Caring for Naturecultures
The Cryosphere

A Landscape of Despair: Alpine Glaciers Covered with Geotextiles
Nathalie Dietschy

Since the mid-2000s, the installation of geotextiles on Alpine glacier surfaces has been used to slow glacial melt. This preservation measure, which was designed to sustain tourism, has resulted in the creation of a new landscape: a landscape of despair that bears witness to global warming and the exploitation of the Earth. Several photographers have captured the various effects of geotextiles on Alpine glaciers, noting the landscape changes that this geoengineering measure entails, the surprising artistic appearance it conveys, and highlighting the direct impacts on the territory, notably pollution. These landscapes of Alpine glaciers covered with fleeces exist within a narrow temporal frame. They mark an ongoing disappearance, a time of mourning, paradoxically revealed by these veils and recorded through photography.

Nathalie Dietschy is an art historian and Vice-Dean for Communication and Innovation at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Lausanne. She serves as Associate Professor in Art History Dep., Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of Lausanne. She studied art history, philosophy, and French literature at the University of Lausanne, where she completed her PhD in 2012 with a dissertation on representations of Christ in photography. Her research examines contemporary visual culture through a longue durée perspective and cultural-historical approach. Her work focuses on four main areas: the secular uses of Christian iconography; landscape photography and ecological questions, particularly in Alpine environments; the history of artists’ and photography books; and artistic practices of copying, replication, and reappropriation in relation to digital technologies and artificial intelligence. She has published widely in French, German, and English, including the monographs The Figure of Christ in Contemporary Photography (2020) and Glaciers alpins sous toiles. Une histoire photographique (2025), and has curated several major exhibitions on photography, visual culture, and technology.

Melting Heritage on The Continent of the Future
Kati Lindström

Antarctica is the only continent without any indigenous population. Yet it hosts many heritage sites – all in all, there are currently 96 Historic Sites and Monuments designated under the Antarctic Treaty. The precarity and non-spectacularity of the objects are in stark contrast with the political visions of the future they embody. The more a country wants to freeze the pre-Antarctic Treaty political order with its competing territorial claims, the more dedicated they are to freezing the heritage sites into orchestrated ruins. Microorganisms, dormant in the walls and fabrics, are patiently waiting for the warmer climate to start growing again; likewise, the territorial claims are frozen into the walls and fabrics, only to be awakened on the day the Antarctic Treaty has crumbled in the ever-warming, unstable world.

Kati Lindström is an associate professor of the history of science, technology, and the environment, with a specialisation in environmental humanities and the uses of history at the KTH Royal Institute of Technology (Sweden). Her work explores how geopolitics, cultural stereotypes, and personal identities influence decisions about the protection and deprotection of cultural and natural heritage in Antarctica, Japan, and Estonia. Lindström is the vice-President of the ICOMOS International Polar Heritage Committee, the Vice-Chair of the Polar Research Committee of the Estonian Academy of Sciences and serves as the Estonian Contact Point in the Antarctic Treaty System.

In Love with a Glacier. Stories of Companionship: Attachment, Personification, Loss, and Reinvention
Jean Chamel

This presentation explores the deep emotional and symbolic relationships that some people develop with glaciers in the context of climate change and glacial retreat. Drawing on ethnographic interviews with mountaineers, altitude workers, guides, crystal hunters and hut wardens in the Alps, it examines forms of attachment, grief, personification, and companionship between humans and glaciers. Far from being perceived as inert masses of ice, glaciers are often described as living beings that move, suffer, die and even communicate. The presentation argues that these relationships reveal forms of animistic perception within contemporary Western societies, especially through long-term familiarity with glacial environments and experiences of danger and vulnerability. It also reflects on how the rapid disappearance of glaciers transforms both landscapes and human emotions, identities, and ways of inhabiting mountain worlds.

Jean Chamel is an anthropologist, lecturing and researching at the Institute of Geography and Sustainability of the University of Lausanne. After conducting doctoral research on the emergence of collapsology and initial postdoctoral research on networks promoting the rights of nature, his ethnographic research since 2021 has focused on intimate experiences in the high Alpine mountains affected by climate change, particularly people's attachment to glaciers. Co-founder of the glaciers ardents participatory research collective (www.glaciersardents.com), he has recently published Fin du monde et effondrement de soi (UGA Editions, 2024) and “Mourning Glaciers” (Humans, 2023), and co-edited Relating with More-than-Humans (Palgrave Macmillan, 2022). Another article, “Living the End of Beauty”, is also about to be published by American Anthropologist in 2026.

Mattmark and the Politics of Natureculture Glaciers
Philip Ursprung

In 1965 an ice avalanche of the Allalin Glacier in the Valais killed 88 people, mostly migrant workers from Italy. The barracks of the workers that were building a dam were located in a dangerous zone despite warnings by experts. It was the biggest disaster in the history of construction in Switzerland. The canton of Valais excused itself for the disaster in 2025.
On the eve of the vote for a "Switzerland of 10 million" (14 June 2026) which intends to restore the inhumane treatment of migrant workers, the paper raises questions on how the (non)mitigation of natural forces relates to politics, economics, and memory.

Philip Ursprung is Professor of the History of Art and Architecture at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture (gta) at ETH Zurich. He studied art history, history, and German literature in Geneva, Vienna, and Berlin, earning his doctorate at the Free University Berlin and his habilitation at ETH Zurich. Before joining ETH Zurich as professor in 2011, Ursprung taught at the University of Zurich, the Berlin University of the Arts, Columbia University in New York, and other institutions in Switzerland and Germany. His research focuses on modern and contemporary art and architecture, with particular attention to landscape, ecology, infrastructure, and the politics of the built environment. Ursprung has served on the Swiss Federal Art Commission and is a board member of the Swiss Architecture Museum Basel. In 2023, Pro Helvetia nominated the project Neighbours, developed with Karin Sander, as the Swiss contribution to the Venice Architecture Biennale.

Scheuchzer’s Glacial Cataclysm: An Early Enlightenment Thought Experiment
Dennis Hansen

In the early 1700s, the Zurich polymath Johann Jakob Scheuchzer (1672–1733) was one of the first scholars to empirically study mountains and their glaciers. He was a pioneer in demythologizing the Swiss Alps and in giving serious thought to the importance of glaciers for realms far away from their lofty heights. In late 1707, pondering the wide-ranging consequences of a hypothetical warmer world, in which the glaciers of the Swiss Alps would melt, Scheuchzer formulated one of the earliest known climate change scenarios. Many Swiss, he argued, would prefer a warmer and more fertile climate in their country. Contrary to such expectations, Scheuchzer’s studies of glaciers and climate led him to believe that a warmer Switzerland would instead unleash disasters on a massive scale.

Dennis Hansen is a biologist and project leader for concept- and content development in the Natural History Museum of the University of Zurich, where he spends much of his time curating dinosaurs and thinking about how to get visitors excited about science and the natural world. Living in a city with a deep history of museums that go back some 400 years, he is passionate about incorporating objects, people, and stories from the past in the current museum.  To this end, he can often be found diving into the museum's collections, and into old manuscripts and illustrations in the dungeons of Zurich’s Central Library.
He also collaborates with artists on art-science projects at the museum to lure in people that may otherwise not normally find their way into natural history museums. Whenever there’s time left over, he migrates south to study ecological interactions on islands in the Western Indian Ocean, aiming to resurrect extinct ecologies with giant tortoises.

Glacial Archaeology: A Brief History
Thomas Reitmaier

Climate warming has caused the glaciers of the Alps to melt rapidly for decades. As a result, thousands-of-years-old objects and even human remains are emerging from the ice and permafrost. The best-known example is “Ötzi,” discovered in 1991 and estimated to be around 5,300 years old. Over the past 20 years, numerous spectacular discoveries have been made in the Alps and other regions of the world.
These archaeological sites are particularly valuable because fragile organic materials have been preserved there for long periods of time. They provide new insights into past ways of life as well as important environmental and climate data. At the same time, the window of opportunity for glacial archaeology is rapidly closing due to the accelerated melting of the ice. For this reason, efforts to safeguard this endangered cultural heritage in time have been intensified. In addition to international collaboration, informing and involving the public through citizen science plays a central role.

Thomas Reitmaier (*1977) studied archaeology at the University of Innsbruck (Austria). He received his doctorate in 2006 with a dissertation on “Pre-industrial cargo sailing ships in Switzerland.” From 2001 to 2006 he worked as an archaeological diver for the City of Zurich; from 2006 to 2012 he was a research associate in the Department of Prehistoric Archaeology at the University of Zurich. Since 2012 he has served as Cantonal Archaeologist of Graubünden. His archaeological research spans the Alps and Morocco, from the Stone Age to the present day.

Bark Objects from Swiss Ice Patches
Giovanna di Pietro & Johanna Klügl

Objects made of plant materials usually decay within decades due to microbial activity. However, in environments with low oxygen levels, such as waterlogged sites or ice, they can survive for thousands of years. Due to global warming, these objects are now coming to the surface. Over the past 15 years, we have been involved in significant conservation research projects focusing on bark objects, primarily birch and linden, that have been found in ice patches beside glaciers at the Schnidejoch and Lötschenberg passes in Switzerland. In this talk, we will present some of these objects, highlighting their importance to prehistoric cultures and the challenges involved in conserving them. 

Giovanna Di Pietro is a conservation scientist and professor at the Department of Conservation of the Academy of the Arts (HKB) in Bern. She holds a Master's degree in Physics, a PhD in Physical Chemistry and is currently enrolled on the Degrowth Master's programme at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. She has led a variety of research projects in conservation, lately specialising in the conservation and significance of prehistoric bark objects: www.arcaheobark.org.

Johanna Klügl is an object conservator at the Archaeological Service of the Canton of Bern and a postdoctoral researcher at the Bern University of the Arts. She holds degrees in conservation and research on the arts from Berlin and Bern, and completed her PhD in 2023 on the Neolithic birch-bark bow case from Schnidejoch. She is specialised in the conservation of perishable organic finds from alpine ice fields and researches the structure, degradation, and conservation of tree barks.

Artistic Responses to Glacial Transformation with the artists from the exhibition
Adam Sébire and Ester Vonplon

Adam Sébire studied documentary at the national film schools of Australia & Cuba; today he works primarily in video art, his works focussing almost exclusively on climate change. Researching his PhD in Svalbard in March 2020 he found himself marooned by Australia’s Covid-19 border closures; he's now become one of the Arctic Circle's 4 million human inhabitants. Works from his anthropoScenes series have won prizes and been exhibited widely in Europe and Australia; the twelfth in the series, his triple-screen Iceberg Care, was projected into the foyers of UNESCO in Paris to mark 2025, International Year of Glaciers’ Protection and the inaugural World Day for Glaciers.

Ester Vonplon lives and works in Castrisch, Surselva. She studied photography in Berlin and in 2013 finished her MA at the ZHdK in Zurich. Her work has been awarded several times, amongst others with the Manor Kunstpreis, 2017. Her work has been shown in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Buendner Kunstmuseum, Chur, Kunstmuseum Thun, Museum Allerheiligen, Schaffhausen, FOAM Amsterdam, FOMU Antwerpen, Dafen Artmuseum Shenzhen, and Les Rencontres d’Arles. Her artistic projects originate from her home in the Alps and are often inspired by the local landscape and nature.