Olafur Eliasson, the Icelandic-Danish artist known for ambitious installations with ecological messages, highlighted the climate crisis earlier this week by bringing a block of ice to Rome, where it was blessed by Pope Leo XIV.
The 20,000-year-old melting piece of Greenlandic glacial ice travelled more than 5,000 kilometres from the fjords of Nuuk, Greenland to the Raising Hope for Climate Justice conference, where it was touched by the pontiff during his inaugural address (1 October).
“Eliasson arranged for the ice to be brought to Rome for this poignant occasion with the support of geologist Minik Rosing,” says a statement from Eliasson’s studio. “Collected from Nuup Kangerluafjord, the ice block had broken away from the Greenland ice sheet, and was melting into the ocean.”
NASA’s Earth Information Center estimates that Greenland’s ice sheet is losing approximately 270 billion tonnes annually as a result of climate change. The Rome conference pre-empts the 2025 United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP 30), which takes place in Brazil next month.
In 2014, Eliasson and geologist Minik Rosing launched the climate change-themed project Ice Watch, whereby ice blocks were placed in public areas in Copenhagen, Paris and London, and were left to slowly melt. This, Eliasson said, was to “make scientific data explicit, so we can feel it”.
Meanwhile Eliasson unveiled his first permanent public art work in the UK in Oxford earlier this week. The work, Your Planetary Assembly, sits within the new, two-acre Fallaize Park, located in a new science, technology and innovation district known as Oxford North.
The piece comprises eight illuminated glass polyhedrons which represent the planets in the Solar System. Eliasson says that “sitting within this local space, you simultaneously inhabit a larger continuum, a meeting point of trajectories that reflects both community and the vastness of the cosmos”. The Eliasson commission was managed by the consultancy arm of the charity Contemporary Art Society (CAS* Consultancy).
Your Planetary Assembly, Olafur Eliasson
© Aurelien Langlais