poem for a vanished glacier (2025)

two-channel-video-installation 8’38”

Poem for a Vanished Glacier is a contemplation on landscapes and the manifold stories they bear.

The pond Blanke Helle at Alboinplatz in Berlin is much older than the city it inhabits: as a kettle hole, it is a remnant of the glaciers that once covered and shaped Berlin’s surroundings. Today, it has become the center of a park where locals rest and take their walks.

On its southern shore, a huge bull sculpture has stood for almost 100 years. Made from local sandstone — recycled from destroyed buildings — it holds its own connection to the site’s glacial past: it was this very sandstone that once provided scientific proof of the glacier’s movement across Europe.

In the late 19th century, the Swedish geologist Otto Torell traveled to the sandstone quarry near Berlin and found scratches that looked familiar to him — marks that only a glacier’s ice could leave in such soft material. Starting from that moment, the influence of glaciers on today’s Central European landscapes became widely acknowledged.

The poem gives space to the encounter of these witnesses: water, stone, plants, birds. How can we connect with and value beings that have vanished long before us? Those who maintain their presence in the natural and cultural landscapes they once shaped— in the ways we remember them.

Poem for a Vanished Glacier is a visual song for the glacial masses that once covered Berlin and those who inhabit its landscapes today. But at the same time, for the glacier’s remaining parts, which are still melting today and may soon, too, be vanished.

More than 10,000 years ago, the glacier that once covered what is now Berlin’s landscape withdrew.

This vast, moving mass of ice, rubble, and meltwater left behind erratic boulders, sculpted hills and valleys, lakes, kettle holes — the Blanke Helle.

At its water side, a bull emerged from the ice.

Now it, too, is melting.

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Thanks to: Miguel Buenrostro, Alexandra Gerbaulet and Kai Ziegner.

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The work was shown at the exhibition Unfolding at Kunstraum Potsdamer Straße, Berlin, 02.05.–09.05.2025, curated by innocent collective.