Live coverage: Filipa Ramos on "Thinking at the Edge of the World" in Svalbard

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Please join us June 12-13th as art-agenda Editor-in-Chief Filipa Ramos (@filipa) reports on the “Thinking at the Edge of the World” conference from Svalbard, Norway–one of the northernmost populated areas in the world. As such, the conference consider the concept of frontiers from an arctic context. The e-flux press release is in partial below, and you can find the schedule in detail via the conference program booklet: Thinking at the Edge of the World_Programme Booklet.pdf (382.9 KB)

“Thinking at the Edge of the World” is a cross-disciplinary international conference initiated and developed by Northern Norway Art Museum and the Office for Contemporary Art Norway (OCA). Held on Svalbard from June 12-13, 2016, it brings together figures from the fields of art, architecture, psychology, philosophy, history and science, who are invited to visit and think about the region, considering it as a unique vantage point from which to reflect upon the environmental, aesthetic, architectural, economic, political and scientific forces that are shaping the north of Norway and its relationship to the world.

How are frontiers questioned from an Arctic vantage point, and how might this questioning catalyse new thinking regarding territory, power and resource exploitation? Could concepts of society, aesthetics and community explored during the 19th and 20th century—often led by artists and intellectuals from Norway and its indigenous communities—be sought again to enlighten this debate?

The conference coincides with the opening of a solo exhibition by the Norwegian contemporary artist Olav Christopher Jenssen at Northern Norway Art Museum’s Kunsthall Svalbard in Longyearbyen. The exhibition features new work inspired by Jenssen’s recent residency project with Kunsthall Svalbard.

Confirmed highlights include a conversation between Candice Hopkins, Chief Curator at The IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, NM, USA, and legendary journalist and Sami political rights activist Niillas Somby, as well as Lisa Philips, Director of New Museum in New York; Robert Templer, Director of The Center for Conflict, Negotiation and Recovery, Central European University, Budapest, Hungary; Elena Isayev, Professor of Ancient History at the University of Exeter, UK; Ute Meta Bauer, Founding Director of NTU Centre for Contemporary Art, Singapore; Luba Kuzovnikova, Director of Pikene på Broen, Kirkenes; Julie Decker, CEO and Director of Anchorage Museum, AK, USA; and Sami poet and visual artist Synnøve Persen together with AK Dolven, two of Norway’s foremost visual artists. A panel discussion on the future of the oceans is complemented by a special screening of Leviathan, an experimental work about the North American fishing industry by Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, and Kim Holmén, International Director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, will lead a boat trip to the glacier front.

Other elements of the diverse programme include a 24-hour sensory intervention and scent workshop devised by design historian, writer and curator Emily King with leading perfumer Nadjib Achaibou.

*Image of arctic pup by Filipa Ramos

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“Thinking at the Edge of the World” across people, landscape, and local companion species — the convene started on Saturday afternoon (even if hours becomes an irrelevant convention here, where the sky is as bright at 2pm as it is at 2pm, when this image of a local dog was taken), with the opening of Olaf Christopher Jenssen’s exhibition “The Expedition,” at the Kunsthall Svalbard (part of the Northern Norway Art Museum, more on the exhibition later).

The opening was followed by a late screening of Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel’s film Leviathan (2012), which is entirely set on a groundfish trawl vessel and portrays the deep intertwinement between humans, sea creatures, and machinery across issues of labour and capitalist exploitation of natural resources.

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The first session consisted of a conversation between Candice Hopkins, curator and curatorial advisor for the upcoming Documenta 14, and Niillas Somby one of the seven hunger strikers during the Alta protests during the late 1970s and 1980s, who were demonstrating against the construction of a hydroelectric power plant in the Alta river in Finnmark, northeastern Norway.

Hopkins and Somby engaged in an outstanding exchange of visions and experiences about indigenous communities across the Northern world, based on their mutual experiences in being, respectively, a member of the Carcross/Tagish First Nation (which was led by women and not by elected male chiefs) and a Sami political-rights activist.

Episodes of the political histories of First Nation and Sami struggles, taking place in parallel across Norway and Canada, emerged through the sharing of Hopkins and Somby’s biographical accounts, attesting how the histories and stories of the single individuals stand for the forms of activism, modes of resistance, and portray the ongoing battles for rights on land against colonial forces and their declinations. Their personal episodes of demonstrations, hunger strikes, punctual attacks to governmental infrastructures, or shaming ceremonies of Federal Governments emerged as modes of raising of consciousness amid the civic society.

Somby started his talk by sharing the memories of his own upbringing in a reindeer herding family in Norway—where his relationship to his grandfather shaped his early access traditional spirituality. His childhood recollections gradually transmute into his youth experiences in the 1970s, and in particular through visions of his hunger strike in Oslo—a response to the plans to construct a power dam in the Sami territories of the Alta River—which managed to raise awareness among the Norwegian people to the oppression of the Same people, and eventually to the establishment of the Sami Rights Commission, in a process that took 18 years and was accompanied by a generational change in-between.

Somby then reflected on how the contact with the Grand chief George Manuel (author of The Fourth World: An Indian Reality,1974) showed him that there could be a unified calling out across various indigenous communities, with great potential for people to share stories of resistance and to gather around common struggles and needs, even if often these alliances were also embedded in forms of shameful complicities with national governments and corporate enterprises.

Somby and Hopkins further engaged in a conversation around the education and re-education of young first nations people, including a series of considerations that comprised not only various forms of knowledge but also the awareness of who is providing education and to what purposes, and on the importance of the land, which is both a teacher, the education resource, the knowledge shaper.

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Image from some of the objects that circulated among the audience during the second session (here, two wooden replicas of an ivory lion from the time of Tarquin the Elder, the fifth king of Rome, 7th century BC).
The session featured a panel discussion on migrations, displacements and territorial occupations featuring Robert Templer, Director of the Center for Conflict, Negotiation, and Recovery (Budapest); Berlin-based curator Lutz Henke; Elena Isayev, Professor of Classic and Ancient History, Univ. Essex; and Alberto Altés, Lecturer, Umeå School of Architecture.

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Historical material culture emerged alongside contemporary artistic production as the means to provide strong figures to address the current problematics around migrations and human fluxes.

Robert Templer started his sharp presentation by sharing a gift with the audience, a golden box full of a mixture of pistachio, almond and cardamom: green and yellow crumbled pieces of a gastronomic territory that are as shattered as the inhabitants of Aleppo, where this delicatessen comes from, and where he has been working on public policy and conflict issues in relation to climate change.
While reflecting about how climate change led to a series of serious draughts in Syria, which triggering the revolutions which grow proportionally to the political failure to respond to these crisis, Templer made an important point about the lack of empathy for the conflict in Syria, wondering about its reasons.
On this topic, which given the short time given to each speaker, Templer didn’t have the opportunity to further develop, cf, for instance, Brian Kuan Wood’s article “We are the Weather” on e-flux Journal no. 45, Naomi Klein’s "Why a Climate Deal is the Best Hope for Peace," or Peter Gleick’s paper [“Water, Drought, Climate Change, and Conflict in Syria.”] (http://religioner.no/wp-content/uploads/2015/08/religioner.no_wcas-d-13-00059.pdf)

Elena Isayev also started her well-informed talk by sharing something with the audience, this time wooden lions, boats, and clay figures, hospitality objects that were shared between people in Antiquity during their journeys. Isayev commented on the recent expansion of the term ‘migration’ and the negative implications that it gained, becoming a mode of establishing a distinction between ‘us’ and ‘others.’

Once again, a longer talk would allow her to further develop on this topic, and to reflect on the gradual transition of mainstream media from ‘refugees’ and ‘migrants.’ Isayev instead gazed towards the past to defending freedom as the right to move inasmuch as the right to say, recalling the audience that passports are a modern invention and didn’t exist until 200 years ago. Likewise, border controls and territorial nation-states are a novelty in relation to the history of human occupation of the world.

She then presented a series of figures of mobility from the Classical Ancient world—namely those of Aeneas, carrying his father, Anchises across the Mediterranean; the objects of hospitality, which people exchanged to assure the constitution of future memory, sort of interpersonal travel gifts/souvenirs, and maps, as the map of Texúpa (1579), from Modern Santiago, Oaxaca, which overlaps the native mobile route ways with the Spanish conquest grid (see image below).

While the Berlin-based curator Lutz Henke reflected on art’s relation to the public sphere, briefly addressing some of his past projects, namely that developed with Santiago Sierra—BLACK FLAG (North Pole, April 2015; South Pole, December 2015), architect and lecturer Alberto Altés delivered a manifesto-like presentation which gravitated around his views on resistance and encounter and was largely focused on his Intra-ventions project: mobile architectonic structures in the form of wooden stairs that he has been creating and which, when transported and moved across a city, generate unexpected spaces of encounter that confound the notions of public and private space, and articulate the social, political and aesthetic.

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The morning session was followed by a conversation between artist Olaf Christopher Jenssen and Jérémie Michael McGowan, Director of the Northern Norway Art Museum, focused on his current exhibition at the Kunsthall Svalbard “The Expedition,” which puts together a series of 25 aluminium plates, displayed in a table-like structure that divides the space of the Kunsthall into two sections, with a series of small, colourful watercolours, preparatory sketches for Jenssen’s approach to the territory around Longyearbyen. Jenssen describes his process of preparing, as he says, “the exhibition as an expedition” and he explains the inclusion of all the taxidermized animals from the collection of the old Svalbard museum due to a fortuitous encounter with: he opened a door in the museum by accident and saw all the stuffed animals there, who seemed to be expressing their wish to also participate in the exhibition.
With these considerations, he concludes by mentioning how his wonders about the meaning of responding to a context, and his interrogation on how to deal with the strong imaginary of the Artic, with its imposing and pre-arranged imagery, deeply informed the creation of this show.

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Designer Emily King and perfumer Nadjib Achaibou present their ongoing research project based on the investigation of scent and memory, which they are testing during the entire symposium, both by interacting with local inhabitants of Longyearbyen and by experimenting the modes of reaction to different perfumes, specifically created for this occasion, with the other speakers and members of the audience.

King notes how experience and memory construction are strongly based on feelings that are hard to describe and comments on how smell generates stories. She presents sense as a transportable experience while Achaibou reflects on conquering disgust as a mode that characterizes the history of smell. I would have welcomed wider reflection on the distinction between odours and perfumes, which could have been a mode to address the mode in which the history of hygiene and the constitution of the modern myth of civilization has been so strongly associated to the elimination of bodily odors and of the animal nature of humans.

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Moving to another geography and other discursive modes, in which personal, often intimate memories were shared through story-telling give way to “Lands, Settlements, Peaks, Bones and Appropriation,” a panel about climate change and agro-capitalism, the adaptation of natural environments to human profit (food, war, landscape construction), and soil destruction.

The panel opens with a brilliant intervention by Adam Kleinman, who makes an introduction about the historical efforts to control and boost food production, centered around the figure of the German Nobel-Prize winner chemist Fritz Haber (1868-1934).

Kleinman points out how the same technology that feeds kills, referring how the history of the development of modern fertilizers and the advances in industrial food producing schemes cannot be distinguished from the gradual infiltration of toxic, nitrogen-derived products (such as such as ammonia, nitric acid, organic nitrates and cyanides) in the crops, in the land, in our bodies, and in the waters. At the same time, the history of agrocapitalism, and its connivance with synthetized nitrate derivates, is accompanied by the development of the appliance of organic nitrates for the creation of weapons (propellants and explosives), and indeed Haber who was as crucial for the development of a process that allowed to atmospheric nitrogen to be fixed in order to produce synthetic ammonia, gave a likewise fundamental contribute for the development of chemical weapons before the WWII (on this topic cf. Etienne Turpin’s text “A Stroll Through the Bubbles of Chemicals and Men” (2013) and the classical Spheren by Peter Sloterdijk).

The Panel is followed by the presentation of Edwina von Gal, Founder of The Perfect Earth Project, who presents a case-study based on her experience of observing the appearance of unexpected amount of algae in the Hamptons area in Long Island, a phenomena associated with the high human-led introduction of nitrate-derivated substances in the soils and their leaking onto the water areas of the region.

Certainly well intentioned, von Gal’s presentation advocated for a problematic promotion of the privileges of wealth, associated to her support of the possibilities of the upper-class inhabitants to lobby and defend their lands, associating economical power to knowledge and environmental awareness, and ignoring the continuous efforts of those—as the various indigenous people whose relevance this convene is largely attesting—who have been struggling against human-led attacks to land, often to the detriment of their own benefits.

The third speaker was New Museum Director Lisa Phillips, who rightfully raised the issue of the carbon footprint of this convene while addressing the inevitable contradictions that need to be addressed by those who are committed to think and act around climate change. Phillips also noted how the current outmoded aesthetics are failing to match the need for new ethics, wondering what is the role that art can and should play to address these issues and providing the examples of artists Trevor Paglen and Maya Lin, in particular her memorial project to vanishing nature, http://www.whatismissing.net/.

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Following the screening of Giogio Andreotta Calò’s film In Girus Imus Nocte (2015), the final session of the day concentrated some of the liveliest and well-articulated moments of the symposium, being also characterized by a very good rhythm between different modes of presenting ideas, work, and words.

The charismatic Director of the Tromsø Kunstforening Leif Magne Tangen introduced a project on which he is currently working on by reading an excerpt of Tanya Busse and Emilija Skarnulyte’s New Mineral Collective’s project Hollow Earth I, a platform that tries to understand human’s interaction on the earth and the use of territorial and geographical resources.

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Humoristicaly addressing the fact that everyone is the conference is either shoeless or wearing the shoes provided by the Svalbard Kunsthall, artist and theorist Nabil Ahmed opens his lucid and well-articulated talk by expressing his nervousness in giving his first public talk wearing crocks!
Ahmed describes his ongoing, long-time research on evidencing various sorts of environmental crisis and their association to an investigation on the ubiquitous permeation of capitalism in what he describes as a ‘theory of poison.’ He pursues presenting his attempt to understand the modes of contact with the violence of capitalism and their environmental traces, which move slowly but inexorably from the body to the territory, while asking himself about the modes to narrate these forms and processes of violence.

He presents the audience with an image of the territory of West Papua, in Indonesia, where one can see how the large copper and gold mines are entangled with the history of indigenous peoples’ struggles and how such mining process has been contaminating their ecologies. This image combines a series of political movements with the forensic evidences of the transformation of these lands: a history of contamination that has been moving from the mines to the sea visible through the cross-section of different methods to bring the data of this research in evidence.

The next figure in his presentation is the Cicinnurus Respublica, the Bird of Paradise named after Napoleon’s cousin, who was an ornithologist, and whose existence has been forever associated with the histories of colonialism that permeate the taxonomic classification of species, and who will be an actor in an upcoming exhibition project Ahmed is working on at the Museum of Natural History in Stuttgart.

He is followed by the moving presentation of artist Elin Mar Øyen Vister, a true appeal to the constitution of interspecies bonds. Vister starts by inviting Svalbard visitors to spend time having a conversation with the Snow Bunting, the ‘Sparrow of the Arctic’ and with the mountains of Svalbard. She describes how her work for the past six years has been focused on recording seabirds and interacting with them through deep listening (a method of listening with her entire body that she inherited from composer Pauline Oliveros). She then reflects about her attempt to become a bird, or a birdhuman, disguising as a puffin, in order to get closer to these animals. Vister then reads a small fragment from the Queer Ecologies aims and politics, also referencing Zoe Todd’s text “An Indigenous Feminist’s Take On The Ontological Turn: ‘Ontology’ Is Just Another Word For Colonialism.”

The day is closed by Synnøve Persen, Sami poet and artist, who reads her poem “The Land Outside the Map”

(…)
The same history made invisible
On the real map the same names are washed out—do not exist
Every mountain every lake the remote places
Where is my land? Is it a trauma, a gene, an utopia?
Who are we? Strangers? Foreigners? Guests in our own land?
(…)

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The site of the second day of the symposium was not the museum but Gruve 3—a disused coal mine which was shut down in the late 1990s, one of the five large coal mining complexes that existed in Svalbard. There, under the ground level, located outside of exposure to the permanent daylight that radically alters the perception and use of time, inevitable considerations about the migration of the sites of labor into the frame of cultural production emerge.

The second life of spaces like Gruve 3 is constituted through a dualistic relation to their past, as we assist to the simultaneous attempt to crystalize what that place was (via the museification of instruments, infrastructures, environments, ghostly occupied by the daily gestures of their past users) and to turn it into a proxy of its own past self, which is accompanied by the addition of another, new layer to this historically-charged site, which allows for new modes of occupation and use to be adopted, which can only function if the awareness of the history of the space is suspended.

It is therefore in this unstable balance between the consideration of Gruve 3 as a site of extreme work conditions associated to the fueling of early capitalism and as a venue for the privileged few of our late capitalist days that “Oceans, Food, Myths, and Sea Monsters,” the first session of the second day of the symposium, takes place.

Director of CCA Glasgow Francis Mckee opens the first talk by timely remarking how we are actually living beyond the end of the world, which finished in Glasgow in 1784 when the Scottish engineer James Watt invented the steam engine, opening way for that very same coal mining industry that is ghostly haunting this day, both as a house that is occupied the early industrial spirits and as a somber portrait of the present times of environmental crisis that appear when observing the many diagrams which offer the concrete figures of today’s climate change.

He is followed by a presentation by filmmakers Lucien Castaing-Taylor and Véréna Paravel, who reflect on the two major influences for their film Leviathan (2012): Herman Melville’s Moby Dick; or, The Whale (1851) and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (written exactly 200 years earlier, in 1651) which physically and metaphysically depicts labor at the sea while it attempts to situate humanity in a large ecological context: to re-portray the human in a rescaling manner, an attempt that also traverses the inner process of making the film, in which Castaing-Taylor and Paravel adopt small cameras that are attached to the various bodies that appear in the film: bodies of humans, of boats, of animals, of the sea, who together become a collective hybrid self-portrait.

The panel was followed by the intervention of Camilla Svensen, Associate Professor in Arctic Marine Biology at the Arctic University of Norway, Tromsø, who reflects on the etymology of the term Plankton, which derives from the Greek planktos, ‘wandering’, to consider drifting as a mode of life for these micro-organisms that are at the basis of the food chain of the oceans, and by

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The invitation to “Think at the Edge of the World” makes sense while it proposes to constitute a heterogeneous network of people who, by finding themselves in a terra franca as Svalbard, whose history has always been shaped by the forms of temporary occupation that have been projected upon it (still nowadays it is highly unlikely that someone either is born or buried in Svalbard, and one’s residence permit depends on one’s capacity to be self-sufficient), are able of summoning new forms of relating to the past that hopefully will contribute for new modes to tackle the pressing issues of the present.

Yet the outmoded notion of ‘edge of the world’ asks to be redefied, updated, refreshed, as to give way to a figure that still assures its meaning as a threshold, connecting place while it moves away from the naïve tropes of the exotic finisterrae.

Exoticism is indeed a ghost that has been kept at good distance but nonetheless risks of haunting this mission of OCA. If it is true that culture can indeed be transposed, discussed, and transformed elsewhere—and in this sense a location in permanent definition as Svalbard offers itself as a good site for new discourses—the notion of the remote ‘other’ needs to be properly exorcized.

OCA has managed to keep this ghost away by choosing to talk about indigenous rights and traces outside the specific sites that allowed for the emergence of these same indigenous cultures, as it creates a protective layer against exoticism: here, the anthropological, ethnographic quest for the ‘other’, the drive towards the encounter with the stereotyped difference cannot take place, and the imaginary is prevented from being a distorted reflection. At the same time, there has been a consistent, ongoing investment by OCA’s Director Katya García-Antón, alongside Senior Programmer Antonio Cataldo in establishing deep, long-lasting relationships with various Northern communities and entities, a gesture that has strongly shaped the new identity they are giving to OCA’s mission and sphere of action.

Besides several trips to the Lofoten archipelago and to their cultural institutions during 2014-15, García-Antón and Cataldo took part in the second Dark Ecology art and research project (Nov’ 2015) , which took them from Kirkenes to Nikel, Zapolyarny and Murmansk (all three in Russia), and subsequent research trip took place across the Norwegian and Finland Northern geographies early this year, establishing relations with artists and institutions across locations as Kirkenes, Inari or Tromsø. Previous to this convene, a subsequent visit to the Alta Museum and Archives, combine with trips to further locations, comprising Nordkapp, Hammerfest, Gjestvæar and Lakselv solidified OCA’s commitment to support and collaborate with the Boreal ecosystems, their inhabitants, institutions, and initiatives.

The results of such a visible interest in intensifying OCA’s dialogue with the regions will require time to fully unfold, and one of the main challenges for OCA will be that of devising ongoing modes of dialogue and connection between the heterogeneous realities that compose the Norwegian cultural context and its relation to an international sphere.

Talking about transporting, travelling waste is also a fundamental issue. The modes in which artistic practices have embraced the contradictions that characterize their modus operandi have become such a banal tranquillizer to institutional critique and its declinations, that referring to the large carbon footprint generated by an initiative that is mostly aimed at promoting the importance of local spheres would be to ignore how the lesser evil is the other side of the greater cause coin.

Under these optics, the dispersed community of indigenous rights activists, scientists, researchers, artists, and thinkers who have accepted to be accomplices of OCA’s CO2 emission lesser crime constitutes the lesser evil that hopefully will make sure that OCA remains faithful to its mission. The visions, ideas, and possibilities opened by this encounter have constituted a powerful lot of story-tellers: the responsibilities, duties and aspirations turns them (us, to be more precise) into vulnerable subjects: let us not fall beyond the edge but make sure it exists as a territory of tactile encounter with what lies next to it.