A Pinch of Light

We are a group of bodies and voices. Voices that emerge from our scientific and artistic knowledge. We are lovers of that which we call nature, that which is not a world apart from our spaces of lived experience. We respond to a call that polar scientist Ximena Aguilar Vega offers us. From the site of our bodies we hear the sound of the wind moving through bodies of ice. We accept her invitation to think alongside glaciers, as a way to make possible important conversations that we want to see happen. We are aware that the efforts made by polar science are enormous: measurements, technological development, listening and interpreting of data that transform into a warning that might alert us. Ximena's invitation through these images —distant landscapes for most of the inhabitants of the planet— is to ask ourselves questions that matter. Polar bodies, the Arctic, the Antarctic, and sub-polar zones are experiencing loss. Day in and day out, polar scientists perceive the scripts of melting that result from a rise in temperatures across the planet. We know this makes us continually use the word urgency, and that perception of this urgency is important. But what we propose here is to go a step further, to pay attention to such voices, to what they want to tell us. What languages should we use to decipher these messages? Beyond the techniques that polar science offers us, we believe we need to think about these landscapes as spaces that, in many ways, have marked our ways of being in the world. However distant these spaces may seem to us, the stability or instability of the poles affect our continental lives. We know well that on this planet a series of circuits connect us. Icy winds mark our geologies; but how might we learn to recognize that perhaps the way in which the wind passes through bodies of ice is precisely the way, the same way, in which the wind travels through our respiratory system. The air that shaped our lungs, our vocal cords, is the same wind that sculpts the earth that houses us. It is time to recognize our own shape in these enormous forms, and pay attention to their language. Alongside Ximena, we ask again: what languages should we use to approach and listen to the messages of these polar bodies? How to situate ourselves continuously in an exercise of listening to these expansions that emerge in front of us. That other, human and non-human, that looks like me and is at the same time profoundly different? What do we achieve by expanding our vocal sounds? Will we be able to infect, in the best of senses, this collective form of being in the face of sounds that clarify the fissures of these traces of light? Might we think that perhaps this is a step towards recovering hope? Artists, scientists and mountaineers from different parts of the world participate in this exhibition. They lend us their capacity for listening and their bodies to show us glacial sound. We invite you to join this collective voice. We invite you to become part of this collective thought process that seeks to create languages of hope. Pensar como un glaciar Think like a glacier El sonido del agua sutil se desprende del cuerpo de hielo The sound of subtle water unhinging from the body of ice Escuchar el viento Listen to the wind Respirar la esperanza Breath hope