A melting of times together

If we consider not only the melting process but its outcome, the a pool of liquid, we might also think of Barthes’ third indexical operation ‘fattening’. A melted block of ice is a fattened version of itself. It has changed shape, but materially it is the same object. It is, perhaps, a material index of its former self.

When an ice core melts the chemical remnants of the atmosphere that it contains become mixed together. Previously separate solid layers - marker of successive periods of time passed - become mixed together. Inside the pool of water, all these points of time are, not just fattened, but also disorderedhomogenised. In this way Eliasson’s gigantic ice chunks, when they have fnally melted, are an index in which time-points are equivalised and thus one in which the idea of the linear succession of time is destroyed.