PHOTOREPORTAGE

Located at 3,212 meters above sea level on South Tyrol’s Giogo Alto glacier, “Our Glacial Perspectives” is the latest permanent public artwork by Danish-icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson. The artwork begins with a 410-meter-long path along the mountain’s glacial-carved ridge. The path is divided by nine gates, which are spaced apart by intervals corresponding to the duration of Earth’s ice ages, thus marking a deep timeline of our planet, of ice and of the environment.

At the end of the path is a pavilion made from multiple steel and glass rings that contain a circular deck. Standing on the deck, viewers can use the pavilion as an astronomical instrument by aligning their gazes with the surrounding rings, which track the apparent path of the sun in the sky on any given day. The rings divide the year into equal time intervals: the top ring tracks the path of the sun on the summer solstice, the middle ring tracks the equinox and the bottom ring tracks the winter solstice. Moreover, each ring is split into rectangular glass panes that cover 15 arc minutes of the sun’s movement across the sky, thus the viewer is able to determine the time of day based on the position of the sun.

The glass panes of the sun-path are tinted in various shades of blue, as referred to the cyanometer, a scale developed in the 19th century to measure the color intensity of blue sky. The colored glass both filters and reflects the light and solar radiation, thus behaving as a miniature atmosphere. On the outside of the pavilion, two parallel steel rings frame the horizon line, and the half-rings that support the structure indicate the north–south and east–west axes.

The artwork begins with a 410-meter path along the mountain’s glacial-carved ridge. By marking the horizon, the cardinal directions and the movement of the sun, the artwork directs the visitor’s attention to a larger planetary perspective on the changes in climate that are directly affecting the Giogo Alto glacier. In Eliasson’s very words: “The artwork acts as a magnifier for the very particular experience of time and space that this location affords – vast and boundless on the one hand, local and specific on the other. It is an optical device that invites us to engage, from our embodied position, with planetary and glacial perspectives.”