An Icelandic writer preserves vanishing glaciers and departed grandparents, transforming loss into a time capsule.

How do you say goodbye to what you never thought you could lose? That’s the question Icelandic writer Andri Snær Magnason grapples with in Sara Dosa’s ambitious new project following her 2022 breakout “Fire of Love”.

Tasked to write the eulogy for Okjökull, the first glacier to be declared dead due to climate change, Magnason reflects on how glaciers create an archive of deep time within their ice over millions of years. Likening this idea of the depth of time to intergenerational memory, he sets out to pass along the stories of his grandparents for future generations, before they too vanish.

Drawing from an evocative mix of photographs, home movies, myths, songs, and folk tales, “Time and Water” is at once an elegy for what we’ve lost and an attempt at cinematic time travel to retain it.