland), she conducts field research on the Vatnajökull glacier and documents the slow death of the ice giants in images and in sounds.
Ungureanu’s video-supported music literally gets under your skin. The glacier appears like a patient on a drip. The continuous, acoustically staged dripping of the meltwater, which turns into flowing streams, seems like the bleeding of a human body, the slow, unstoppable death of a living being.
Both the fascination and beauty of the huge ice worlds and their fragility and irreversible destruction by humans are dramatically expressed.”
Dorothée Bauer, Feinschwarz, Mai 2024 https://www.feinschwarz.net/vom-sonnengesang-zur-gletscherschmelze/