PAUL WALDE: "Requiem for a Glacier," Langham Cultural Centre, Kaslo, B.C., Oct. 12 to Nov. 24, 2013

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"Requiem for a Glacier"

Paul Walde, "Requiem for a Glacier," 2013, 2-channel HD panoramic video projection with stereo sound, 40 min. loop.

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"Requiem for a Glacier"

Paul Walde, "Requiem for a Glacier," 2013, 2-channel HD panoramic video projection with stereo sound, 40 min. loop.

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"Requiem for a Glacier"

Paul Walde, "Requiem for a Glacier," 2013, 2-channel HD panoramic video projection with stereo sound, 40 min. loop.

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"Requiem for a Glacier"

Paul Walde, "Requiem for a Glacier," 2013, 2-channel HD panoramic video projection with stereo sound, 40 min. loop.

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"Requiem for a Glacier"

Paul Walde, "Requiem for a Glacier," 2013, 2-channel HD panoramic video projection with stereo sound, 40 min. loop.

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PAUL WALDE

Requiem for a Glacier

Langham Cultural Centre, Kaslo, B.C.

Oct. 12 to Nov. 24, 2013

By T.E. Hardy

“We shared in something really profound,” says Kaslo curator Kiara Lynch, reflecting on the feat and subsequent success of assembling a 70-member choir and orchestra to perform last July on the slope of Farnham Glacier in the Purcell Mountains of the British Columbia Interior. The thought of a majestic glacier listening ominously to its own requiem is an awful irony. Rising temperatures and Jumbo Glacier Resort – a proposed all-season ski development that’s caused controversy in the region for two decades – threaten its future.

The video installation in the gallery – which includes footage of the orchestra as well as views of the landscape and individual performances, such as a horn player who stands alone before the glacier – portrays the theatricality of taking such a message to the mountain. “It was like a dream,” says Iwona Smuga-Otto, a singer with the ensemble, made up of volunteers from communities in the area. But it’s a dream that is becoming part of a new reality as artists around the world join people from other disciplines to raise awareness about climate change (witness, for example, Carbon 14: Climate is Culture, currently at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto).

The project was undertaken by Paul Walde, a sound and visual artist who teaches at the University of Victoria. He composed a four-movement oratorio that activates a story both local and global, and accomplishes much by connecting local resources and passions to new trans-global modes of artistic thinking. In this way, it provides a model, simple yet complex, propelled by a meeting of many intelligences. “We really did create a family,” Lynch recounts, “and the essence of the work came to fruition … the glacier received the piece!”

For Walde, the project brings together social and critical practice. “Jumbo resonates in so many ways as an issue … and to work across so many meanings is challenging.” Requiem for a Glacier is at once an expression of grief, a plea for responsibility, a demonstration of human alienation, and a grand metaphor for the extensive possibilities of art. It makes a stand on the mountain, absurd and beautiful, transcending its agitprop character to exult as it laments. “This is an artwork,” Walde says. “I’m not telling people what to think.”

Walde used different conceptual strategies to develop the score. For instance, records of average temperatures provided by Environment Canada inspired the music’s graphic arc in the third movement. And the libretto that Victoria-based soloist Veronika Hajdu sings is a Latin translation of a 2012 provincial government media release announcing approval of the development, 55 kilometres west of Invermere, B.C.

The work has been realized in different ways. Along with the performance on the glacier, led by Ajtony Csaba, conductor of the University of Victoria Symphony, and the video installation, it will eventually be available as a multimedia concert and an audio recording. The exhibition will be shown at the Oxygen Arts Centre, an artist-run space in nearby Nelson, in January. Organizers then hope to tour it across Canada.