In Graubünden, the sighs of an ice giant disappearing now resonate thanks to the sensitive ear of the French sound artist Ludwig Berger. His project, entitled “Crying Glacier”, gives the final breaths of the dead glacier to hear, now a direct victim of global warming.
At the first listening, the sounds collected could almost seem happy. The runoff of water, the bursting of bubbles, the crackles that resonate like trees in the wind … So many signs of an apparent vitality. And yet, they testify to a silent collapse.
The more “alive” the glacier seems, the more he is actually dying. The burst bubbles contain imprisoned air for centuries, even millennia. Each noise, each cracking corresponds to the end of an old structure, shaped by time and pressure.
The agony of an ecosystem
Ludwig Berger’s sound documentary lasts less than ten minutes. But in a few moments, it gives to feel the agony of an ecosystem. More than a scientific testimony, it is an almost intimate sensory experience that confronts the auditor or the auditor with the concrete reality of global warming.
Through “Crying Glacier“, Global warming is no longer just a fact or a graphic, it becomes audible and tangible. A way to make what ice can hear can no longer tell.
pw / hkr
