Slowest Wave

2025
50(h)×60x40 cm
Ice/water, Arthrospira platensis (blue spirulina), steel

LVMH Maison/0 This Earth Award Winner


This work emerges from my interest in extractivism and the material politics of natural resources. Motivated by research into polar ice drilling, it reflects on how fresh glacier water and natural cold are becoming some of the most precious resources of the near future and a ground zero for climate change.

Inspired by my visit to the British Antarctic Survey in Cambridge, the piece draws on real scientific and environmental processes. It explores themes of memory, fluidity, and fragility, highlighting the slow yet irreversible release of frozen archives of Earth’s climate data and the loss of fragments of glacier time: trapped air, fresh water, and microorganisms dating back up to 800,000 years.

The melting of ancient ice is a process that contributes to rising ocean levels, alters marine ecosystems by increasing water salinity in some areas and diluting it in others, and releases trapped greenhouse gases and ancient carbon dioxide. These processes accelerate global warming and disrupt the delicate balance of Earth’s climate.