The ice archive

Valeria Arrigo's project

Academic year

2025 - 2026

The ice archive / An archive gathers documents produced, received, and kept to preserve a living memory: an ordered thread that binds history. Inside the EuroCold Lab ice archive, beneath the University of Bicocca in Milan, technology meets extreme conditions to study time itself. Cold rooms store ice from Antarctica, Greenland, and the Alps, allowing researchers to reconstruct climate history and better understand what lies ahead. The researchers animate the laboratory: each day they endure freezing temperatures to make sense of the past and to shape the future, in a world that seems to be changing faster than we can follow. 

 

The Searchlights is the second chapter of Ti vorrei dire, a three-year project developed in collaboration with Gallerie d'Italia - Torino, a part of Intesa Sanpaolo. The projects map out the urgencies of our time through the perspective of a new generation. Ecological and climate crises, dynamics of power and representation, identity, mental health, precarity, memory and narratives of the present run through the works, shaping a collective account that restores complexity to what is too often reduced to a label.

Curated by:
Carlotta Cattaneo, Daria Scolamacchia, Giulia Ticozzi
With teaching support from:
Luis Aniceto, Francesca Cirilli, Fabio Barile, Diego Fontana, Alessandra Foschi, Simona Taddeucci, Jacopo Loiodice, Céline Volonterio