ABSTRACT

As I draft this paper in a hotel room overlooking the Jardin du Luxembourg in the 6th arrondissement of Paris, a few kilometres away in Le Bourget negotiations for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) Conference of the Parties (COP 21) are once again occupying the collective imagination. While the world watches, and even dares to hope for ambitious multi-lateral efforts on decarbonisation, climate negotiators are locked away in conference rooms finalising the text of a joint statement, with only the faintest rumours emanating about draft agreement texts. Aside from the official nego - tiations across the city there are numerous fringe events organised by a plethora of scientific, environmental and cultural organisations. On the way to one such event, I happened to walk past another, an installation by the artist Olafur Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing entitled Ice Watch. Around the Place du Panthéon twelve large blocks of ice, originally harvested from free-floating icebergs in a fjord outside Nuuk, Greenland, were arranged in clock formation, slowly melting in the crisp early December air.1 Crowds mingled around the ice formation, some touching their surface while others listened to the ice as it creaked and groaned, as the melting formed cracking patterns through these immense hunks of frozen water. As I listened to Eliasson explain his motivation for the installation I was struck

by the theatricality of the work. The slow violence of melting ice and the disappearance of frozen landscapes – with their multitude implications for both human and nonhuman inhabitants – sit alongside what Donna Haraway terms the “tragicomedic” narratives of apocalypse (in this case the ticking of the doomsday clock) as now-familiar tropes in the political aesthetics of climate change (Haraway 1997). Kathryn Yusoff writes that images of melting ice and stranded polar bears have “become mythic and biophysical storyteller[s], figuring the complex ities of changing climates and habitat loss, and conjoining the biophysical and emotional worlds of humans and animals” (Yussof 2010, p. 74). These images have, she continues, “become a prosthetic emotional device for testing the water of loss” (Yussof 2010, p. 76). The pathos of the scene in Place du Panthéon is accom - panied by the installation’s website, which outlines a series of ‘climate facts’ and their implications for sea ice and glacial ice.