The contributors to this special issue of Regeneration are artists, writers, and researchers who sailed around Svalbard on a tall ship with the expeditionary residency program The Arctic Circle. A High Arctic archipelago just 800 miles from the North Pole, Svalbard is notable for its polar bear population, substantial glaciation, geological significance, and history of mining and whaling. Over nearly three weeks in October 2022, as polar night approached, our expeditionary collective worked on creative projects during anchorages next to glaciers and shore landings on moraines, Arctic tundra, and cultural heritage sites.

Our work represents many disciplines and media: sound, painting, sculpture, data collection, poetry, fiction, nonfiction, public art, calligraphy, dance, performance, and game design. Each of us is multidisciplinary in our practice, and our projects are interested in history, presence, and futurity—in resilience and regeneration—at a time and place of environmental extremity. In addition to cameras, notebooks, laptops, and canvases, our tools and methods included hydrophones, atmospheric infrasound recorders, place-based choreography, 3D printing, pointed pen and brush calligraphy, found poetry, rock collection, and shipboard development of large-format photographic negatives in the style of historical polar expeditions.

What distinguishes The Arctic Circle from other artists and writers residencies is not just the presence of multiple armed polar bear guards at all outdoor project working sessions, nor the knee-high Arctic muck boots packed along with the tools of our practice. Strikingly, the residency is an atelier afloat, a studio aship in the Arctic Ocean. The Antigua, a 160-foot barquentine with a small crew of three sailors, was responsible only to wind and ice conditions and our artistic needs. We had no cell service, no internet, no news of the world, and no possibility of stepping away from our twenty-seven shipmates beyond the cordon set on shore landings by our rifle-strapped escorts. The expedition leaders were exceptionally skilled in polar survival; they are all also exceptionally skilled artists and thinkers, and we are especially glad to feature contributions by three of these Arctic polymaths (head guide Sarah Gerats, Sergei Chernikov, and Terhi Nieminen) in this special issue.

Svalbard is Norwegian for “cold edge.” In 1596 the Dutch navigator Willem Barentsz first approached the jagged punctures of the glaciated terrain and called the landform Spitsbergen or “pointed mountains.” No green land, Svalbard remains sharp, cold, and on the edge of human settlement. The archipelago lacks an Indigenous history, although Dutch, Russian Pomory, Danish, and English hunters and whalers began seasonal excursions in the late 1500s. At the turn of the twentieth century, coal mining drove the settlement of Longyearbyen, which was named for the American coal magnate John Munro Longyear. At 78° north latitude, Longyearbyen is the world’s northernmost town with a population over 1,000. Coal mining is presently declining on Svalbard; the slopes of the mountains surrounding Longyearbyen nevertheless remain dotted with the infrastructural ruins of past mine shafts, and Russian and Norwegian miners still work the archipelago’s thick, visible coal seam. Norway has administered the territory under the name Svalbard since 1925 (the historic designation “Spitsbergen,” by which the archipelago was previously known, remains on the map as the largest island in the archipelago). Tourism and scientific research at the University Centre are growth industries even as Svalbard remains an industrial outpost; the median length of residency for Norwegians is only 3.6 years. Longyearbyen today has a population of around 2,300—fewer than the number of polar bears in the area—but a rich international culture animates the community, driven in part by its museums and two in situ artists residencies (Artica and the Spitsbergen Artists Residency).

Our own residency collective boarded the Antigua in Longyearbyen and slipped out of Isfjorden bound north. The ship had tiny shared cabins and just one common room that could hold us all, wedged into the stern. A small hut on the deck provided a few extra seats out of the weather; we called this coveted spot “The Quiet Car,” after Amtrak’s space of cellphone-free train travel. Each day, if atmospheric conditions permitted, we made two shore landings. We would gather our project materials, bundle up in cold weather safety gear, and drop into the Zodiac boats which ferried us to shore for several hours. The landings were all different: some beaches were crowded with stranded ice, others rich in Arctic tundra. Once, we communed with a huddle of 100 walruses that had hauled out on the strand next to the yellow-bricked ruins of Smeerenburg, an early seventeenth-century Dutch whaling station. We saw the remains of past visitors, their huts and abandoned tools, about which we trod carefully–in Svalbard all human detritus predating 1946 is considered “cultural heritage” and must not be disturbed.¹ Some of the most memorable landings were not landings at all but Zodiac cruises along the faces of calving glaciers whose colors, textures, and movements baffled our descriptive powers. Many of us at some point shed our layers and made a ceremonial plunge into the Arctic Ocean. At 4:00pm every day we were served a different freshly-made cake. In the evenings, exhausted and sense-dazzled, we took double helpings of snert (the Dutch name for split pea soup) and gave project presentations. Some of us contracted Covid. Packed together in a small ship several days’ sail from Svalbard’s only town, we took no mitigations, wore no masks, and let it run its course, luckily without serious effects (the pandemic had already postponed our residency twice). We may have been out of communication with the networked world, but as Covid reminded us—and as we were acutely aware in our own ecological and cultural meditations throughout our transit—the Arctic may look and feel otherworldly to outsiders, but has always been part of the world we inhabit.

A hot pot of snert (split pea soup), vegetarian and thus “for all.” Photograph by Hester Blum.

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The multimedia, interdisciplinary, creative meditations in “On the Cold Edge” are drawn from and respond to our experience of High Arctic flora and fauna; anthropogenic climate change; the history of resource extraction; the sound of calving glaciers; the Northern Lights; the rhythms of a masted sailing ship; and Svalbard’s geological marvels. While much of what is gathered here was either produced or assembled in part while on board the good ship Antigua or during our various landings during the residency, the collection reflects the significant processing—artistic, intellectual, situational—we have undertaken since returning from the cold edge. We recognize, too, that this collection also reflects the heterogeneity of our day jobs, as we variously returned to teaching art, writing, or gaming; working in tech, design, or architecture; creating and curating art, poetry, and dance; and guiding other Arctic visitors. These labors shaped our Svalbard artistic meditations. Our editing practice for this issue, in turn, has focused on making visible the work of assimilating and digesting how art emerges from and speaks to climate extremity. We understand “On the Cold Edge” as a curated statement. While we three have co-edited this issue, all twenty-three contributors have been our ongoing peers in reviewing the work of our collective. As such, the art and writing in “On the Cold Edge” is often dialogic and reflects the impact that certain sites or experiences had on the whole cohort.

The Arctic icescape and landscape of our curatorial collective may be navigated in thirteen sections within Regeneration (the overview of contributions that follows is not comprehensive, we should note, and many of us have multiple pieces in this collection). The historical significance and ecological drama of the landing day at Smeerenburg—its northern prospect uninterrupted to the Pole—especially compelled us, for example: the pod of walruses (or Walri, we insist) lounging on the pebbled shore, ringed by glaciated mountains; the quiet gravity of the remains of both humans and processing vats from the early modern whaling era; a cultural heritage site strewn with snow-covered debris marking the launch sites for Swedish aeronaut S. A. Andrée’s Arctic Balloon Expedition of 1897 and Italian aviator Umberto Nobile’s airship attempt at the North Pole in 1926 (like most historical polar expeditions, both failures).

The issue’s curatorial logic was not primarily dictated by place, however, and the sections of “On the Cold Edge” bring into provocative relation our heterogeneous responses to Svalbard. Heroism (and its constantly shifting definitions) is a theme addressed in Harley Cowan’s updated portrait of a Crean[e] polar explorer, past and present, as well as in his photographs of the Antigua’s crew members. (These photos, like all Cowan’s contributions to this issue, were taken—and developed in his bunk aboard the Antigua—with the same large format camera technology used by the legendary photographers of polar exploration’s Heroic Age.) Hannah Larrabee’s Polaroid of the low-hanging October sun accompanies her poem “Arctic: Crevasse”; the weak-seeming sun nevertheless burned a hole through the very print, indelible imprint of the artistic process. Andrea Legge’s Subjective Heroism presents photogrammetric 3D model stills of the Antigua as interpreted by a handheld iPhone from a moving zodiac, while Jessica Creane’s Blah Arctic (after Amber Share’s illustrations in Subpar Parks of one-star National Park reviews) recasts the sublime through the entitled lens of a jaded tourist. Like Legge, Creane provides a searing, witty take on notions of bravery, egoism, and monumentalism.

Nautical data, spreadsheets, and numbers are collected, rewritten, and reassembled in a variety of mediums in Research. Sergei Chernikov’s Heartbeat Port LYR presents long-form layering of ship calls to Longyearbyen for each season, providing a data visualization of travel to Svalbard. Felicia LeRoy’s sculpture Drift was deployed to gather forensic information about the ship’s latitude, longitude, altitude, and knots traveled, while Dianne Chisholm’s poems “What Remains” and “Flotsam & Jetsam Nordkappbukta” provide richly textured inventories of human polar detritus, yesterday and today. Found Objects continues and extends this cataloging impulse, and gathers material encountered in the landscape (driftwood in Laurie Glover’s long poem “Sundry Articles Found”; the furtively collected pebbles in Jacinda Russell’s One Rock), or else transported to Svalbard for anomalous integration (the incongruous inflatable animals of Joan Albaugh’s paintings).

Many residents were drawn to the permanent and impermanent Performative Actions taken by visitors to Svalbard over the centuries. Dancer and choreographer Alexandra Lockhart shows how the body responds to the natural environment in a still from Whale Bone, for instance. Leonor Anthony laid claim to a Norwegian hunter’s shelter at Sallyhamna by planting the Cuban flag, and extended her ongoing project Supporting Love, in which she suspended a line of bras from Antigua’s mast. Sound artist Brian House’s Macrophones is a recording of atmospheric infrasound, or sound waves with frequencies well below human audibility; the macrophone he built allows a listener (pictured here, guide Sarah Gerats) to listen to the infrasound of a Svalbard glacier.

Ice dominated the landscape at each zodiac landing, and we examined it from both an objective and subjective viewpoint. In Objectice, Paula Sćiuk’s photographs address the formation, disappearance, and luminosity of ice. Felicia LeRoy’s Brash Ice Spitsbergen (I & II) and Ablation, captures the substance’s breakage and striations in glass sculptures as well as (in Bergy Seltzer) its rapid melting. Osceola Refetoff’s A Thousand Words for Ice – Multispectral Exposure – Dahlbrebukta reveals ice’s infrared spectrum, a kaleidoscope of color enhanced by filters in the photographic process. Later in the issue, in Subjectice, Ashlin Aronin’s sound piece Smeerenburgbreen, Zoriça Markovich’s The Polar Silk Road and Ice Memory, and Hannah Larrabee’s poems “Dying in Dreams” and “Dahlbreen Glacier” feature the artists’ navigation of their more personal encounters with the cryosphere.

Reading the Landscape finds Hester Blum (in her essay “The World Is Here Too”) feeling out of place in the Arctic, even as the art of Albaugh, Cowan, and Sćiuk featured in this section offers up various visual languages for conning the landscape. In Candace Jensen’s lyric essay “Vox Populi Vox Dei,” the runic rocks of Svalbard animate an intertextual meditation on communication and relationship. This drive to connection spurs the work of Intimacy, as well, notably in the marvelous formal sweep of Sarah Gerats’s diptych Reclining Nude #Erikbreen and in Jia-Jen Lin’s triptychs from Collapsing Landscape. An attention to the forms and expressions of intimacy in Chisholm’s and Larrabee’s poems in this section are in evocative communion with Lockhart’s haunting Felt Essence performance.

The material tools, hardware, and structures that mediated our transit through the Arctic were far from tidy or frictionless. In Frames & Infrastructure Russell’s Salt. Water. Obstruction provides an unexpected portal into photography’s polar limitations, while Terhi Nieminen’s contributions No Easy Way Into Another World and A Defeat Is Better Than Nothing At All, as well as Refetoff’s Cars on Unnamed Road, suggest a wry acceptance of Svalbard’s transportation challenges. This collection concludes, perhaps inevitably, with Loss and Reflection and The Voyage Home. Drea Zlanabitnig’s photo of Esmarkbreen, one of the final glaciers we visited, captures the astonishing instance—only seconds in duration—in which a section of the ice wall turned crimson in the late-arriving dawn. Chisholm’s and Larrabee’s poems, as well as Legge’s photogrammetry in these final entries, offer a different durational sense of that brief blaze of sun, calling our attention to the fragmentary, the atomized, the refused, the edge experience. The collaborative spirit and inherently dialogic nature of the creative processes at work in “On the Cold Edge” were ever attuned to these polarities.

The language of crisis saturates climate rhetoric—particularly regarding the Arctic—and threatens the sustainability of artistic and literary practices, as well. Yet capacious possibilities for new collective modes of survival continue to emerge. Our Svalbard collective’s contributions to Regeneration model how creative work can develop from and respond to conditions of environmental extremity.

Group Portrait, The Arctic Circle Residency, Longyearbyen, ©Osceola Refetoff 2022.

Notes

1. Svalbard Environmental Protection Act, 15 June 2001, https://www.regjeringen.no/en/dokumenter/svalbard-environmental-protection-act/id173945/. [^{^}]