In Stubaier Gletscher 09, Marike Schuurman confronts us with a landscape that is at once present and absent. The reclaimed Polaroid negative, with its discolorations and chemical scars, renders the image porous: a glacier that already seems to exist in memory.
We see a wide, worn expanse of ice, framed by dark rock walls. Ski lifts hang motionless above the terrain; small patches of reflective material lie scattered like improvised bandages. Here, humans attempt to slow the melting process — and in doing so, they reveal the absurdity of the gesture. The protective sheeting appears too small, too late, and haphazardly placed in a landscape that was once monumental and autonomous.
Schuurman does not use photography to capture what is, but to seize the moment when something begins to disappear. The damaged negative and the retreating ice mirror one another: material erosion and ecological erosion converge. The glacier thus shifts from document to metaphor — a reminder of a mountain world we have ourselves caused to tilt.
Alptraum becomes not an indictment, but a subtle observation: humanity attempting to shield nature from the consequences of its own desire for control. A landscape caught between exploitation and preservation, between reality and image.
Additional information
Marike Schuurman: "In my work I employ the medium of photography to investigate the ambiguity of manmade spaces and landscapes.
One of the greatest concerns of our age is climate change. Glaciers worldwide are losing an average of 75 centimetres of their ice-thickness per year. Due to human-driven global warming, the glacier ice is melting faster and faster. To slow down the acceleration of this irreversible melting process, during the summer glaciers in the Alps are being covered with reflective material.
For the realisation of the series “Alptraum” I applied the technique of ‘reclaiming negatives’. In this specific way of working, I take photos with a Polaroid camera and “rescue” the negative from disappearing, which means I transform the subject from a photographic context into a content-related dimension of my work.”