Sermersuaq: The Last Ice
is art as activism, an inspiring international art collaboration in a time of an awakening. It will be an international expedition, multi-dimensional sculptural installation, film, and radio documentary. In the Greenlandic language ancient glacial ice is called ‘Sermersuaq’. The project seeks to shed light on a profound truth: The Greenland glaciers and ice sheets are melting. The vanishing of the ice is changing lives everywhere on the planet. We seek to reveal the imagination and ideals that humanity needs to keep the world a habitable place.
The Expedition:
The Last Ice is an expedition from Tasiilaq, Greenland, working with Angaangaq to collect an ancient dislodged 15’ long 4’ wide relic of 10,000 year old blue basal ice from an iceberg that has been frozen into sea ice. To search for the precious relic of ice, Angaangaq and Goggin will lead the team to set off from Tasiilaq and travel by dog sled over the sea ice to where the massive glacier calves into the sea. The Expedition will be documented in its entirety. On the sea ice, the team will set up camp and work with Anaangaq to build a sweat lodge to take a journey to meet with Sedna, the mother of the sea, to ask her permission to respectfully remove and preserve the ice and bring it around the world as a sacred talisman and ambassador. We will then continue with Angaangaq to travel across the sea ice to find the glacial iceberg. Treading carefully so as not to flip the iceberg, the team will salvage the large block of basal ice only with pre-industrial hand tools. The team will tie ropes to the Sermersuaq ice and pull it onto an oak sled, built from wood salvaged from the 2020 California Zogg Mine Fire, and pull the glistening ice with the ssistance of sled dogs and Tunumit mushers, by hand over the frozen sea ice floes back to Tasiilaq. Once the sea Ice melts enough the team will load the Sermersuaq onto a ship and sail for Copenhagen, the first port of call for this new sacred object.
The Reliquary:
The goal is to transform a block of Greenland glacial ice—the Sermersuaq—into an object of reverence—a sacred object, a relic, a focus of meditation, thought, and conversation.The ice will be preserved in a hand-sculpted, solar-powered, glass-walled reliquary constructed from up-cycled materials including wood salvaged from recent California forest fires.We will carve the ice into the shape of a precious jewel and install it into the solar powered sculptural glass freezer reliquary to create an art installation and film which will travel globally as a public art piece at the largest scale. The ice will serve as both a relic of significance, and a cultural ambassador, to signify awareness of the planet’s climatic upheaval. The journey to preserve the ice will show how peoples from across the planet can come together – in awareness, with love and in reverence – to save what is most valuable, most precious, and most fragile.
The Traveling Exhibition:
Sermersuaq: The Last Ice will be a multimedia museum installation to create an artistic and ritualistic space where visitors will celebrate the ice, mourn the ice, and come to terms with what we must do to preserve the ice. The exhibition will stop at the United Nations Climate Summit as well as cultural centers around the globe. After it has traveled around the world, as an ice ambassador, and acting as a focal point to engage with the public in meaningful conversations with Angaangaq as well as scientists and indigenous healers from around the globe, the ice will be returned to its home in Greenland where it will live at the The Icefjord Centre, which informs visitors about the history of ice, the culture in and around Greenland, and climate change.
The Film:
The film will be a documentation of a new rite — a liturgy for the 21st century. Filmmaker Jon Halperin and Brian Goggin will collaborate on the film documenting the “ritual” removal of the ice showing the process of transforming a 100,000-year-old block of glacial ice into a sacred object and transporting it back to the carbon-dominated civilization. The film will be immersive, projected on a floor to ceiling
screen as part of the traveling exhibition.The film will be both real and not real simultaneously. Hyper crisp 8k images, but in black and white. Atmos Dolby sound but where music, sound effects, and field recordings are intertwined to create a mythic and psychological soundscape. The score will be centered by Angaangaque’s wind drum playing and compositions. The film will be made to survive as long as the ice: a record of how and why the ice was removed – a kind of Rosetta Stone explaining the silent ice in ist “everlasting” reliquary.
The Radio Documentary:
Radio journalist Charles Monroe-Kane will be interviewing along the way to create a behind-the- scenes podcast series to document, and in many ways, speak truth of the people who created the Sermersuag project.
The Expedition, Reliquary, Film, and Radio Documentary will be carbon negative: to exemplify visionary energy and material use practice. Materials will be repurposed or recycled content wherever possible. The freezer system will be solar-powered. We will make efforts to sequester carbon and potent greenhouse gasses like methane. We will partner with Running Tide, based out of Iceland, to rebalance the carbon cycle and move fast carbon back to slow carbon by using ocean Kelp farming techniques: https://www.runningtide.com/restoration.
The ice will travel by sailship. The project’s GHG-negative carbon footprint will be verified by an independent third party.
WHEN & HOW: A preliminary scouting expedition will take place in March 2024. Dates for March 2025 are to be determined.
To Support this Project:
We are raising funds to complete the Reliquary freezer system, build the solar array, conduct the scouting trip in 2024 and the expedition in 2025, and produce the film and the exhibition. This Project is fiscally sponsored by Intersection for the Arts and can receive tax deductible donations.
Please make contribution checks out to “Intersection for the Arts” with “The Last Ice” in the memo line and mail the check to their office at:
Intersection for the Arts, 1446 Market Street, San Francisco, CA 94102
Find more info here:
Brian Goggin » Sermersuaq: The Last Ice (metaphorm.org)
And if you have any other questions, feel free to contact Brian Goggin directly at gogginsculpture@gmail.com
