Iceberg Care
Adam Sébire
Official Selection
𖤘 Short: Experimental, Performance
“This slow, repetitive tending becomes a ritual of attention; yet, one which is aware of its limits (the bergs still melt, overturn and vanish). That humility is the point: care here is not control but the insistence that a relationship be kept.”
A concept that defines this final Screening Room is acts of care. Care and protection of our oceans, our forests, and our ice-covered places. Here, a lone figure tends to four sublime glacial icebergs frozen into sea ice. Known to indigenous Inuit as kassoq these are exquisitely coloured formations of translucent glacier ice, created under enormous pressure at the base of the Greenland ice sheet (Sermersuaq) before being transported by the flow of the Qarajaq glacier. They’re likely to be millennia-old.
“Bergy bits” are repetitively mopped, swept and polished of fallen snow. Their carer’s Sisyphean endeavours are punctuated by moments of connection between him and the ice. (Of course, we can only really know the 10% that floats above water). Ilulissap eqqaa (a Kalaalisut term for the area surrounding an iluliaq or iceberg) is a dangerous place to be since the sea ice here is fragile and the bergs, eroded from below by warm water, can overturn without warning. Belying their monolithic appearance, icebergs are in constant transformation – by wind, current, solar radiation, precipitation, and now, by manmade climate change. Yet, the protagonist’s effort continues.
The artist says he wants to prise open conceptions of our relationship with (and within) nature sufficiently to accommodate more symbiotic and collaborative approaches – such as environmental philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s proposal for a “Symbiocene.”
Above is a single-screen version of what was originally designed as a four-screen installation.
Across formats, Sébire aims to engage viewers critically and emotionally. His work asks not just what we know about ecological collapse, but how we live with, respond to, and imagine alternatives to it.
Production: Adam Sébire
Courtesy of the artist