Arctic: Intimacy
Hannah Larrabee
When I came back from Svalbard, my eighteen-year-old cat had moved into the bathroom like it was a condo in Florida. He chose a spot in front of the tub, so I stacked the cat beds three deep to keep him warm. He sleeps so hard now he leaps when I touch him, like he is thrust toward something he was dreaming about. I place my finger in his paw and he tightens around it just as he always has. I brought the sunlamp into the bathroom, can you even call it a bathroom? I don’t know what it is now but it will ever be what it was before. Love isn’t anything if it isn’t listening. I hold a fractured Arctic stone together with a rubber band and mail it out to another artist from the trip. She takes a series of photographs so beautiful they are portraits of the stone. That’s what it takes, I think. Intimacy in the hands of someone who knows what to do with it.
February 8, 2023
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Reclining Nude, #Erikbreen
Alma Noor
Reclining Nude, #Erikbreen, Archival pigment print.
©2022, Alma Noor. All Rights Reserved.
Reclining Nude #274, Archival pigment print.
©2022, Alma Noor. All Rights Reserved.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other
Jia-Jen Lin
This series of works contemplate human conditions under progressive catastrophes resulting from social issues and climate change. By employing the concept of “landscape” as traces of human history, visualized as a battleground and extension of the human body, Lin explores the conception of a “post-landscape” where nature, human activities, digital media, and materiality intersect, along with the circumstances in which human beings are forced to constantly adapt and respond to the changing environment.
This three-channel video, titled Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other, employs video, sound, generative visual, and text to reimagine where we, as humans, stand amid our changing land. The major footage and sound of calving glaciers were recorded during Lin’s field research with the Arctic Circle expedition around the Svalbard archipelago, Norway, in 2022. Lin explores the notions of and interactions among natural disasters, collapsed landscapes, deformed structures, social violence, trauma, memories of loss, reconstructions, and fragments and transmutes the abstract concept into a perceivable audio-visual built environment.
The work also probes the interrelation among video, music compositions, and text excerpts recomposed from poetry by Laurie Glover, an American writer who wrote poems during their expedition in the High Arctic region. Part of the video composition is inspired by Glover’s concept of “layered fragments” and the inconstant phenomena captured in her poems. While we try to understand the landscape, history, and climate change through our observations and research on glaciers, ice, and the objects we encountered, the ice continues to break up, move, and recombine.
Collapsing Landscape: No One Surface the Same as Any Other, Image Stills from Three-channel video. 2023. Images courtesy of the artist. Text from poems by Laurie Glover.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Arctic: Lover
Hannah Larrabee
and now she’s all I think about:
coat soaked through to sweater
storied travel of bare trees
green sandal entangled in fishing line
frozen jellyfish, a penumbra
whale bones white as wings
a cabin ransacked
stones ice-shattered
no, really, sliced like a hardboiled eggs
all the things we couldn’t touch
all the places we shouldn’t step
I sought a spot to watch the moon
move horizontally across the sky
and when someone came by to say hello
it startled me.
December 15, 2022
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Zombie Ice: Ancient Ice Sample #01
Zoriça Markovich
Zombie Ice: Ancient Ice Sample #01, Photography, 2023.
©2023, Zoriça Markovich. Image courtesy of the artist.
Zombie Ice: Ancient Ice Sample #01, Photography, 2023.
©2023, Zoriça Markovich. Image courtesy of the artist.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Isbjørn, Stubendorffbreen
Dianne Chisholm
i
Antigua ventures deep into Austfjorden shallows. Almost too shallow for Antigua’s shallow keel. Drops anchor near shoals off Stubendorffbreen. Rides out high winds, huge swells.
S spots bear in Snaddbukta! Swimming towards Finnekroken’s moraine jetty. All eyes on deck, cameras in tow. Zoom in . . . where bear? . . . zoom out. Try tracking animal in such cosmic commotion! There! Tiny, yet unmistakably. Yellower than ice. Exits water, stalks shallows, paws shoreline. Focuses us, distracts our seasickness.
ii
In 1594 Barents and crew blundered upon their first polar bear. A sea-swimming bear, so they named it Ursus maritimus. Lassoed it, wrangled it aboard and, failing to tame it, killed it. Then slaughtered every bear encountered ever after. We decry Barents’ barbarism, be it brute instinct, imperial caprice or sadistic machismo. Our ethos lionizes this icon of anthropogenic extinction, which we too shoot like fiends Click! Click! ClickclickclickclickclickclickClick!
iii
I sighted my first polar bear from a day-tour boat. The bear was not swimming but bounding up Nordenskjöld glacier. So we detoured from Pyramiden, across Billefjorden, to go bear-watching. The closer we approached, the higher climbed the bear. Did we scare it aloft? Or was it exploring the steep bare ice, undeterred by our presence? What did we–visiting, prestigious, circumpolar scholars–know about ice bears?
My last polar bear encounter was with a dead bear. In a tiny settlement of hunters huddled on an island under Greenland’s ice sheet. Where I witnessed a family of women clean the hide of their hunter-husband-father-son-in-law’s recent harvest. From behind my camera I sensed those eyes. Glaring lidlessly from the skinned, decapitated head the women had carefully placed aside.
From Antigua’s deck, we see only the animal.
Not the animus.
Note
Austfjorden, East Fjord, is the lower branch of Wijdefjorden. Icebound (2021), a history of Barents’ 1594-1597 expeditions by former Arctic Circle resident Andrea Pitzer, highlights the gruesome massacre of polar bears by Barents’ crew. Pyramiden is a Russian coal-mining ghost-town in Billefjorden, is the easternmost branch of Spitsbergen’s Isfjord, Ice Fjord.
The author declares they have no competing interests.
Svalbard Series: Movement Vignettes
Alexandra Lockhart
ØY
4:36 minutes
Subfreezing air, my skin met your breath, the numbness overtaken by awe and overwhelm. Whisked away by your whispers of the wind, both away from my body and deeper in. At this altar, a desire to offer myself, in an unknown way, profess my love, and ask for forgiveness as I witnessed and felt our destruction. Me, a micron, engulfed by you, aching to be with, not on or beside. A blurred sense of edge, boundary, or limit, just expanse and spirit, until I had to come back- a painful and forced extraction to come back to this other side.
Created by dancer and choreographer: Alexandra Lockhart
Filmed by: Ashlin Aronin
Zodiac maneuvering: Sarah Gerats
Original music composition by: Nathan Wheeler
Violinist: Chris Jusell
Filmed in Svalbard, Norway. © 2023, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.
Ice of Breen
4:09 minutes
A movement exploration of the audible interaction of calved glacial ice, sea, and air, Ice of Breen showcases the nuanced popping, crackling and complex composition of the ice and sea. Themes of erratic and randomness within a continuous flow are embodied and expressed through the movement and editing. The music composition is comprised of sound picked up from the camera during the filming process, overlayed with a simple composed musical score.
The sudden movement of a mini-iceberg next to me as I waded through the glacial ice sculpture garden caught me pleasantly by surprise and further informed my movement. After unmeasurable moments of wondrous engagement, I took a step that sent me off balance, causing full submersion into the underworld of the icy blue giants. This marked the end of our conversation as a zodiac ride back to the ship for a hot cup of tea and dry clothing was in order, however dancing through the sea amongst these ancient glacial carvings frequents my dreams.
Created by dancer and choreographer: Alexandra Lockhart Original music composition by: Paul DeHaven
Filmed in Svalbard, Norway. © 2023, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.
Felt Essence Of:
4:27 minutes
While focusing on the theme of impermanence, this short film exhibits my exploration and examination of how the body feels the essence of a place and how it portrays animism of this specific location. This piece was inspired by the musical unseen water flows within the glacier, the curvature and movement of the glacial pathway above me, as well as the soft and quiet snow that began to fall halfway through my improvisation.
While we are impermanent, our actions aren’t. This environment will outlive us- to be generous to that. To be respectful of the time it has lived, of the experiences it has had, the intensities it has created, felt and shared.
Created by dancer and choreographer: Alexandra Lockhart
Original music composition by: Nathan Wheeler
Poetry by: Hannah Larrabee
Narration by: Alison Bagli
Filmed in Svalbard, Norway. © 2023, Alexandra Lockhart. All Rights Reserved.
The author declares they have no competing interests.