Project IJS/ICE

if there’s a beginning it will end
but
if
and
if there’s an end something has to have begun

you have to take a leap or you will be frozen
like a snowflake
fragile but still…

no two flakes are alike
not one is the same

miracles of beauty
masterpieces
of time and time again
again unique

such a shame
when melted, forever lost, never to be repeated
transitionary forms

when evaporate
when melt
alike alike alike
all alike

their uniqueness has no meaning
the melting has the meaning
the change

Carina Ellemers

Time was short.
While searching for an ice factory that would allow me to film the ice and the men tending it, I repeatedly caught a glimpse of the production of these large blocks of ice. Metal containers are filled with water and slowly lowered into a basin of salt water so cold it steams. The basin is covered with thick wooden floorboards to prevent the loss of the cold. The temperature of the salt water is so low it freezes the water in the containers. When the water has been transformed into ice, the containers are hoisted out of the basin, loaded onto trucks and distributed.

In the end, a friendly Chinese director of a small ice factory in the city of Klaten, near Yogyakarta on the island of Java, gave me free rein to film anything I wanted. He was pleased to be able to speak Dutch again. I made encouraging test shots with a small Indonesian crew.  

Two years later I returned to Indonesia again. In Jakarta I asked photographer and cameraman Tino Djumini, a kindred spirit with whom I’d often worked before, to accompany me to Klaten. Tino grew up in the Netherlands, but has lived in Indonesia for decades and understands the essence of the Indonesian language and culture. 

Together with Tino, I followed the ice from the factory to its destination. Because tropical nights are relatively cool – 23 degrees rather than the daytime temperature of 30 – much of the distribution takes place at night. The ice determines the time and the rhythm. The men follow this rhythm and we followed them. We forgot clock time, immersed ourselves in the slightly hallucinating effect of the progression of the ice, and slept, like the men, a few hours here and there, sometimes at night, often during the day.

In between, the helpful Chinese director shared – in his cautious Dutch – his memories of his time at the Dutch Fröbel school and HBS (kindergarten and high school) in Indonesia. He told me how attached his family had been to the Dutch language and that he himself had never visited Holland. At the factory he took me out back to show me something. An iron plate had been fitted to one of the compressors: ‘firma Grasso, ’s Hertogenbosch’ (’s Hertogenbosch is a Dutch city). This sparked my curiosity and from then on I tried to find out how exactly that ice had ended up in the tropics.

Information about the origins of the Indonesian ice turned out to be scarce. I found little in the Indonesian archives, and almost nothing in the Netherlands. No one could tell me precisely how the ice had ended up in Indonesia. With the help of the Dutch historian Rogier Smeele, I continued my search in sources such as the online archive Delpher, a gigantic collection of historical newspapers.
By this time, the corona virus was circulating and everyday life had come to a standstill: curfews, 1.5-meter distancing, face masks. In this locked-down and lonely world nothing else could distract me from the ice. I read hundreds of newspaper articles in papers like the Soerabaijasch Dagblad (the Surabaya Daily) and the Amsterdam-based Algemeen Handelsblad from about 1850 to 1937. I lost myself increasingly in the expanding and fascinating world of ice. I read how with unwavering commitment, nature was transformed into ‘ice farming’. Natural ice was carved out of lakes and rivers, from America to the Netherlands.

I read how later the industrial revolution would allow for the production of artificial ice, independent of temperature influences, non-stop, anywhere. It resulted in the Dutch shipping artificial ice to the former Dutch East Indies, together with the machines for the ice factories. In the tropical heat, the Dutch in particular had a great need for ice, which they already knew from back home. The shapes were different, but the pattern was always the same: melt, condense, freeze, melt, condense. 

From the hundreds of text fragments, I distilled thirty-five. They cover in chronological order a wonderful and fascinating period in which ice was increasingly seen as a product, first harvested naturally and later produced industrially. Large blocks of ice were made in a format that could be lifted, dragged and transported by one man. This format still exists today, the result of a reciprocal relationship between man and ice. There was something genuine in this relationship of reciprocity, as if there were a harmonious relationship between man and nature.

In 2018, the director of the ice factory in Indonesia told me that within about twenty years the large blocks of ice that his factory produced would no longer be made. The modern ice industry with its small ice cubes packed in plastic was steadily advancing.

But is not only the present and it’s future that facinated me I became interested in the historic stoy as well so I dived in old newspaper articles. Historical newspapers have no illustrations, no drawings, no photographs. Curious about the historic images, I began searching in photo archives, from those of the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam to those of the Anderson University & Church of God in Indiana, USA. From the search came the book ICE/IJS.

And in this journey through the centuries it is clear as ice, nothing is permanent, everything is changeable.