There’s no future in ice performance and video installation

Focusing on the fragile olfactory relationships between lichen, water, reindeer, and anthropogenic climate change, There’s no future in ice presents a ritual of apology, transformation and respect performed in Ubmeje Sápmi, the lands of the Sámi people in Northern Sweden. The Arctic is a vortex for climate change, warming nearly four times faster than the global average. Rapid, unpredictable and extreme weather events are increasing, lichen gets frozen beneath layers of ice and reindeer can’t smell their food. 

As white Australian visitors, we grappled with how to make art on Sápmi. We began by gathering water from the Ubmejeiednuo / Umeälven, the river which flows from Byjjesmehkie / Överuman lake in the Western mountains and across Swedish Sápmi, through Ubmeje / Umeå and out to Östersjön / Baltic Sea, a precious and diverse ecology that sustains lives, matter and memories. Boiling the water, we distilled the delicate odours of jeagil / läv / lichen foraged from the forests of Gammlia, Ubmeje / Umeå. Freezing the distillate, we trapped the fragrant lichen hydrosol into ice forms to suspend scent, temperature, time.

In the rituals presented in the video There’s no future in ice, we hold the frozen votive offerings in our hands, warming them, melting them, releasing lichen fragrance and river water into the forest as a gesture of reciprocity, culpability and apology. 

There’s no future in ice resonates beyond the Arctic: Australia, too, faces intensifying climate and environmental volatility—heatwaves, bushfires, floods—reshaping cultural and ecological memories, relationships and orientations.  From melting permafrost to burning bushland, nowhere is unaffected.