As part of an almost year-long residency in art and science at Geneva's Natural History Museum, Bernard Garo not only designed a number of installations, but also engaged in previously unseen filmed poetic performances. His inspiration and favourite artistic exploratory terrain are the most fascinating Alpine glaciers. Some of his expeditions have been real sporting feats and an adventure for a non-mountain professional. For one of them, it was even an artistic world first. Diving to the bottom of a glacial mill more than 50 metres below the surface to discover a network of deep galleries carved out by meltwater was an innovative and exceptional act of immersion in several respects. Not only did it provide a unique visual record of a little-known aspect of glaciers, in the form of a film entitled 1000 ans sous la glace (1000 years under the ice), but it also offered a powerful experience at the heart of 2000-year-old ice. By creating strikingly beautiful images, the artist invites us to marvel at and question the memory of the Anthropocene, the passage of time and glacial movements.

The artist's concept was to create an exploratory and meaningful performative act, consisting of bringing back a serpentinite stone from the Alps, once swept away by the Quaternary glaciations, but found on the shores of Lake Geneva, 200 km from its place of origin, in the bowels of the glacier, at the foot of its mother mountain.

This mineral, engraved and signed by the artist, was deposited forever beneath the glacier, abandoned to the flow of meltwater and the movements of the glacier, accompanied by pure cotton paper on which the artist had traced a graphite (pure carbon) imprint representing the state of our planet and its pollution. With its natural fragility in the face of the forces of nature, this paper represents human vulnerability in a very short space of time, but also the metaphor of our impact on the environment. It will quickly break up and disappear, taking the stone with it, on a new journey that will probably end long before the previous one, because of the disappearance of the glaciers as a result of accelerated global warming.


On 19 November 2022, at 10.30 am, Bernard Garo descended to the bottom of an abyss,
50 metres under the ice, in the main mill of a glacier in the Swiss Alps,
to place a paper stele on his last great journey,
accompanied by a stone found on the shores of Lake Geneva.
This mineral, identified as serpentinite rock,
was carried over more than 200 km in a long time, 25,000 years ago,
by the glacier that covered the Rhône valley, the plateau and the entire Lake Geneva basin.
Engraved and signed by the artist, it has been brought back to one end of our earth,
to its place of origin, in the memory of time,
in the heart of an ice sheet over 1,000 years old.