Icedge gestures
icedge gestures is one of 4 video performances/ hydro choreographies in the Waterflux Icegut(s) series. 2020-2021 made in dialogue with the oil exhibition at the National Museum of Science and Technology and emerging research on entangled ocean ontologies. through hydrochoreography the figure traces Ice edges local and metaphorically afar musing on inter(relationships) between body of water.
The article The ice-edge is lost, nature moved it by Berit Kristoffersen and Philip Steinberg is an inspiration for this eco-somatic gesture. the paper explores”how ‘ice’ is woven into the spaces and practices of the state in Norway and Canada and, specifically, how representations of the sea ice edge become political agents in that process. The arcticle focuses in particular on how these states have used science to ‘map’ sea ice – both graphically and legally – over the past decades. This culminated with two maps produced in 2015, a Norwegian map that moved the Arctic sea-ice edge 70 km northward and a Canadian map that moved it 200 km southward. Using the maps and their genealogies to explore how designations of sea ice are entangled with political objectives (oil drilling in Norway, sovereignty claims in Canada), they describe how the maps communicate a general tendency of states to assign fixed categories to portions of the earth's surface and define distinct lines between them. The authors propose that the production of static ontologies through cartographic representations becomes particularly problematic in an icy environment of extraordinary temporal and spatial dynamism, where complex ocean–atmospheric processes and their biogeographic impacts are reduced to lines on a map”
-Text is the abstract of Berit Kristofferens and Philip Steinberg paper The Iceedge is lost, nature moved it.