This project marks the culmination of my fellowship year at the Collegium Helveticum. I warmly invite you to join us for the opening on 12 June 2026 at 18:00 in the courtyard of the historic Semper Observatory (Sternwarte), Collegium Helveticum, situated in the heart of Zurich’s university quarter.
The exhibition Caring for Naturecultures: Glaciers reconceives conservation as a practice of care spanning natural and cultural environments. Through artistic engagements with Alpine glaciers and Arctic icebergs, the exhibition presents ice as both conservation object and natureculture hybrid: a living archive preserving traces of planetary and human histories. Shaped by scientific inquiry, technological intervention, and climate anxiety, glaciers and icebergs emerge as sites where memory, materiality, and environmental change converge.
Across the exhibition, acts of covering, cleaning, documenting, recording, and tending recur as gestures performed in the face of ecological crisis. White geotextiles draped across melting glaciers resemble bandages or shrouds—temporary membranes intended to slow disappearance. Yet they also reveal the paradoxes of contemporary conservation: attempts to preserve vanishing ice through interventions entangled with the very industrial systems implicated in planetary warming.
Rather than offering solutions, the exhibition dwells within these contradictions. The works move between intimacy and planetary scale, scientific observation and embodied encounter, documentation and abstraction. Glaciers and icebergs appear not merely as symbols of climate crisis, but as matter in transition, bearing traces of human intervention, labor, grief, and desire.
At its center lies a pressing question: what forms of care remain possible when permanence can no longer be promised? The works gathered here suggest that conservation today may increasingly consist not in preserving the world as it was, but in learning how to accompany, witness, and care for lifeworlds undergoing irreversible transformation.
With works by Pepe Molina Cruz, Stefan Rohner, Adam Sébire, and Ester Vonplon.
Special opening hours during the Zurich Art Weekend June 12, 2026: 10:00–21:00 (opening event at 18:00) June 13, 2026: 11:00–20:00 June 14, 2026: 11:00–18:00
This event marks the culmination of my fellowship year at the Collegium Helveticum. I warmly invite you to join us for the sympoisum on 12 June 2026 at 13:00 – 17:45 in the Wolfsroom of the historic Semper Observatory (Sternwarte), Collegium Helveticum, situated in the heart of Zurich’s university quarter.
As glaciers retreat under rapidly warming climatic conditions, they emerge not only as indicators of environmental transformation, but as complex conservation objects navigating natural and cultural worlds. Melting ice releases archaeological artefacts preserved through freezing rather than intentional conservation; geotextile coverings transform Alpine landscapes into sites of technological intervention and ecological grief; Antarctic heritage sites expose the entanglements of preservation, geopolitics, and climate instability; and artistic practices confront the emotional, ethical, and material contradictions of caring for environments undergoing irreversible change.
Responding to these transformations, Caring for Naturecultures – The Cryosphere reconceives conservation as a cross-domain practice of care that exceeds conventional distinctions between natural and cultural heritage. Bringing together perspectives from art history, anthropology, archaeology, conservation, environmental humanities, glaciology, natural sciences, and artistic practice, the symposium approaches glaciers as natureculture hybrids: living archives shaped by climate, memory, extraction, scientific knowledge, and political imagination.
Structured around themes of glacial loss, emotional and spiritual responses to disappearing ice, glacial archaeology, environmental politics, Antarctic heritage, and artistic engagements with the cryosphere, the program explores how melting ice destabilizes inherited notions of permanence, stewardship, and preservation. Across discussions of mourning, geoengineering, migration, emerging archaeological objects, and complex ecologies, glaciers appear not as passive landscapes, but as active agents within Earth histories and as sites of planetary responsibility.
With: Jean Chamel; Nathalie Dietschy; Giovanna di Pietro; Dennis Hansen; Hanna Hölling; Kati Lindström; Thomas Reitmaier; Adam Sébire; Philip Ursprung; Ester Vonplon.
January 27-29, 2025 | Institute of Materiality in Art and Culture | HKB Bern Academy of the Arts
We are calling for participation in this Lab from individuals from the Global South, especially those who belong to underrepresented groups and are in the early phases of their careers (e.g., PhD candidates or recent postdocs). See below for the description and specifics of the call.
This international workshop aims to bring together in a hybrid format experts and practitioners of conservation in two domains: on the one hand, art and cultural heritage conservation; and on the other hand, nature conservation. Except for singular activities, these two communities have rarely if at all communicated. This is highly remarkable especially considering recent developments both in art conservation and nature conservation. In both domains the “things”, “items”, “objects” or “sites” conservators and conservationists care for are increasingly recognized as natureculture hybrids. While art conservation, especially in its earlier guise of restoration, primarily considered artworks as the outcome of human—and especially the artist’s—intentions, the field of art conservation has increasingly recognized that the materials of artworks undergo unintentional, and sometimes unexpected, changes and are subject to loss and decay well outside human control. At the other end, while inspired by ideas of pristine wilderness, nature conservation in its earliest instances was primarily geared towards the establishment of national parks and nature reserves fortified against human intervention, conservationists have come to value humans as inherent to the ecosystems they care for. Given that the “things” and “sites” for which (art) conservators and (nature) conservationists hold responsibility are interplays of human and non-human agencies and thus nature-culture hybrids, both fields and communities consider ontologically similar objects, and should exchange views.
The workshop will explore questions such as, How should conservation practices in both nature and art be redefined in light of the inevitable and sometimes desirable changes to the material make-up of objects, landscapes and environments? How can new conservation theories that embrace change and transformation, particularly those emerging from contemporary art, inform and reshape traditional conservation approaches that prioritize permanence and stability? Who gets to decide where and how conservation occurs, considering the historical silencing and displacement of human voices in both ecological restoration and cultural heritage conservation? How can the field of conservation expand beyond top-down expert models to embrace decolonizing community engagement, thereby raising questions about the future role of experts?
The current global challenges of the climate, environmental and, in parts of the globe, humanitarian crisis create a strong urgency to intensify the exchange between the fields of art and nature conservation. To cope with these challenges, nature and culture heritage conservation requires alternative ontologies and distinct epistemologies. Ontologically, both fields require approaches that can deal with change and the dynamics accelerated by the climate crisis. Epistemologically, both fields need to develop more inclusive models of decision-making, in their turn, questioning the role of experts in conservation. This workshop will bring these two communities together not because we are under the assumption that one field has the solutions to the problems the other field is confronted with, but because both fields confront similar problems. Rather than transferring ready-made solutions from the domain of art and culture to nature, or vice versa, and simply having one community learn from the other, the workshop will offer a platform for both communities to learn together and progress facing the global challenges mentioned above.
The confirmed contributors for this workshop are Lotte Arndt, Jackob Badcock, Marjolijn Bol, Josephine Ellis, Noémie Étienne, Sven Dupré, Rodney Harrison, Hanna B. Hölling, Laura J. Martin, Maeva Pimo, Christian Rosset, Friederike Schäfer, Anna Schäffler, Peter Schneemann, Yvonne Schmidt and Glenn Wharton.
We also invite applications from individuals in the Global South, particularly those from underrepresented groups and at early career stages (PhD candidates or early postdocs), to participate in our workshop. Participants may contribute by delivering a short presentation and/or joining discussion groups focused on the aforementioned themes. A subsidy of CHF 1,000 is available to support travel and accommodation for four in-person participants. The workshop and application process will be conducted in English.
Please apply by November 3, 2024, by submitting the following: 1. A motivation letter (maximum 2 pages) detailing your interest in participating in the workshop and a brief research statement explaining how the workshop would benefit your current research 2. A CV (maximum 5 pages), including a list of publications.
Natureculture Lab has been organized by Hanna B. Hölling (HKB Bern Academy of the Arts) and Sven Dupré (Utrecht University/University van Amsterdam) with the support of the Swiss National Science Foundation Scientific Exchanges Grant, the Bern University of Applied Science Network Grant and the Institute Materiality in Art and Culture at HKB Bern Academy of the Arts.
