Strike a match and put it out

[En anglais]

I was standing in front of a small screen showing a video of a glacier slowly shucking off frozen fragments and I was doing jumping jacks. They didn’t seem to be working; the glacier continued to fracture. I tried slow-motion interpretive dance. I talked loudly to the glacier and hoped to maintain whatever remaining dignity I had.

I really did believe I could save this glacier, along with the glaciers that appeared subsequently in Matt Nish-Lapidus’s A Limited Hangout (2025), from its inevitable demise. That I could succeed in this task was, at least, the implication of the sensor mounted conspicuously next to the screen. What’s more, it seemed to be the whole point of the show Strike a match and put it out, which required viewers to become participants in the works, activating them through a myriad of hands-on and hands-off approaches. It was the terms of the activation with Nish-Lapidus’s piece that I couldn’t quite work out, and perhaps also I simply don’t know how to save a glacier.