The Magnetism of Ice: Art and Affect in a Melting World

Abstract

In 2015, when Olafur Eliasson stationed twelve massive pieces of glacial ice on a central street in Paris, as the UN Cop21 Climate Summit proceeded nearby, passerbys wept as they embraced the melting ice. Why is ice so potently affective? How does a mainstream “biophilic” relationship to ice threaten the very thing it purports to love? This presentation is a visual essay that critically investigates the magnetism of ice—glaciers, sea ice, icebergs—and the political and environmental stakes of this affinity, in an age riven by climate crises and apocalyptic anxieties. Drawing on recent discussions in feminist and creative geographies, I develop a “critical topophilic” approach that explores works of visual art that engage with ice as bodies, as sites of trauma, sites of possibility, and agential beings. These works span a range of emotional intensities: intrigue, devotion, heartache, grief, devastation, and even lust. In particular, I focus on British-Indian performance artist Himali Singh Soin’s work, Subcontinentment: A South Asian Futurist Manifesto. In it, Soin embodies a piece of ice—a dying elder, one with rapidly disappearing memories; this piece of ice delivers a manifesto that can be understood as a love letter to humanity. Can the ice, despite everything, love us back? Soin’s manifesto is framed through a plea—to recognize the geopolitical and postcolonial relationships that find their nexus in a single piece of melting ice. This essay also draws on my own embodied experiences with and of ice, from multiple trips of field research conducted on the island of Svalbard.