Archive on Ice

It’s an early February morning in North Bay. By 9 a.m. I am out on the frozen ice of Lake Nipissing alongside artists, community organizers, curators and volunteers. I am here to build a site-specific work for the tenth annual Ice Follies art festival where I was invited to create the Archive on Ice: a solar-powered digital micro-archive of the festival’s history. Sourcing data from the Ice Follies’ pre-existing digital archive with help from the Near North Mobile Media Lab, I coded a low-emission twin archive, a low-data ghost of the original. For a number of months I dithered documentation and text into a low-data format. I used this method so that the archive could operate off a Raspberry Pi microcomputer and be stored on a 34GB SD card that was web server-accessible and sunlight-powered. Throughout the process of transferring the digital traces of Ice Follies’ history onto my solar server, I became more aware of this interwoven dynamic between the Nipissing Region arts community and Lake Nipissing itself.

The lake was a constant presence within the archive, shaping the outcomes of each project as well as the curatorial and artistic direction of the festival across the years. The shape of Lake Nipissing has altered over time through volcanic eruption and incremental erosion. Its first name, its truest name, was ᓂᐲᓐᓯᓐ (nibiinsing) in Ojibwe language, which is still cared for by the Dokis 9 community and Nipissing First Nation. The lake has been a means of connecting to the natural world from time immemorial: it has provided routes for trade, and over time it has been altered by climate change and corporate control over ecosystems.¹ In 2004, the lake was altered, once again, by a scrappy group of artists who brought their work onto its frozen surface.

Founded in 2004 by my father, Dermot Wilson, Ice Follies brings together artists from the region and beyond to respond to the lake as a site, as a living organism, and as a space that is activated by the local community. In the festival’s twenty-year history, artists have investigated the ice fishing culture connected to Lake Nipissing; they have built multi-media exhibitions and sound art experiences; they have conceived of land art that speaks to the effects of climate change, and they have created live storytelling performances. Looking back at photos from past festivals, an individual versed in art-making might assume the frozen, snowy lake is a substitute for a white cube–an open expanse of stark white might be interpreted as a neutral stage for large-scale sculptural installations. However, for those who attend the festival, the lake is anything but neutral. To reduce this place to an environment-sub-gallery is to project an institutional framework onto a living, breathing place with its own history and agency. Defined by geographic specificity and the modest fragility of an artwork that sits on a temporarily frozen lake, to make an Ice Folly is to construct a “spectacle that shatters spectacle:” a work that incites wonder but is deeply oppositional to the post-modern large-scale installation spectacle.² Artists invited to exhibit at the festival become gracious guests on Lake Nipissing; the lake does not cater to them, and artists must contend with its specific and uncontrollable environmental conditions.

The interwoven dynamic between the lake and the arts community becomes a core theme, a throughline across my solar archive. Shifting through time, the lake is a governing force of the festival. In 2004, the festival catalogue addressed the larger population’s affinity for Lake Nipissing. As a significant presence in the lives of so many in North Bay and Nipissing First Nation, installing artworks on the frozen ice made the festival meaningful to a larger community.³ Between 2008 and 2010, many installations addressed the increasing need for climate activism, and in the years since, many Ice Follies artists have taken up this subject in their works. Over the span of two decades, Lake Nipissing acted as a symbol to channel the flux of contemporary life in the North. In 2010, Wilson stated explicitly that Ice Follies would be a “more activist festival, and the warmest yet.”⁴ As protest movements mobilized in opposition to pipeline construction across Turtle Island, and land development threatened the ecosystems of Nipissing First Nation, artists embraced water as a means of survival. In 2018, the Aanmitaagzi collective shared with audiences the mythic dimension of the body of water by performing the Aanishnaabe story of the Black Sturgeon from the Nipissing First Nation, a serpent tale legend of Lake Nipissing.⁵

When I arrived in the Nipissing Region for the 2023 iteration of the festival, I was invited by Aanmitaagzi to Nipissing First Nation to participate in an orientation for all participating artists, where co-founders Penny Couchie and Sid Bobb emphasized the ongoing relations between the lake and local Indigenous communities but also shared the updated safety protocols on the lake. They stressed adamantly that, this year, the ice was significantly thinner than in years past. Penny Couchie shared a pointed story about ways of navigating the ice, to proceed with caution but not fear–that a changing climate does not mean that we should remove ourselves. They stressed how to listen for ice cracks. The artists in this room maintained a special relationship to the lake, indebted in part to the Ice Follies festival itself. They became experts in listening to the lake while also relying on it for creative intervention and community collaboration.

Herein lies the magic of the festival. During the installation week, artists, curators, and volunteers worked together digging into the snow, exchanging ideas and skill sharing in order to realize art installations that operated in tandem with the conditions of our surroundings. In the morning I would pull on a lavender one-piece snowsuit, a vest, hat, mitts and rubber boots. It was like being on another planet. My snowsuit was a spacesuit, and when I was on the water, facing away from shore, it felt as if I was walking across the frozen tundra of a different planetary dimension.

It is day two of installation week. I’m on the roof of an ice shack installing the solar panels that will power the Archive on Ice. During the 2008 Ice Follies, Dermot Wilson acquired this particular shack structure from a local fisher. It was then molded by artists David Yates, Marcy Adzich, and Donavan Barrow for the artwork To Catch a Fish Takes Luck. Following the shack’s first outing as an official folly, it has been reworked and utilized by many over various festivals. The structure holds a magical ability to shape itself around the needs of the arts community. It might be a shell over quilted fabric (Aiden Urquart’s Sunshine Thoughts, 2010), a micro gallery for student artworks (STAG Gallery, 2014-2016) or a hangout for volunteers during a particularly cold installation day.

For Ice Follies’ 2023 iteration, my father and I shared the structure to host our two installations. Throughout the project, my role as digital archivist has been shaped by my childhood memories. While I dither over a photograph of Ernest Deatwyler’s Ice Bubbles (2004), I think about lying inside one of them when I was 12, recalling that each bubble had a different smell. Does this make the Archive on Ice a tainted record? On a coded web server, can the memories of the archivist be imprinted on passive records? The archival history of the festival collapses into my familial memories of days spent on the ice. My dad and I talk as we work in the ice shack, a vessel that is both a past and future folly. As I drill into a wood beam, I understand my own participation in the history of the festival. Like many before me, I imprint a certain wish onto the ice shack, adding to the complexity of this animated relic.

I take a coffee break and talk with my father and the former Near North Mobile Media Lab co-director Alexander Rondeau. Rondeau asks my dad: “Has there ever been this much rain during an installation week?” For a number of days, artists and staff have contended with slushy ice from persistent rain and fog. Wilson replies, “No, I don’t think so.” From my own memories as a volunteer, past installation weeks entailed sharp winds, bitter cold, frostbite scares, and numb limbs. This year it is shockingly temperate. Weather is never predictable in Northern Ontario, but this year’s installation strikes me as eerily ominous. As we huddle in a circle, we talk around the futurity of our festival within the stark realities of climate change.

On the opening night of the Ice Follies, the Archive on Ice premieres as a website that can be visited by viewers through a small monitor in the ice shack. The opening includes other works by incredible artists from across the region and Turtle Island including the Public Visualization Studio, Cease Wyss, Dermot Wilson, Quinn Hopkins, Liz Lott, Andrew Ackerman & Chris Koslowski (along with Fine Arts students from Nipissing University), Isabelle Misaud, Caroline Kajourine Krievin, and Elizabeth Hill, as well as a sound art exhibition curated by Nadine Arpin and Sonya Ballantyne. This year also marks the largest iteration of the festival in Ice Follies’ history.

I’m walking through the snow in the dark, through a crowd of opening night attendees. I talk excitedly with former collaborators and mentors; there are so many families, and little ones crawling through sculptures. I’m walking towards the horizon to see Aanmitaagzi’s live dance, All My R(el)ations. My father, the festival’s founder, wears a handmade mask and dances with Sid Bob, Penny, and the many other members of the Aanmitaagzi art collective. I’m crouched down beside the other spectators, and find myself crying. Crying for what once was, what is, what will be.

The Ice Follies festival is a mere fragment of a longer, ancient history of the nibiinsing. After leaving the city, the solar archive I built will transform into a record of that fragmented blip. It will also take on a new presence in the Ice Follies’ history–another installation work that responded to the water. This small record of a community-run festival is permeated by the effects of climate change, the local activism towards environmental conservation, and the devastating results of corporate impacts on vital ecosystems. These factors alter the communities’ relationships to the lake and, in kind, trickle down to reflect back on Nipissing Regions’ arts community.

I built a solarpunk digital archive in a tenuous environment, taking the digital history away from the safety of the data centre and the hard drive. I was indebted to the water for its site, and the sun for its operation. As I coded the web server in the ice shack, water dripped down beside me. I was a humble collaborator, appreciative of the sun and the climate as it allowed me to do my work. Over the course of the festival I learned to listen to the ice while navigating an altering climate and reckoning with the convergence of objective archival recordings and my nostalgia for Ice Follies’ past. Most importantly, I worked alongside community members, artists, and volunteers to make works that were revelatory, resistant, spectacular, and invested in the site as means of survivance.

---

Imogen Clendinning (she/her/they/them) is a settler video artist who currently resides as an uninvited guest in the traditional territory of the Anishinaabeg, Haudenosaunee, Attawandaron, and Wendat peoples, known in a colonial context as London, Ontario. Clendinning holds an MFA from the University of Windsor, an MA in Art History and Curatorial Study at Western University, and they are currently pursuing a PhD in Art and Visual Culture at Western University, with a focus on DIY digital archives and environmentally sustainable networks.

1. In 2022 Consolidated Homes Limited was forced to pay $200k to the Natural Conservancy of Canada after the company damaged the ecosystem of the Balding’s turtle in North Bay, near Circle Lake (CBC News Sudbury, Dec. 2, 2022). By next year, Industrial Plastics Canada will build a plastics plant in the Nipissing Region. The municipal government and the IPC have stated that they will not manufacture raw plastics on site, and its operations will not have effects on local watercourses (Statement: Industrial Plastics Canada, North Bay city website, July 11, 2023). However, locals have expressed concern that IPC’s on-site manufacturing of polytetrafluoroethylene (PFAs) could lead to contamination of Lake Nipissing (Jonathan Migneault, CBC News Sudbury, July 19, 2023).
2. Dermot Wilson, Ice Follies catalogue, 2006.
3. Ice Follies catalogue, 2004.
4. Ice Follies catalogue, 2004.
5. Ice Follies archive, 2018

This article is published in issue 40.3 of BlackFlash magazine. Get this issue