Ice has always moved. When glaciation took hold some 34 million years ago, interconnected rivers of ice combined to produce the Earth’s vast ice sheets. As temperatures slowly warmed, glaciers developed a unique balancing act; advancing and retreating to calibrate their annual winter accumulation against summer melt. Sometimes calving colossal icebergs into the sea. A positive feedback loop that has regulated the movement of ice for millions of years. Today ice is moving faster still, as anthropogenic factors accelerate climatic changes. The Earth is burning up… and ice is on the move. 

However, in the early 1800s colonialism and capitalism had already joined forces to move ice. Not as an unforeseen consequence of industrialisation – which we now recognize as a key accelerator of atmospheric warming – but as a commodity in and of itself. What came to be known as the ‘frozen water trade’. A trans-hemispheric commerce in natural ice that moved its crystal cargo along the well-established shipping routes of plantation economies and the spice trade. Shipping natural ice extracted from glaciers and winter lakes to colonial elites around the world. First as ballast in the holds of trading ships and then as commercial cargo. Sometimes using slave labour to unload ships. The moving of a melting commodity that lost its mass by almost a third upon arrival is now largely forgotten. The documentary film Moving Ice by Susan Schuppli tells the story about how European and American merchants tried to cool the tropics through the financialization of temperature.

Susan Schuppli (CH/UK) is an artist and researcher examining material evidence from war and conflict to environmental disasters. Her current work explores the ways in which toxic ecologies from nuclear accidents, oil spills, or Arctic dark snow are producing an ‘extreme image’ archive of material wrongs. Her creative projects include the video trilogy Trace Evidence and Atmospheric Feedback Loops, a Vertical Cinema commission for Sonic Acts 2017. Schuppli is a Senior Lecturer and Deputy Director of the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, University of London.

Premiere: Sonic Acts Biennial, 2024 (NL)
Further presentations: Cinemateket Bergen, 2024 (NO); Kunstnernes Hus, 2024 (NO)
Part of Re-Imagine Europe – New Perspectives for Action. Co-funded by the European Union.
This work is available for touring.
For further enquiries, contact: bek@bek.no