Once we sang of Ice and Fire

Climate extremes and the art of close listening

Ice is melting. Forests are burning. These are things a majority of us know. Yet knowing is not the same as feeling. Climate change resists that second kind of understanding, the kind that sits in the body rather than thought.

This is where art can begin. Ultima presents a day of concerts, film, readings and conversations at Oslo's main public library, exploring our relationship with climatic extremes.

A cello tracing the retreat of thirty glaciers over twenty-four years. Musicians recording sounds from inside the ice. A film uncovering the nineteenth-century trade in natural ice. A novelist imagining teenagers blowing up hard drives in a burning forest. Artists and scientists sitting together, listening across disciplines.

Still from *Moving Ice* (2024) directed by Susan Schuppli

Still from *Hearing the Aurorae*, directed by Sébastien Robert

Programme

Alvin Lucier: Glacier (2009)

Med Wei Ting Tseng, cello solo

Deichman foyer, 12.45–13.15 | Kringsjå, 14.45–15.00

A musical opening with Alvin Lucier’s quiet, slowly descending work for solo cello. The piece translates data from melting glaciers into sound, tracing change so gradual that it is almost impossible to perceive.

Glacier Lamentation: Lyden av Svalbard

Performance with Torben Snekkestad, Morten Qvenild, Anja Lauvdal

Musikkavdelingen, 13.00–14.00

The trio perform with sounds recorded in Arctic ice landscapes. Field recordings, live music and improvisation become a way of listening closely to glaciers in transformation.

Glacier Lamentation is also an artistic research project at the Norwegian Academy of Music, where musicians, artists and scientists explore how the changing Arctic can be heard. Through the collection of field recordings from Svalbard, scientific collaboration and live improvisation, the project treats the glacier as a sounding body, an archive, an instrument and a witness to climate change.

All But Silent

Film by Sébastien Robert

Kinotek, 13.30–14.00 | 18.00–18.30

In Svalbard, an artist and researcher and a radio astronomer investigate stories of people who claim to have heard the northern lights. The film listens to ice, radio waves, magnetic skies and forms of knowledge that do not always fit within Western science. The film is commissioned by Ultima and Sonic Acts.

NB. Limited capacity. Book your free ticket in advance: 13.30–14.00 or 18.00–18.30. Includes the Susan Schüppli's film Moving Ice.

Moving Ice

Film by Susan Schüppli

Kinotek, 14.00–15.00 | 18.30–19.30

Ice has always moved. But in the nineteenth century it also became a commodity, harvested in Norway and North America and shipped along colonial trade routes to India and beyond. Schüppli’s essayistic film connects that history to the climate crisis we are living now.

NB. Limited capacity. Book your free ticket in advance: 13.30–14.00 or 18.00–18.30. Includes the film All But Silent by Sébastien Robert.

On Saturdays, the Girls Go Into the Forest and Blow Things Up

Reading and Q/A with Fiona Sironic

Kringsjå, 14.00–14.45

Fiona Sironic presents her debut novel On Saturdays, the Girls Go into the Forest and Blow Things Up (original title in German “Am Samstag gehen die Mädchen in den Wald und jagen Sachen in die Luft”, Ecco Verlag, 2025). Her work explores the climate crisis alongside questions of memory, identity, and connection in a rapidly changing world.

Set in a landscape shaped by environmental destruction, the novel follows fifteen-year-old Era, who lives on the edge of a forest threatened by fire and documents the disappearance of bird species. As ecosystems collapse, her observations become an attempt to preserve what is vanishing. In contrast, her classmate Maja responds with acts of destruction, highlighting different ways of coping with a world in crisis. Through their relationship, Sironic reflects on how climate change reshapes everyday life, emotions, and future imaginaries.

Fiona Sironic will read from her novel and join a Q&A with the audience. In English.

Climate Talk: Artistic Reactions to Climate Extremes

With Kai Schwind, Torben Snekkestad, Fiona Sironic, Sébastien Robert, Joana Sá and Michael Schulz

Musikkavdelingen, 15.00–16.15

It is not only the Arctic that is extremely sensitive to global warming. The dramatic loss of sea ice, rising sea levels and thawing permafrost are further exacerbating global climate change. For some time now, artistic voices have been seeking to highlight and critique these developments, drawing the attention of science, politics and society – and thus all of us – to human-induced climate change.

This Climate Talk brings together artists from music, film and literature whose work will be shown at Deichman throughout the day, alongside climate researcher Michael Schulz. The conversation asks whether art and culture can help stop climate change, or at least limit it, and whether words, images and music can make us more aware of the responsibility we share. The panel is moderated by the media scholar, podcaster and author Kai Schwind. In English.

Climate Talks is a dialogue series organized by the German Embassy in Oslo. On this platform, we discuss current climate and energy policy issues with representatives from civil society, politics and business, and here, art. The Climate Talk "Artistic Reactions to Climate Extremes" is a collaboration between Ultima, the German Embassy in Oslo and the Goethe-Institut Norway.

The Song of the Glacier

Film by Chloé Reymond

Musikkavdelingen, 16.15–16.45

Excerpts from the upcoming documentary following Glacier Lamentation in Svalbard.

body : territory. Variations on Restlessness

Performance by Joana Sá

Deichmansalen, 17.00–17.50

Rooted in the eruptive geology of the Azores and the 2025 wildfires that devastated Sá’s own village in Frádigas, Serra da Estrela, Portugal, this performance listens to the planet as a restless body. Semi-prepared piano, bass drum, field recordings and sound exciters become an encounter with fire, extraction and the forces that resist them.