multi-media installation, 2020–2025

In the technoid, pseudo-scientific installation,  an archiving process is imagined through investigation of different media and materialities. ‍However, glaciers, physical ice, polyester geotextiles and the aquarium have long become artefacts and objects of analyses for art works and institutional critiques. Have they already rendered useless in their effect or are caught in the sublime imaginaries attached to them?

‹Archive› in «*gel-[archive]» is to be understood ambiguously here: On the one hand, there are the glaciers as natural archives, which have a preserving effect through their ice masses over thousands of years. And on the other hand, there are human-made archives, often with violent histories, in which artefacts are appropriated and preserved transgenerationally. Archives and archiving as a cultural technique are subject to an anthropological desire for preservation.

The film material of «*gel- [archive]» has been recorded over several years at various locations (Southern Ice Field/Antartica, Switzerland, Iceland) and has itself taken the form of a growing, more resources consuming archive. The material was filmed mostly in the extreme tele and extreme wide angle range to provoke reflection on different media artefacts.

Sounds were recorded by artist Gerome Gadient on a joint expedition to Morteratsch Glacier in Switzerland (2020). He used directional, contact and underwater microphones to later create a soundscape that oscillates between dualities of the archive here (natural/synthesized).