Seminar: Glacial feelings

Saturday 23.08.25 13-17

“Glacial feelings” is a seminar that concludes James Webb’s exhibition “Slowly, slowly, and then all at once”.
In the seminar we want to take a closer look at the ongoing climate crisis, primarily through the lens of art and personal experience, but also with the cold, scientific facts known to us at the present time.
We ask how we can live with, and respond to, what is unfolding around us, while keeping hope alive.

Invited participants are:
Professor Jostein Bakke from the University of Bergen, artist Jana Winderen and South African art theorist Dr. Anthea Buys, in addition to artist James Webb and curator Sissel Lillebostad.

From Kabuso, you can see a sliver of Folgefonna, Norway’s southernmost glacier.
It is, like the other glaciers we know of, in the process of melting, and it is happening faster than we thought just a few years ago.

The exhibition has as its central element an installation that asks 151 questions directly to Folgefonna; the artist asks after what memories the glacier has, about its fears and the experience of transformation.
The questions are spoken in both Norwegian and English and broadcast into the room via three loudspeakers facing the glacier.
The glacier does not respond in any language that humans can understand, but in the silent pauses that follow each question, the audience can project their own thoughts and answers.

Program:

13:00: Welcome to Kabuso by Sissel Lillebostad
13:10: James Webb introducing the work A series of personal questions addressed to the Folgefonna glacier
13:40: Jostein Bakke: On Folgefonna, research and experiences

14:20: Break/Pause: coffee, tea, snack, exhibition.

14:50: Poem
15:00: Jana Winderen: ‘Listening with Folgefonna”, Jana returned to Folgefonna this year, after 18 years, for her project: ‘Meet the Locals: Underwater’ for Bergen Assembly.
She will be sharing memories, stories and sounds from her recent travel and from 2007, when she was hanging in a crevasse recording the meltwater of the glacier, guided by Åsmund Bakke at Folgefonna Glacier Team.
She was then working with the sound installation “+4C – form Folgefonna to the North Sea”, as part of the project Sleppet.
15:30: Short technical break

15:35: Anthea Buys: A series of personal questions (and some comments) addressed to the artist James Webb.  Description: Borrowing a structure from James Webb’s two works currently showing at Kabuso, my presentation uses the ancient rhetorical device of the question to reflect on speculative biographies, object-beings, acts of listening and other themes that are central to Webb’s artistic practice.
Departing from the Folgefonna Glacier and the Paleolithic stone axe visible from and at Kabuso, my considerations will meander through topics such as deep time, object-oriented-ontology and post-humanist thinking.

16:05: Short technical break

16:10: Conversation: Jostein Bakke, Jana Winderen and James Webb. Moderated by Sissel Lillebostad
16:50: How did it go? Short summing up by Sissel Lillebostad
17:00: We should be finished now.

Practical information:
The seminar is free of charge, but we kindly ask you to collect your free ticket