The Diamond Ledger is a live, satellite-fed public art installation proposal that keeps an account of individual icebergs dying in Iceland's Jokulsarlon lagoon, and asks people passing a window in Madrid to take responsibility for one.
One hundred cast modules - one for every year since the lagoon formed in the 1930s - form a faceted sculpture in the vitrine. Its brightness is not invented: satellite radar reads the glacier's real retreat.
Behind it, an account few institutions bother to keep. Forty to sixty icebergs are tracked and named - JK-0417, JK-0421 - each a light in the rear plane. No registry records objects this small. Their histories are written on the glass: which are alive, how long they have lasted, how many people took them on.
Two acts are possible from the pavement, deliberately unequal. Anyone may rest a palm on a contact element and feel ten-thousand-year-old air escaping melting ice - free, anonymous, any hour. Anyone may also adopt one berg, only ever one, and be told months or years later it is gone.
Nothing is replenished. Across twenty-four to thirty-six months the field empties, each loss answered by a star above it. The more the ice bleeds, the more brilliantly it shines.
This project wants to take a loss too large and too distant to be felt, and reduce it to one object, one name, and one person who asked to be told. What opens as a glittering window closes, slowly and irreversibly, as a sky.