Barricading the Ice Sheets investigates climate breakdown, the climate justice movements and the relation of the latter to the arts. Oliver Ressler’s film projects, installations, photographs, and drawings illuminate the mechanisms and potential of worldwide protests. The interdisciplinary research project Barricading the Ice Sheets (2019–2023) chronicles the mobilizations of climate activists through their activities, gatherings, and working sessions and presents different approaches and methods for an artistic-activist practice.

The publication presents these in detail by means of numerous text contributions as well as comprehensive photo documentations and emphasizes the complexity of the climate crisis in its proliferating manifestations.

“30 years of failed climate negotiations under the framework of the United Nations have not reduced global carbon emissions at all. Consequently, global temperature is still rising. This inaction on the part of nation states has led people to take action themselves, without representation. Horizontally organized climate movements have emerged all over the world. Polite protest is a thing of the distant past: the movements have blocked fossil fuel extraction sites and transport routes, mobilized against airport expansion, run successful divestment campaigns, and halted Arctic drilling. These actions intend to economically undermine the fossil-fuel industry.

Many people still see personal behavior change as a solution to the climate disruption. Admirable as it may be to take a train instead of a plane, eat vegetables instead of meat, or put solar panels on a residential roof, private gestures of good faith are not equipped to stop epochal climate vandalism on a planetary scale. Planetary life is more than consumer behavior. Our powers and responsibility as inhabitants of the Earth are collective and social, not private and personal. Powerful structures, not personal decisions, force us into lives that destroy livelihoods, devalue life and ultimately endanger survival. We who suffer from those structures are collectively implicated in them, which is why they must be changed by our collective action.
The title Barricading the Ice Sheets refers to the scale of the emergency the climate justice movements face and the scope of what they set out to do. To barricade ice sheets as they melt is physically impossible, but the movements are attempting something historically unprecedented, because the planet has never in recorded human history confronted so absolute a threat. When Arctic ice melts, sea levels rise everywhere; islands and cities sink, global exploitation of agriculture and fisheries lurch off schedule.”
- Oliver Ressler

Edited by Corina Apostol, Marius Babias, Reinhard Braun, Pablo DeSoto, Gabriela Salgado, and Leila Topić. With texts by Oliver Ressler, Andreas Malm, T. J. Demos, Ameli M. Klein, Kodwo Eshun, Doreen Mende, Toni Negri, Marco Baravalle, Pujita Guha, Anja Steidinger, and Nora Sternfeld.

Published on the occasion of the exhibitions at Camera Austria and other venues