Jaanika Peerna is an artist based in New York and spent a week as Artist in Residence at Villa Arnica in May 2025. During her stay, she explored the villa’s garden and investigated the connection between its irrigation system and the glaciers of the high Alps, which feed many of South Tyrol’s springs.

Her work explores the movement of bodies, expressed in a variety of forms: through gestural marks on transparent drawing surfaces or through physical movement in space, as seen in her Glacier Elegy performances.

Ice plays a central role in her practice - used as a totemic symbol of strength, beauty, and ecological fragility in her performances, or as a medium of erasure, flow, and transformation in her drawings. Through this, she channels her engagement with the climate crisis - particularly the loss of glaciers. In her wall installations, she adds new layers to this process by cutting and twisting her drawings into three-dimensional forms that cascade down walls like flowing water.

As part of her stay at the Villa, she presented a performance on the theme of glaciers, using ice as her material. In the following artist talk, she shared her inspiration and how her visit of the nearby Madatschferner-glacier also influenced her performance. Ice and glaciers have long been her source of inspiration and take on particular significance in the context of today’s climate crisis.

The artwork "Thank you for the embrace, Madatschferner" was created especially for the performance, worn by the artist as a dress, and is now on display at the villa.