BARRICADING THE ICE SHEETS

Barricading the Ice Sheets is the first research programme of its kind on the international activity of the climate movements and in particular the role played in them by artists and cultural producers. The most important mobilizations, demonstrations, meetings, assemblies and working meetings of the movements, along with the ensuing images, will be recorded, documented and categorized over three years, ensuring maximum public accessibility. Activists will be brought together in unexpected combinations and given the opportunity to speak from otherwise unavailable platforms, with the ensuing insights also to be recorded. Artists` engagement in social movements is not uncommon, yet the relationship has never before been addressed in depth within the exhibition form. This new research should contribute to an understanding of the shifting roles of artists and activists and artists` positive contribution to social movements. The research is structured along two trajectories: Trajectory 1 I will convene a meeting of five or six key climate movement protagonists working between art and activism, including Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner, John Jordan & Isabelle Fremeaux, Gavin Grindon and Beka Economopoulos, who will discuss the movements` methods, purposes, past and future in a group setting. This format can be seen as a re-enactment of the movements` working group structure and an affirmation of their commitment to collective speech and decision. Trajectory 2 Here the research will focus on the tactics of the most formidable sections of the climate movement, with particular attention to texts and image production and the role of artists and cultural producers. Platforms for collective becoming to be documented will include: demonstrations, blockades of fossil fuel extraction sites and transport routes, divestment campaigns, mobilizations against airport expansion and transformative movements for a non-extractive form of collective life. The research will be disseminated primarily in the exhibition format, which remains central to the public mediation, experience and historical comprehension of art. The exhibition will first appear as an applied research site at Camera Austria in Graz. Then MSU Museum of Contemporary Art, Zagreb and Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto will host the research, followed later by other international art institutions. The project will also be accessible online. The key researcher is Oliver Ressler, for whom global warming has been a central theme since the solo exhibition 100 Years of Greenhouse Effect at Salzburger Kunstverein (1996). This title refers to the writings of 1896 in which Swedish chemist and physicist Svante Arrhenius sought to prove scientifically the reality of global warming.

Barricading the Ice Sheets Oliver Ressler "Barricading the Ice Sheets" investigates climate breakdown, the climate justice movements and the relation of the latter to the arts. The research endeavour materialised as videos, photographic works, a conference, publications and a cycle of solo exhibitions. 30 years of failed climate negotiations under the framework of the United Nations have not reduced global carbon emissions at all. Consequently, global temperature is still rising. This inaction on the part of nation states has led people to take action themselves, without representation. Horizontally organised climate movements have emerged all over the world. Polite protest is a thing of the distant past: the movements have blocked fossil fuel extraction sites and transport routes, mobilised against airport expansion, run successful divestment campaigns, and halted Arctic drilling. These actions intend to economically undermine the fossil-fuel industry. The title "Barricading the Ice Sheets" refers to the scale of the emergency the climate justice movements face and the scope of what it sets out to do. To barricade ice sheets as they melt is physically impossible, but the movements are attempting something historically unprecedented, because the planet has never in recorded human history confronted so absolute a threat. When Arctic ice melts, sea levels rise everywhere; islands and cities sink, global exploitation of agriculture and fisheries lurch off schedule. "Barricading the Ice Sheets" records and documents some exemplary mobilizations, activities, assemblies and work meetings of the climate movements. No "neutral" position exists from which a social movement could be merely documented. Every decision - concerning how and what to record, what to omit or the inclusion/exclusion and editing of the activists' direct speech - must be recognized as simultaneously conditioned by and constitutive of the relation to that movement. Consequently, the artistic production drawn from the research includes material that might momentarily be seen as straightforwardly "documentary", along with other elements where the "artistic" engagement is more obvious. Any sustained attention to the work, however, will reveal its systematic blurring of any artificial line between "document" and "artwork". The research endeavor "Barricading the Ice Sheets" took place as solo exhibitions at Camera Austria, Graz (2021), Museum of Contemporary Art Zagreb (2021/2022), Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), Berlin (2022), Tallinn Art Hall, Tallinn (2022), LABoral Centro de Arte y Creacin Industrial, Gijn (2023), and The Showroom, London (2023).