Tag: cryosphere

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.

Curated by Hanna Barbara Hölling.

Follow this link for more information.

Venues:
Gallery & Laboratory, Collegium Helveticum

Open to the public with free entry.

Official opening
June 12, 2026, 18:00

Regular opening hours
Mon–Fri, 12:30–16:30

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

The exhibition has been realized with the support of the Senior Fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich, with additional support from HKB Bern, the Center for Critical Conservation, and the Natureculture Lab.

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.

Please note that this is an in-person event only.

Full program available here.

The symposium has been organized with the support of the Senior Fellowship at the Collegium Helveticum, ETH Zurich, with additional support from HKB Bern, the Center for Critical Conservation, and the Natureculture Lab..