Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas (2022-2023)
Simulation of digitized glacial Arolla cave, tree, sap and lichen
Commissioned by the MIRE Project, further exhibited and developed with Copenhagen Contemporary and Teyler’s Museum
Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas is a digital simulation of the Arolla Glacier in Switzerland. The photographic material which formed the piece was gathered based on two weeks of intensive fieldwork at the glacier, at a height of 2300 metres. The physicality of the creation process speaks to the intuitiveness of the final piece. Every day, 3 hours of cross-country skiing were required in each direction to reach the frozen cave.
The piece documents a “glacial tongue” - an environmental phenomenon where water runs past the edge of a glacier, eventually carving a path inside it and shaping a cavern. Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas explores the relationship between language and landscape by traversing multiple scales of the ecosystem of the Arolla glacier - the ice cave, the endemic Arolla tree, the sap created by the tree, and the lichen living in symbiosis within it.
The double title refers to the connection that language has on our perception of the natural world around us - the names we give to things around us, how they enter our awareness, and how we move through them - in this case the glacial ‘tongue’. As if speaking in tongues itself, the work journeys from a descriptive, objective realm outside of the glacier, down into a microscopic scale, where life takes psychedelic forms within the digitized lichen and sap.
Image: Tongues of Verglas in Yet it Moves! at Copenhagen Contemporary, 2023. © David Stjernholm
Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas is a 24 minute continuous cinematic journey designed to play in a perfect infinite loop, an extension of Steensen’s ‘slow media’ philosophy of work. It begins by showing the 3D scanned glacier tongue as an organ, slightly animated, as if it was a human tongue, then moving to a more objective perspective, where we are able to identify features of the cave. The video transitions into a dark cosmos, where we venture into a 3D scanned native Arolla tree, showing a universe of living energies upon it. The video zooms even closer, showing an extremely fragile and detailed 3D scan of a sap droplet which reveals the wolf lichen living within - a species living in symbiosis with the tree, creating a form of multi-species co-habitation only found in this specific location.
The project was discussed in an interview with Jakob Kudsk Steensen in conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist for CURA 39 ‘Are we Eternal Beings?’ Magazine. The magazine can be found on the CURA website.
Installation - MIRE Program, Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain
Chêne-Bourg Station, Geneva
June 2022 - June 2023
Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas was originally commissioned by the Canton de Genève, as a part of Fonds Cantonal d’Art Contemporain’s MIRE Project in Geneva. The piece is shown via an 18 minute looping video across two screens in Geneva’s Chêne-Bourg metro station, alongside the work of two additional artists. The MIRE Project spans several stations in the network. At Chêne-Bourg, Tongues of Verglas is seamlessly integrated into the station’s infrastructure and interplays with the natural rhythm of the public space. The MIRE Project also features artists Dominique Gonzelez-Foerster, Bea Schlingelhoff, Shuang Li, Jennifer West, and Emmanuelle Antille.
Images courtesy of the MIRE Program by Fonds cantonal d'art contemporain, Geneva © Serge Frühauf
Sentinels of Arolla
Text Collaboration with Writer Joel Kuennen
Commissioned by the Nicoletta Fiorucci Foundation for ‘Lichens Never Lie’ as part of the World Weather Network
June 2022 - June 2023
The World Weather Network invited a worldwide network of artists and writers to report on changes in their local weather and climates. In Grasse, France, the Nicoletta Fiorucci foundation focused in on lichens as 'weather reporters', in an effort to upturn the anthropocentric underpinnings of weather reporting.
Kudsk Steensen invited writer and artist Joel Kuennen to participate on the trip to the Arolla Glacier. During their trip, Kuennen wrote a short story about the experience and the discovery of the wolflichen inside the sap of the Arolla tree. This text is interspersed with images from the Tongues of Verglas / Les Langues de Verglas video for the Grasse weather station's report on the World Weather Network website.
Images: Documentation of fieldwork by Jakob Kudsk Steensen and Joel Kuennen at the Arolla Glacier found at 2300 meters height in Switzerland.