Dear Pre-Examiners,
I present my latest film, "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace," for the last pre-examination. While in Greenland, we both felt that the processes affecting Greenland on a political and ecological level were not visible to the human eye on-site. Therefore, we expanded our research to institutions that conduct research about the Arctic but are not in the Arctic. The results of our research have led to the creation of the film „In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace“ (original title: „Nichts geht spurlos am eis vorbei“). I am submitting this film for the fourth pre-examination for my doctorate with the new overall title:
“More than meets the eye – capturing invisible flows and processes.”
The five parts of my doctoral thesis now include the following five works:
- "Memories of a Past Future," a 3-channel installation, pre-examination in 2019
- "Unlearning Flow," an film essay, pre-examination in 2019
- "2°," an film essay, pre-examination in 2020
- "The Other Side of Ice," a photo text installation, pre-examination in 2021
- "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace," submitted with this letter in 2023.
I must note that I have replaced the film "Antibody" with "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace" to better fit the series of works.
The film "In the Ice, Everything Leaves a Trace“ was made for screening and is best viewed on a large screen with stereo speakers. The vimeo link is password protected since It did not yet had a premiere at a film festival. The password is sent to you by a seperate mail.
Thank you very much for taking the time to watch my film. I am looking forward to your reports
Sincerely,
Christoph Oeschger
13:08 min/HD for RC (Original in UHD)
Directed: Christoph Oeschger
Script and Research: Gianna Molinari, Christoph Oeschger
Camera, Editing: Christoph Oeschger
Sounddesign/Music: Fabian Gutscher
Color grading: Michael Etzensperger
Voice over: In the ice, everything leaves a trace.
Still terra incognita, they said.
Perhaps, they said, up in the north, in the interior of the largest island in the world, there are areas that are free of ice, land where roots penetrate the soil, where bushes grow, where life would be possible—and cultivation and prospecting and dominion.
Another attempt then, after the failure of the first expedition, when they had to turn around midway through.
1912/13, travelling from west to east. Covering 700 kilometres in thirty-seven days, Swiss explorer Alfred de Quervain and his team trekked across Greenland, conducting research for Denmark: they wrote fieldnotes, put up pilot balloons filled with hydrogen, made observations of the degree of cloud cover, measured the direction and speed of the wind and the air pressure and temperature, and searched for ice-free land. But there was ice everywhere.
After the trek Alfred de Quervain remarked that in future expeditions, scientists should observe the clouds, noting, in particular, the direction they moved in.
“Ce qui serait d’une très grande importance.”
For whom?
Important for whom?
I’m trying to visualize the Arctic, piecing together a picture bit by bit. Creating an image. An approximation of an image.
What can be seen …
What not …
Well-researched areas.
Unresearched areas.
The ice still provides protection. The cold keeps out a great many tourists and mining farms and stops flags being hoisted.
Still.
And yet, the ice is melting and with the melting of the ice comes the possibility of new trade routes, awakening greed and territorial claims.
What are now international waters may tomorrow belong to Russia, the
USA, Canada, Denmark, or China.
Where are the bounds of this expanse of white whose boundlessness is no more?
What can be seen …
What not …
Above the water …
And beneath …
The Arctic seabed is reportedly far less explored than the surface of the moon.
And far more interesting. It’s said to be rich in natural resources. Arms reach out, elbows extended, fingers placed on points on the map, leaving behind faint greasy marks.
Oil is still the key.
What was once whale blubber is now oil deposits, gas bubbles, fossil fuel prospects.
So today oil is still at the heart of things. Oil in a different form. And metals and rare earths.
The melting of the ice exposes the soil, and the seabed is made accessible.
The Arctic composes itself before me, reconstituting itself over and over. Layer by layer.
Scientists bring home ice cores and samples of sediment and rock. They remove a piece of the Arctic and take it to their laboratories further south. The Arctic migrates, ending up in cold storage units, freezers, bags, test tubes, mortars, under microscopes; it is mixed with fluids, ground up, scanned with XRF, dissolved. It is broken down. The Arctic is no longer just in the Arctic. Parts of it have gone elsewhere.
Bits of the Arctic can be found in sediment cores retrieved from the seabed and stacked in plastic pipes that have been cut in half.
They have been prepped for current research and for future use.
The Arctic lies congealed in the material, ready for examination. Collected, in the dry, stored in the archive of the ocean floor.
Time is compressed.
If you put your hands beside a drill core, a thumb’s length of ice contains two millennia.
Millions of years collected in a linear metre of core.
What can be read from it:
the impact of a meteorite and the extinction of the dinosaurs, a volcanic eruption, the tunnelling of a worm. Global warming is recorded as a dark stain.
What can be seen …
What not …
The ice is also a store of time.
It is remembering shortly before memory is lost.
What can be read from the ice cores:
all the summers that have been too hot, the eruption of a volcano, storms in the Sahara, every fall of snow, dead animals, nuclear weapons tests.
Traces can be found in the ice cores: bone, pelt, ash, pollen, dust, tritium.
In the ice, everything leaves a trace. Nothing eludes it.
Not the plague in the fourteenth century, not the nuclear tests of the 1960s.
The ice records these tests as radioactive tritium emitted into the atmosphere by the explosions, which then sank down on the glaciers, shrouding everything, a toxic mantle covering the earth.
The time of the plague is recorded too in the glacial ice. During this period, fields went untilled and no crops were harvested—there is no pollen to be found in the glaciers.
So what is missing tells a story too.
What can be seen …
What not …
On his expedition, de Quervain saw mountains covered with glaciers in front of him. He called one of them “Mont Forel” after his Swiss patron and named an entire region in East Greenland “Schweizerland”. A bay in Greenland was given the name “De Quervain’s Havn”.
De Quervain inscribed himself in the ice too, in the ice and on maps.
Which begs the question: Who gives the names, who has ownership, who makes a record of themselves, who is left out, who is forgotten, what of all this disappears?