Chroniques d'un Dégel

Here, in the mountains around Grenoble, glaciers are receding, rocks are collapsing, and the landscape is changing. Near the summits, a glaciologist measures the melting with careful gestures. Under his feet, crevasses are echoing the murmur of global warming, one drop after the other. Rushing downhill, water sometimes takes sections of cliffs with it, but it also feeds dams, snow cannons, pressure pipes, pumping stations, drillings.

Lower down the mountain, a spelunker's headlamp lits up the routes water has bored through millenial rock. Within the veins of the Earth, time is suspended and takes us somewhere between the begining and the end of the world. Thousands of flow tracks connect in the valley, going through countless infrastructures, motivating the gestures of technicians, awakening managerial attention or predatory interests. Machines are running, technicians are measuring, water is irrigating the plain, electrifying the city. The flow never stops.

And yet: glaciers are receding and soon water will be lacking.

Down below, in the plain, a collective is rallying to protest water hoarding and pollution by tech industries. They prepare for struggle, and aim to give its voice back to the river, to reconnect the fate of the people of the city to the water of the glaciers.

Chroniques d’un dégel (Chronicles of a melting) is a documentary movie currently in production, co-directed with Naïs Van Laer and produced by Mujō.

For a few years now, in the area around Grenoble, we have been directing our attention towards an environment that is very much shaped by water, and towards the people who take concern about it. A glaciologist measure the melting of ice, a spelunker follows the routes of water, activists watch over the sharing of the resource, technicians estimate pressures, open gates, analyse, count, scrape, drill, extract, look.

Through their gestures, walks, sights or listenings, water appears as the environmental, cultural, economical, and political matter that it is, while a voice-over pulls the historical thread of the making of a territory, and its uncertain climatic future.