This session encourages us to reconfigure and de-centre the anthropocentric bias that often pervades archival studies by exploring the ways in which the material enfoldments of ecological matter like glaciers and ice sheets express themselves as media that both archive and re-compose their complex entanglements with planetary processes and human histories, producing what Schuppli refers to as "ice memory".

Drawing from Inuk microbiologist Aviaja Lyberth in the film Utuqaq, a meditation on the sentience of Arctic landscapes as experienced by four ice core scientists [that she calls visitors] working in Greenland, Schuppli begins from the premise that, “Ice has memory”. As Lyberth narrates in the film: “[Ice] remembers in detail for a million years or more. It carries a message, the history of climate. Ice remembers the chemical composition of the air around the start of the last Ice Age.”

Some might say that to speak of climate histories and ice memory is to attribute cultural conceits to the geophysical realm, but what would it mean politically if we were to consider human history and memory as merely expressions of a broader phenomenon of spatio-temporal re-orderings and re-assembly?

Guest speaker: Dr. Susan Schuppli

Reading group

27 January 2025 15:00-18:00 at UvA Buzzhouse (OMHP). Please send an email to organisers to receive information and updates about the reading group meetings.

Organisers