A multimodal collaboration between artists, writers, and scholars. This piece emerged from an expedition to the Arctic archipelago as part of the Arctic Circle Residency in Autumn 2022.
Smeerenburgbreen
Ashlin Aronin
I come to the end of the world to witness the end of the world.
Vast creatures of ice throw themselves into the sea, to be subsumed in the great body. I stand in the bay fronting Smeerenburgbreen, surrounded by these children of the glacier, who babble, bubble, squeal and pop as they thaw.
This isn’t what I thought the end of the world would sound like – so alive, so joyous. As I listen, their voices start to ring out like bells, and I become lost in time…
https://vimeo.com/manage/videos/1111203878
The piece consists of underwater hydrophone recordings and a video from the same location near Smeerenburgbreen, treated with gradually increasing resonant filter and trails effect. Ashlin Aronin, 2023. Reproduced with the kind permission of the author.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
The Polar Silk Road
Zoriça Markovich
Somehow, I’ve been infected by it all, and it’s hard to describe its impact on me. It will take me years to unfold my experience, and yet I am inspired. I am deeply and profoundly moved.
“The Polar Silk Road” delves into the political complexities surrounding the disputed Arctic waterways, weaving a narrative through a series of composite photographic images that mirror the region’s icy landscapes. The project consists of 11 images in total, each printed on 1 metre of silk habotai.
Zoriça Markovich, The Polar Silk Road #01, installation view of silk panel, 2023.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Dying in Dreams
Hannah Larrabee
When the glacial sound was unearthed, compressed from hours into minutes and played back for us, I listened. It was a knocking in a great hallway, it was language slowed down to the pulse of the earth. We saw a glacier that looked like an icy hand laid flat between mountains, its fingers curved into turquoise caves. I don’t know why the deep blue visits the ice. It could be a myth about dying, the melting a kind of death for us but there is such rich food for birds in the calving ice. Then the glacial sound came back in a dream: we were on the tallship, on the deck, when there was a seismic sound as if the hull of the whole earth groaned. Then we rose on a massive swell and the glacier broke into icebergs as far as the eye could see. When they began to pierce the ship there was a ringing in my ears so human the part about dying wasn’t needed.
October 15, 2022
The author declares they have no competing interests.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Dahlbreen Glacier
Hannah Larrabee
Straight to the lungs
if you ask me—ask me
why the night groans
with our arrival
why some things
leave no trace at all
entire epochs suffering
a geologic amnesia
and here—outside time
—I draw closer
to the bright blue
mouth of the glacier
at a certain distance
a kiss is a force
that cannot be contained
why not offer the ice
to my tongue, my tongue
to its softening dominion
—the body is all
that is ever decided
on this ship we rise
and fall on the massive
chest of the ocean—
the glacier nudges
the mountains
with both elbows
lowers her hips onto
the lapping waters
—calving is an intimate
thunder.
October 3, 2022
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Ice Memory
Zoriça Markovich
Movement and sounds are dampened––slow, and subtle. Magnified by my audio equipment the ice crackles and pops. Sounds are not the same above the water as below. Below they are brighter, crisper. There is a hum, like magnets or electricity. It is extraterrestrial. It is hypnotic. The encounter unfolds across the senses even as it resists them. I close my eyes to fully embody the environment. It is exquisite.
“Ice Memory,” a 14-minute immersive audio soundscape, serves as an auditory portal into the sonic tapestry of the Svalbard-Spitsbergen archipelago. This immersive soundscape captures environmental sounds of calving glaciers, fragmented brash ice, and the haunting moans of melting dead ice. Captured with a variety of different microphones and presented in the round, I am inviting an intimate connection with the Arctic’s sonic landscape.
Download Ice Memory by Zoriça Markovich.
The author declares they have no competing interests.