Legacy of Melt, North Atlantic Voices
Legacy of Melt if part of an ongoing work by light artist Martin Ersted and the Copenhagen-based collective Båll & Brand, bringing together light, sound and matter collected through almost eight years of field work across glacial landscapes in Europe, the North Atlantic and Antarctica. What opens at the North Atlantic House in February 2027 is the synthesis of years of travelling, collecting, experimenting and thinking about changes that are enormous in scale but often distant and abstract in everyday life.
Legacy of Melt emerges out of thinking about relationships: between materials and places, human activity and natural systems, geological and human time, cause and consequence. The question underlying the work is whether light, sound and matter can make some of these relationships tangible rather than merely intellectually understandable.
The samples used throughout the exhibition are collected to bring the public close to the places they embody. Places where nature is fast transitioning, with impact reaching far beyond their borders. At its centre are rotating glass discs containing a growing collection of physical materials such as meltwater, crude oil, volcanic sand, algae and plant matter. Around them, field recordings from glaciers and other environments where these substances originate, will move through the space, developed in close collaboration with composer Jonas Jurkūnas.
As sound embodies the room, light passes through and the glass discs turn, samples collected are transformed into time capsules. Each holds site-specific fragments of places and moments that may one day no longer exist in the same form. At the same time, radically different timescales meet inside them: geological, biological and human.
The concept of transitioning is a key theme in Legacy of Melt. Besides the point that the samples themselves come from places that are fast transitioning, the installation is designed to display these samples transforming under light. The analog, projected images are never fixed, they shift constantly as the discs rotate. And, as visitors move throughout the installation, they may find themselves transitioning too, carried, however briefly, towards the landscapes, sounds and atmospheres these fragments encapsulate.
In Legacy of Melt, what is geographically and temporally distant is made physically present in the room through light, sound and matter used in the installation. Such presence is also an open invitation to reflect upon the complexity of the relationships between materials on display. As such, Legacy of Melt displays crude oil – the very substance that advanced much of society, technological development, and modern life – sitting beside meltwater from Greenland, Iceland, the Alps, Norway and Antarctica. The exhibition does not prescribe what to make of that proximity. It allows the materials – and the relationship between them – to speak for themselves.
Importantly, in Legacy of Melt, light is a means of investigation. Martin Ersted uses light to reveal the parts of physical matter that the eye alone cannot see, running in parallel to how light is used in scientific work to measure and reveal what is less obvious to the eye. Here, art and science exist as parallel methods of inquiry: both using light to investigate, uncover and make perceptible that which might otherwise remain unseen.
In a world filled with information, digital screens and generated imagery, the mechanism behind the projects used in Legacy of Melt is deliberately simple and analog. Each projected image is created by light passing through matter collected by hand over almost 8 years of fieldwork. For Ersted, encountering these materials again can act as a trigger of memory, evoking the places and moments from where samples were collected.
Poetry connected to the places and landscapes explored in the project is part of the spatial soundscape, where words and voices emerge, dissolve and melt into sound. An accompanying programme of films and live conversations with researchers and artists will extend some of the questions raised by the exhibition, including how science and complex environmental change can be communicated, and experienced in different ways.
For Ersted, the sealed glass discs have increasingly begun to resemble fragments of places and moments in constant transition, each one a trace of something that may not exist in the same way again. Legacy of Melt brings these fragments of distant places and different timescales into the room, as physical matter transformed through light, sound and movement.
BÅLL & BRAND
An artistic collaboration creating site-specific works with light, space, sound and movement