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Two year British Academy funded project on Cryoconservation and Frozen Biobanking concludes
Animals on Ice: Extinction in an Age of Cryoconservation (PI: Dr. Sarah Bezan) is a 2 year interdisciplinary project that explores how meanings of extinction are shifting in light of recent technological developments in cryoconservation. Through art-science exploration, the collaborators Sarah Bezan, Adam Searle (University of Nottingham), Robert McKay (University of Sheffield), Peter Sands (University of York), and Lucy Mercer (University of Exeter) worked together to examine cultural and textual representations of thawing/freezing in relation to biodiversity loss.
This project explores how thermal imaginaries of ice and heat are redefining extinction in an age of cryoconservation. As polar ice caps melt and wildfires rage, the biodiversity crisis continues to intensify to unprecedented levels (IPBES Report 2023). To combat these losses, scientists are turning to cryoconservation, a practice in which biological materials of extinct and endangered species are cryogenically frozen for the purposes of research and even future resurrection. Animals on Ice unites scholars from across the humanities and social sciences to reflect on how thermal imaginaries of ice and heat capture the gravity of species loss as well as the potential of future regeneration. To investigate these questions, the Animals on Ice project team met together for two meetings. In the first, the team met to participate in creative workshops to play with the cultural imaginaries of ice and heat through candle-making using ice moulds and screening a variety of films/artworks of ice miniatures. This allowed the team to explore ideas of miniaturisation in relation to nature and considered how thermal imaginaries intersect with metrics of scale in relation to planetary biodiversity loss caused by phenomena like wildifires and global warming. In the second meeting, the team assembled with scientists at The Frozen Ark at The University of Nottingham to create fridge magnet poetry. The project team ended up making a fridge magnet poem ("Is the fridge a host to love and loss?") that now remains on the freezer door of The Frozen Ark, and the team is now co-authoring a paper on fridge magnet poetry as a creative-critical method for understanding the thermocultural dynamics of extinction.
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For further details please contact Dr. Sarah Bezan SBezan@ucc.ie