Mirari, Chermsideøya 80° 28.2’ N 019° 54.8’ E

Paula Sćiuk

October 5, 2022, 11:58pm, 4° C, clear, day length: 9:24:27

Aurora Borealis, Venus, bright, low on horizon amid shooting stars, Milky Way

Antigua’s gentle sway, scent of brine, cloud like breath at fore of ship.

Mirari, Ultrachrome ink on polycarbonate, 2022.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

“The World Is Here Too”: Out of Place in Svalbard

Hester Blum

On the evening of our third day the tall ship Antigua reached its farthest north, sailing beyond 80° N latitude—less than ten degrees from the North Pole. We were artists and writers on an expeditionary residency to the high Arctic archipelago of Svalbard, and we thrilled to the idea of voyaging that far north. Even so, before we had embarked in the small city of Longyearbyen (already so far north at 78° N), the expedition guide, Sarah Gerats, had tried to temper our desire to reach 80°. “Sixty-six point thirty-three degrees means something,” she said, referring to the Arctic Circle, the latitudinal line that marks the geodetic point beyond which the sun does not rise or does not set for at least one day per year. The eightieth parallel, on the other hand, does not itself “mean” anything beyond its navigational utility. “It is what we make of it,” Sarah told us, shrugging at our arbitrary ambitions. We nevertheless made a lot of it that night: just as the ship crossed the parallel, under sail, we saw the Aurora Borealis for the first time on the expedition. The ship was so far north that the Northern Lights were to the south of us. We turned our faces to the sky and gaped at the greens and blues and reds of the Northern Lights. The colors flared and spiked like an irregular heartbeat on a monitor.

The next morning we prepared for a landing, which we did twice daily to set up our artistic project equipment or otherwise wander as far as the armed polar bear guides would safely permit. The initial landings in those first few days of The Arctic Circle expedition were in impossibly spectacular spots: on narrow moraines at the restless, calving mouths of glaciers, or in dramatic bays that has been basecamps for hunters and whalers and were now protected sites of “cultural heritage,” a designation applied to human traces that predate 1946, per Svalbard environmental law. (Svalbard has no Indigenous human population but has been intermittently visited or inhabited by resource-extracting Europeans and Americans since the late sixteenth century.) From the prospect of the ship in the afterglow of the Northern Lights, the small northern island Chermsideøya was underwhelming. It presented no outsized landscape features, no visible glaciers or geological marvels, and the scree on the beach looked flat and dull in the cold and wind. But when we climbed out of the Zodiac boats that ferried us to shore, the beach disclosed a two-fold surprise. Nordkappbukta (“north cape bay”) was beautiful in ways that weren’t apparent from the vantage point of the Antigua. We had arrived at a low spit with frozen-over braided streams and the improbably striped and elaborately folded rocks that are characteristic of Svalbard’s geological singularity. The archipelago appears as if in the immediate aftermath of an Ice Age, with Mesozoic to Archean formations—including the coal seam that drove the settlement of Svalbard—clearly visible in the unvegetated landscape. Everyone who visits Svalbard becomes an amateur geologist, so outsized is this weirdness.

Improbably striped rock on the shore of Chermsideøya, Svalbard. Photograph by Hester Blum.

Yet even more vivid than the particolored rocks was the other disclosure on the beach: great, garish heaps of plastic trash, driftwood, fishing nets, metal scraps, and discarded ballast blanketing the shoreline. It was as if we had washed up on a blighted slip in an active industrial port. Jettisoned ship floats, huge spheres of rusting metal, were strung out along the tide line; one artist kicked a smaller yellow plastic float along the sand like a toddler with a ball. Fishing nets of every size and thickness and color were entangled with frozen sand, buried or snagged on other trash and difficult to extract. They made manifest the stock cartoon image of an angler’s bum catch of a tin can or an odd boot. If our expeditionary collective had determined that 80° N meant something to us, what, then, was the meaning of this volume of human garbage this far north, a thousand miles beyond the Arctic Circle? Was the macroplastic any more out of place in Svalbard than we were—and what would “we make of it,” in guide Sarah’s formulation?

Plastic is not Svalbardian cultural heritage. The crew, no strangers to this bay, had packed the Zodiacs with a number of huge nautical-grade trash bags, and told us that if our project needs permitted, we might clear the beach of much plastic as we could. The Svalbard Environmental Protection Act identifies “cultural heritage” as “all traces of human activity in the physical environment, including localities associated with historical events,” and automatically protects “1. structures and sites dating from before 1946; 2. movable historical objects dating from before 1946 or earlier that come to light by chance or through investigations, excavation or in any other way.”¹ I filled a bag up to my armpits with postwar nets, bottles, bins, and one orange safety cone, still neon bright. My enormous trash bag was too heavy for me to carry without help; even in pieces, commercial fishing nets are gargantuan and surprisingly heavy, clogged with sand not readily shaken free. I was far from the only one spending the landing time harvesting plastic detritus, yet there was no visible diminution of plastic.

Marine industrial trash and driftwood at Nordkappbukta, Chermsideøya, Svalbard. Photograph by Hester Blum.

On the beach that day my first feeling was shock and deflation. After the sublimity of the Aurora Borealis, the greens and blues and reds of the plastic garbage were grotesque, and my looping inner monologue was a muttered et in Arcadia ego. The beach cleanup effort helped channel the horror into virtuousness, temporarily, but the scale of the problem kept me from sustaining such cheaply-purchased self-approval.² The trash and logs (Svalbard is treeless) had mostly floated from the north or Siberia—that is, over the Arctic Ocean via the transpolar current—and not from the south or industrial western Europe, as I had presumed. There were some pieces that had Cyrillic writing only semi-effaced, including a blue cap from a Russian water bottle. It was midday but the sun was barely above the horizon; at 80° N in mid-October, the sun circles the horizon but does not rise, which gave the impression that we were the pre-Copernican nuclei of our frozen world. The slant light was golden, a day-long magic hour or permanent sunset. Several artists on the beach clustered around a woman’s wedge sandal, largely intact. Before the shoe was consigned to a trash bag, everyone took a turn photographing it on the patches of ice on the spit. One artist said, “it’s a carbon footprint.”

That awful volume of human-generated inorganic garbage was unsettling, an interruption of the Arctic sublime we had been documenting in the first few days of the trip. But to feel horrified by the spectacle of so much macroplastic in northernmost part of Svalbard, a spot closer to the North Pole than to the Arctic Circle, is to participate in a fantasy of the Arctic as cut off from the rest of the world. “You can’t run away to Svalbard,” Sarah told us; “the world is here too.” She had been talking about Norway’s tightening nationalist management of Svalbard, but I heard her words anew on the junked strand. The world was still with us on the other end of Chermsideøya the following day, where we visited geoglyphs left over the past 125 years by a sequence of scientific and North Pole rescue expeditions. In small white rocks now covered with lichen, members of the Swedish half of the Swedish-Russian Arc de Meridian topographic expedition left their name and the date 1898; the Russian icebreaker that rescued the North Pole-seeking crew of Umberto Nobile’s crashed airship likewise left its mark in Cyrillic and Roman lettering, with a dateline of 1928. From the uninterrupted signs of weathering, these geoglyphs seem to have been undisturbed in the intervening years.

A swastika, too, is visible on that Chermsideøya beach. Left by Nazis who maintained a wartime weather outpost on Svalbard—the last Germans to surrender to Allied forces in 1945—the swastika, formed of white rocks, looks far fresher. Nazi Germany destroyed Longyearbyen during the war; a bombed coal mine, bridging the periodic divide between cultural heritage and human trash, continued to burn for twenty years. The swastika on the northern tip of Svalbard has been dismantled and reformed at various points over the intervening years by those who would either wish to kick it free of protection within Svalbardian cultural memory, or to preserve—as historical caution, as limit case—the violence of its particular brand of heritage.

Even if we weren’t looking for symbols they found us. I turned my back to the geoglyphs and instead walked back and forth among the wildly variable composite rocks that comprised the landing site. There were stripes of quartz that ran through many of the rocks, forming elusive glyphs of their own. In one eye-catching curiosity, the white geological bands in one large grey boulder formed a circle with a diagonal line through it, the symbol of something verboten. I dictated “I want a language that can read the lines in these rocks” to the Notes app on my phone, my fingers too cold to thumb out the words. Before the Zodiacs returned us to the ship I took off my parka and woolen layers and muck boots and did an Arctic Ocean plunge in water so cold it was nearly physically and cognitively incapacitating. I have a memory of body confusion about how to stand up after I dove in, confusion about whether leaving the water was something I should—or even could—do.

Shoreline of Chermsideøya, Svalbard. Photograph by Hester Blum.

The Northern Lights to the south of us, marine industrial trash rafted over the North Pole, a swastika on the strand, my shocked, stripped body in the water: in each instance in that charged 36-hour period in Svalbard I thought this does not belong here. All were out of place. It was hard to situate my feeling of out-of-placeness in the Far North—whether I was understanding myself as a writer, a humanities researcher, a tourist—within the broader context of climate displacement. Humans are dislocated from their homes by the climate disasters (both swift and slow-onset) of an industrialized, rapidly warming earth; the catastrophic retreat of Arctic and Antarctic ice transforms coastlines and coastal communities and has global effects on everything from temperature and albedo to food and shipping networks. I was contemplating, too, how place and time shape what we understand as cultural heritage, whether in Svalbard (which has no premodern human history) or in the broader Arctic (a site of pan-Inuit Indigenous survivance for millennia).

As both a geophysical and an intellectual metric, out-of-placeness bears a history. The visibly out-of-place rocks left behind by retreating glaciers, rocks known in geology as “glacial erratics,” led to the human recognition of past planetary ice ages and thus an understanding of deep or geological time. Erratics are the rocks gathered up by glaciers on the move; when a glacier shrinks or moves on, rocks and other debris are left behind in areas where their appearance and constitution is incommensurate with the region’s native stones. In the early nineteenth century, James Hutton, Louis Agassiz, and Charles Lyell were among the scientists who determined that the anomalous rocks they saw in Alpine valleys and Scottish dales were not borne by an ancient flood, as earlier theories had proposed, but by vast, mobile ice fields. Coming to an understanding of the place and time of glacial erratics allowed humans to apprehend and tell stories about historical climate changes beyond the scales of normal human observation. And there is a long, toxic history of white Western travelers seeking experiences of out-of- placeness for their (our, my) aesthetic consumption and production.

When I stood on the tundra and scree of Svalbard’s marginal land, out of place, I felt an identificatory affinity with erratics—both lithic glacial erratics and the erratic cultural heritage remnants among which we threaded our way. Wandering, variable, uneven, eccentric relative to my geographical and cultural home, I considered a figuration of the “polar erratic”: the cultural forms (ideas, affinities, human and nonhuman life, waste, resources) that are out of place because they have been moved by large-scale environmental change. These displaced things, like the rocks made erratic by the propulsive movement of glaciers, must nevertheless be accounted for in the new landscape formed in the wake of climate disruption. In a moment when contingency, precarity, and errancy are continual states of being, out-of-placeness may be the state of the Arctic, the state of the human in the world now.

*****

Before we boarded the ship one artist asked guide Sarah about a photo in Longyearbyen’s North Pole Expedition Museum that showed garbage all over one shoreline. “That is not garbage,” Sarah smiled, “that is our cultural heritage.” The effect of Svalbard’s Environmental Protection Act, Sarah told us to dramatic rhetorical effect, is that “history does not exist after 1946…we cannot create history anymore.” The clarity of the dateline defining what detritus of culture should be preserved in Svalbard nevertheless does not neatly resolve the muddle of what constitutes trash and what constitutes cultural heritage, whether in the Norwegian Arctic archipelago or elsewhere—the muddle, that is, of what is out of place, what belongs, what is assimilated into the environment.

The first site of cultural heritage at which our Arctic Circle expedition stopped was Sallyhamna in Holmiabukta, where the remnants of a seventeenth-century Dutch whaling station are visible next to a twentieth-century hut established by Norwegian trappers. Crumbling remainders of the yellow bricks used by Dutch whalers to build blubber ovens are scattered around the harbor and surround the modest hut that the Norwegians had built in the 1930s, into which we peeked (it currently contains a cot, a hotplate, a corner chimney, a desk, some maps, a few nautilus shells, a wooden shoe mold, and a fire extinguisher). Near the water’s edge, one of the Dutch try-pots for rendering whale blubber had been appropriated as a human grave. The restless permafrost, however, eventually heaves what is buried to the surface, a polar erratic in situ. We could plainly see mossy human bones, including a tibia and fibula, beside the boards of a wooden coffin that lay on the tundra that brimmed the blubber oven. We were enjoined to be particularly careful with our steps at this site in order not to trod on the bricks, bolt-studded boards, and other infrastructural remains of hunting practices. One of our guides, the deadpan Finnish artist Terhi Nieminen, said “in the Arctic cultural heritage is a jumbled mess, not temples or pyramids.”³ (This line was only slightly less memorable than her equally laconic observation that when in the water, “walruses look like swimming dicks. Old ones.”) When the guides shared their own art with us late in the expedition, Terhi showed us part of her short film Grenada, which documents her attempt to sell a non-running 1970s Ford Grenada in Finland. In the film, Terhi’s mother tells her to unload the car at a junkyard; Terhi responds “it’s in the world now, but if I scrap it it’s just gone.”

The glaciers of Svalbard (“like Switzerland with the sea,” said nineteenth-century British explorer Benjamin Leigh Smith⁴) shaped and crowded both the landscape and our awareness. We were hailed by glaciers that spoke to us insistently and resoundingly, cracking and popping and groaning in the vibrancy of their matter. Most were restlessly calving, fracturing at their termini with thunderous, textured rumbles that sounded like urban garbage trucks making the rounds. Descriptive superlatives were wan and limp in the face of the extravagant sublimity of the glaciers. As a shorthand for the insufficiencies of language we subverted our responses (“urban garbage truck”), standing on deck flourishing our middle fingers at sunrises and sunsets that lasted for hours in the high-latitude low-hanging sun. “This is stupid” we would say as an otherworldly lunar halo or moon dog would appear over a berg-filled bay. “More bullshit” we would say while standing twenty meters from 100 heaped walruses mildly snuffling in front of an impossible horizon of glacial tongues. I tried out this line on Sarah, who raised an eyebrow; perhaps she pitied the impoverishment or cynicism of our expression. Henry Chermside, a British member of an 1873 expedition to Svalbard (and the namesake of Chermsideøya), wrote of a similar affective shift in aesthetic perception: “it is almost with a feeling of awe that one turns away from the outmost (or inmost) threshold of the dread unapproachable tract of frozen ocean”; yet the epic sublimity of the scene soon resolved for Chermside into a sense of the “ordinary.”⁵

Glaciers moved in my ears and behind my eyelids, and when I was not conceding linguistic expressivity to Svalbard’s visual outlandishness I recurred to two words to describe the vast deltas of ice: “encompassing” and “insistent.” I recurred, as well, to a line in Moby-Dick that my mind also subverted. In the moment when cabin boy Pip is abandoned to the sea, his “finite body” is “jeeringly” preserved by a sea that drowns “the infinite of his soul.” Melville writes that Pip experiences an “intense concentration of self” as his “ringed horizon began to expand around him miserably.” In Svalbard, I felt my ringed horizon expanding around me, but my sublime encounter felt more rapturous than miserable. When Pip situationally drowns in Moby-Dick, he glimpses the “multitudinous, God-omnipresent, coral insects, that out of the firmament of waters heaved the colossal orbs.”⁶ In this baroque phrase Melville is suggesting that Pip has witnessed continent formation, according to a nineteenth-century theory that the “colossal orbs” were formed of coral. In other words, Pip has seen deep time in the ocean’s depths. His vision of extra-human planetary timescales registers as madness to the superficial world, however; he cannot communicate what he has seen. I did not need to drown to glimpse the geologic record of deep time in Svalbard, which feels more visible in its scantly vegetated, treeless rockscape than in any other place in the world. Nevertheless like Pip I find, still, that trying to “speak” what I have seen does not translate as sense to my temperate-zone listeners, perhaps a result of the inevitable dilution of my own concentration of self. I had wished for a language to read the lines in the runic banded rocks of expeditionary landing on Chermsideøya. The language to speak Svalbard is more erratic, more fugitive still.

I am usually thinking about Moby-Dick, to be fair, and Melville makes several references to the long history of Arctic whaling in Svalbard, which he knew by the name Spitzbergen. Svalbard (Norwegian for “cold edge”) was called Spitsbergen (Dutch for “pointed mountains”; Spitzbergen in the German spelling) by the original sixteenth-century Dutch voyagers and throughout most of the twentieth century until Norway claimed the archipelago; the largest island in the group is still known as Spitsbergen. In Moby-Dick’s chapter on ambergris, which immediately precedes Pip’s metaphysical drowning, Melville writes about the Dutch whaling outpost Smeerenberg, which becomes an occasion for him to defend whalers against the charge of being smelly:

I partly surmise also, that this wicked charge against whalers may be likewise imputed to the existence on the coast of Greenland [where Spitsbergen/Svalbard was mistakenly located on early maps], in former times, of a Dutch village called Schmerenburgh or Smeerenberg, which latter name is the one used by the learned Fogo Von Slack, in his great work on Smells, a text-book on that subject. As its name imports (smeer, fat; berg, to put up), this village was founded in order to afford a place for the blubber of the Dutch whale fleet to be tried out, without being taken home to Holland for that purpose. It was a collection of furnaces, fat-kettles, and oil sheds; and when the works were in full operation certainly gave forth no very pleasant savor.⁷

I brought all my Melvillean whaling knowledge to bear during our shore landing at Smeerenburg or “Blubber Town,” established in 1619 on Amsterdam Island as a Dutch whaling station. Consider the next paragraph or two my contribution to a Moby-Dickish tradition of historical invocation, allusion, and erratic intertextual promiscuity. In the 1620s and 30s Smeerenburg was occupied by up to 200 whalers representing the Dutch Noordsche Company, a whaling cartel, as well as by rival Danish whalers. Basque whalers operated in Svalbard, too, both as whaling masters hired by the Dutch and Danes and as commanders of their own whaleships. Smeerenburg was a site of shore-based whaling, and the remains of seventeenth-century Dutch blubber ovens or try pots are visible across the plain, their crumbling oven walls still studded with the yellow bricks of contemporary Dutch architecture. There were enough whalers in residence that a brothel may have been established in Blubber Town; today, 100 graves have been identified onsite. When we were there we saw, by contrast, a huddle of 100 walruses, sleek and fat, evocative of Terhi’s swimming dicks. Seventeenth-century reports claimed that Smeerenburg was a settlement of up to 20,000 people, a hundred times the figure estimated by archaeologists and other historians. The settlement was on a broad, flat moraine called Amsterdamøya, a planar difference from the mountains and glaciers that ring the island. A steep hill rises abruptly that once nurtured abundant scurvy grass, so the Dutch called it Søre Salatberget—South Salad Hill. The scurvy grass was not sufficient to have prevented the deaths of seven Dutch whalers who died of the vitamin C deficiency disease during one of the first years of human overwintering in Svalbard.

The year that Blubber Town was established, 1619, is also the year that a ship bearing a Dutch letter of marque, the White Lion, transported the first Africans enslaved in North America. Whether in 1619 or in 2025, it’s hard to disentangle slaughter and cultural heritage, the movement of humans and of human detritus, the preservation or annihilation of what is valued or not valued. This slaughter, too, is cultural heritage. In Svalbard we had to keep off the lushly beautiful tundra, and not only to preserve its fragile growth: the tundra’s richness had been nourished over the centuries by the blood of harvested whales by the thousands of gallons, and thus the blood-fed tundra, too, was cultural heritage. If everything is out of place all the time—if the world, its human and nonhuman life, its inorganic materials, are all displaced by extreme environmental processes—then we need a new way to orient ourselves in relation to everything from macroplastics on a beach to the timelines of ongoing colonial/carbon effects.

The fragmentary, ephemeral, occasional, unstable, out-of-placeness and out-of-timeness of these stories is a story of displacement and re-emplacement by climate processes and temporal distortions driven by extraction logics. But as Jen Rose Smith, Kyle Whyte, Zoe Todd, and other Indigenous scholars have shown, what the white Western world experiences as present climate emergency is only the most present iteration in 1000 years of colonialism and genocide.⁸ To lament the contamination of the Arctic is to indulge in a form of ecomelancholia that, like photographic ruin porn of blighted urban structures, fetishizes extinction and renders it both inevitable and abstracted. When I traveled to Antarctica as a lecturer, for example, the cruise passengers all said that they wanted to see the ice “before it was gone,” a form of witnessing (if not extinction fetish) that remained aloof from the impact of our carbon footprint and other forms of causality. The prosaic industrial trash that carpeted the sand at 80° N was not autochthonous to Svalbard, of course, but an Arcadian Arctic is no more available to the world than Arcadia; the concept of a “pristine” Arctic annihilates its longstanding human histories. Et in Arktikos ego, even in the Arctic, I am there, plastic and other human garbage says again and again. The sites of cultural heritage we visited on Svalbard were all part of the history of extractive energy industries: the Dutch and Russian Pomory hunters, trappers, and whalers of the late sixteenth through early twentieth centuries were succeeded by American, Norwegian, and Russian coal miners in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries; Longyearbyen was named by John Munro Longyear, the American founder of the Arctic Coal Company. For the experience of being there, of being in Svalbard (as it has been for me in Nunavut, in Sápmi, in Antarctica, in Greenland), was not an experience of remoteness or geophysical extremity but instead a sense of a reorienting assimilation into an already-disturbed environment.

In reckoning with what can be assimilated into the world versus what continues to stick up, to disturb the environment, the figure of the polar erratic has stuck with me. When I stood on tundra and scree, amid the infrastructural debris of a so-called pristine Arctic environment, I was reluctant to fetishize some former “untouched” natural wild, a state of nature historically weaponized to excuse or disguise imperialism and settler colonialism. Nor did I want to engage in cynical dismissal of this corruption as always already in place, Siberian plastic at my feet notwithstanding. I have been listening for a language that could account for these misapprehensions, while also having explanatory power for our present moment. I found that language in the rocks of Svalbard, or rather, those rocks formed part of the signs and signifiers that my polar travels have thrust insistently upon me. Polar erratics throw into relief the protracted and changeable temporalities and place-specific knowledges of the polar zones. Polar erratics disturb extinction rhetoric about the circumpolar regions and provide a different register for marking temporal acceleration and dilation, as well as for thinking about Indigenous futurity. Polar erratics might include Arctic cultural heritage sites, ecotourist routes, and the nonlinear timelines of Indigenous climate knowledge. Polar erratics include scholars like me. I am a white settler from the continental US; in my erratic polar travels (and in their heavy carbon footprint) I remain in and out of place, from an academic disciplinary research perspective as well as in my increasing discomfort with the academic imperative to extract and stitch together rough bits of knowledge into a smooth, coherent narrative. In Svalbard, and still today, I wonder what it means to leave those erratics in their very out-of- placeness and organize the world around the new—if already-littered or noisy—environment they create.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Anchorage at Gipsvika

Harley Cowan

Anchorage at Gipsvika, Silver gelatin print, 2022.

©2022, Harley Cowan. All Rights Reserved.

Havhestbreen Glacier

Harley Cowan

Havhestbreen Glacier, Silver gelatin print, 2022.

©2022, Harley Cowan. All Rights Reserved.

Andrée’s Launch Site, Vizrgohamna

Harley Cowan

Andrée’s Launch Site, Virgohamna, Silver gelatin print, 2022.

©2022, Harley Cowan. All Rights Reserved.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Resting Place

Joan Albaugh

Resting Place, Photogravure, 2023.

©2023, Joan Albaugh. All Rights Reserved

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Vox Populi Vox Dei

Candace Jensen

Poemessays / lyric essays are my favorite form of composition, and a monstrous one which feels well-suited to approaching the “topic” of Svalbard. This contribution barely hints at the abundant complexity and cosmic-scale of the lexical, material and mythological significance of Svalbard. I have made a brave, spirited effort to encapsulate it and know that I have failed— the friction of inadequacy of any art or science to contain Svalbard is part of the point. Svalbard here also functions as “any place” which could be made subject to this treatment of expansive meaning. I’m attempting to ask, “Is everything a speculative fiction— us literally wrestling some sort of narrative logic from the immensity of the sublime, material world?” and “What meaning can be derived by an itinerant explorer, a temporary visitor, and will that meaning supply necessary tools for any kind of meaningful dialogue with land, water, flora, fauna and else?”

This poemessay is specifically, a chimæra of a curated, purposefully recursive, repetitive selection of; unedited journal entries from my voyage with the Arctic Circle Residency Autumn 2022 expedition in and around the Svalbard archipelago, as well as adapted, expanded versions of those journal entries, recursive lines from those expanded journal entries worked into essay which took over a year to approach after digesting and assimilating my rich experience on Svalbard, my original poetry as well as found/erasure poetry, and references to literature and mythology which are seminal to my work as well as prescient to my experiences on Svalbard in October, 2022.

Found gull feather and ink markings on mulberry paper, studio image.

Photograph by Candace Jensen, 2024.

Vox Populi Vox Dei

speculative fictions built on observed materialities

///

“Sunday 10/9/22

Near the Reindeer Plain – Hornbaeckpollan (head) in/near Liefdefjorden (Fjord of love)

In the Northernmost bits of the landmasses of Svalbard,

the soft chunk of maroon leaving mauve pigment against quartzite and granites, agate or carnelian littered pink amongst and around

The water is wildest under its surface, tranquil and mirroring above

The cold is the kind of cold that is plain and honest. It does not seep into your bones, or appear blameless at first only to knife you in the back, or sneak into the cuffs of your crinkle sounded coat. It is simply cold, even smilingly so. And so you wear two fully woolen pairs of socks right over each other, and your shoulders are decked in three layers themselves. The shadows of noon are long as dusk. The color of the sunset mingles with the pinks of dawn. Messages are scrawled in stones from over a hundred years ago, and other messages are embedded in stones from millennia past. Some are legible, some are in [Cyrillic] Russian, some are swastikas with soft edges, which perhaps could [should] be dispersed. A message from the mountain is like the algiz rune, the ehwaz rune, the Gebo rune. And the cold and quiet place is a choral arrangement of infinite complexity and absurdity— who could speak all of these languages well enough to know what they say, much less reply to them in kind? Huddling in against the wind which is passing by in shhhushes and whispers, toeing around bits of algae-green plastic ropes and twines caught under sand frozen solid with a message from the fox “I was here, but now I am not. I jumped toes together and then scampered toes in a neat line.” Where are we hunting and what can we eat? How are the[…]”

from a mostly unedited journal entry, recorded on Sunday October 9th, 2022

///

All communication is about relationship. Some speaking happens with a long wait before the sound, or its echo is able to be interpreted— messages across epochs. Language of the land is climatic, geologic, lithic. In Svalbard, it is also the cry of the pre-migratory kittiwakes, terns and gulls, and the rest.⁹

The churn of bear paw. The waltz of ice flowing out of the sky and water twirling up the black and blue walls of the fjords. Almost all of what was being said in Svalbard was unintelligible to us, elemental, atmospheric, epochal languages that they were. And yet each moment we felt the weight of having “received a message.” Not like the world was speaking in tongues to us, dumb as we are. The glossolalia was in the breaths we took—tasting the undercurrent of rot in the water on the day of the polar plunge. The briny sweat of fishing ropes yanked through detritus after being yanked bodily from Norwegian offshore wells. [I thought numerous times— couldn’t we have kept using ye olde fibers? Let the seals gnaw them, as if they were dragons in the deepest well of the world, and the fibred lines were indeed rooting us?]

Language failed us at every turn. Whether to describe what we saw, or communicate how we felt, we tyvekked and woolen-clad numbskulls fell into awkward and frustrated lexical gaps in the face of Svalbard and of our enormous privilege and luck to visit the place, especially under the particular conditions we found ourselves; artists, writers, researchers all playing polar explorer and enjoying our afternoon tea and dessert promptly at 16:00 daily. Witnessing the sublime became chore-like, and even painful. We flipped-off the sunsets and the mysterious fata morgana staring past us at Templehofjorden, we fell mute or became derisive at yet another glacial mass. A cute-aggression of the sublime.¹⁰

Snapshots of apparent glyphs taken by the author during landings on Svalbard’s Northwest coasts and islands, October 2022.

The stark desire to connect, and to understand, kept us ambling. Even in our incomprehension, the mirage of the recognizable hovered in the arctic air. Lithoglyphs resembling stark rune letters jutted from the beach equal parts sand, ice, and pebble. Plastic too. Messages are scrawled in stones from over a hundred years ago, and other messages are embedded in stones from millennia past. Some were legible, Cyryllic or Latin letters, some were swastikas with soft edges. There are love notes, surely, and warning signs. A message from the mountain across the water away from the beach looks like the algiz rune [ᛘ], or the complex promises of the torch [<]. But right in front of us, the lithoglyphs resembling runes spell out something hard to discern with the logic-driven reading brain, on its own; the ehwaz [ᛖ] or perhaps Mannaz rune [ᛗ], the Gebo rune [ᚷ] and Issaz [I] time after time in the rocks strewn about by the sleeping Jotun of ice.

[ᛘ]elk [Maðr is the extension of the soil, great is the claw of the hawk.]¹¹

[ᛗ] human being / humankind

[ᚷ] gift [debt]       [І І І І І І І І] ice ice ice ice ice [baby]

Even if the letters stared at me in clear, stark lines, their meaning— their narrative— eluded me.

The runes aren’t native to this Cold Coast but it’s a proximal system of writing for ‘reading’ the Svalbardian landscape— an endemic glyph alphabet to the pre-Christian, Nordic region, a native script of the lands closest to the archipelago [which aren’t exactly close— 580 miles separate Tromsø from the Southern tip of Svalbard]. Svalbard is riddled with Norse toponyms, approximate nomenclatures from another place of ice, rock and sea. And stuck as we are in the logos of letters, unable to interpret the alphabets of messages scrawled in the elements, by the elements, it’s at least something. And something recognizable in a sublime seascape that constantly threatens to overwhelm the meager processing power of the 3 pounds of meat in my skull, well that’s something. And everything else is something else.

Heimdall gave man the runes, according to the Eddas, but Oðin suffered for them first. And neither of the deities invented them in their mythologies— the runes were revealed. Through trial and suffering, they were earned. The speaking of the great waves of the world couldn’t be heard or recorded without the sacrifice of a life lived in the ridges and patterns of the sky, the sea, the tree, and the dark places of the roots.

There are no trees in Svalbard. No Yggsdrasil. And long before the runes were written in what is now Norway or Denmark, hundreds of miles to the South of the arctic archipelago, we [ᛗ] were further South, climbing trees and solving social challenges orgiastically. How incredible to find ourselves in this place with no trees, a place so inhospitable to unblubbered life? The sheer ingenuity of our survival there matters, whether 500 years ago on the whaling boats, or yesterday, tucked into the wintering huts whittling walruses [walrei]. We may not belong, but who is to say we cannot learn? Who is to say whether we could approximate belonging in such a place. Given time.

The pudgy reindeer swam across the strait or walked across the ice bridge of a time long lost, and their short little legs and furry clover-shaped noses and cheerful stupidity let them thrive on the lichen-blessed rocks and salt-licked pebbles. Their taller kin knock-kneed and expired upon entry, brought over by desperate unblubbered types as they were. The merry corgis of the reindeer world munch on, idle away. Unbothered. Belonging.

And the land itself, the substrate a medley of rocks without soil, the mold-like lichens and small mycoplants squishing, isn’t a place that supports putting down roots. Politically speaking, due to the administration of somewhat-dictatorial Norway, Svalbard is a place that one cannot die. [Ahem, one could definitely DIE in Svalbard, and many have. Taken by cold, by backfiring shotguns, exposure, by the ever-present bears. But legally, death and burial are anathema to the 78th parallel.] More keenly, within the ‘land’ composed of ice and wet, black rock, there are no wriggling roots nor Níðhöggr gnawing upon them. Grasping, fleshy folds of green and orange tell a story of clinging, of mutually assured survival if the growth is low, slow and soft. One builds not cities but connections. The reindeer nibble at the taxonomical rainbows of this Critical Zone¹², where all of life’s dramas happen and miracles are observed, ignored and oft taken for granted.

Snapshots taken by the author during landings on Svalbard’s Northwest coasts and islands, October 2022.

❄

//

“Watching the sky go all cotton candy.”

//

My challenge: bring the complexity of the relationship between sea, sky, light and water to mere pen and paper. Words, making marks, drawing what I see, letting the land and elements talk to me in a way. Drawing out the narrative of the place in the languages being spoken, whether I can understand them or not (mostly not).

As human beings stepping muck-booted feet in the hallowed places of bear, ice, tern and ptarmigan, it falls to us to do this narration, if only to keep ourselves from going insane without the story of our belonging. We don’t belong there. But I don’t mean that in the way it comes across— like everyone should pack-it-out and disassemble the shanties and dog-kennels, art installations and kindergartens, abandon the mines¹³ [okay well maybe we can abandon the mines, keep it in the ground and all]. I mean it takes generations to develop the knack of belonging, to breathe within the thing and respond with the syllables of indigeneity.

It bears stating that, even if over-simplistic, the ‘Cultural Heritage’ standards on Svalbard demand exactly the eradication of signs of culture and life, if made after the world war era. Cultural heritage is the crumbling junk of whaling sites, oil barrels, metal garbage from ships, patient wintering huts for the fur-trade— signs of industry, evidence of extraction, the ephemera of exploitation over the last 500 years. It isn’t, remarkably, the signs of culture that continue to this day, whether rooted in creative work, education, science, or worship. All garbage from the early 20th century and prior is protected. Aghast as this policy made me feel, I was relieved to learn that all types of plastic were blessedly modern enough to not count as cultural heritage, and we could laboriously glean the sands of polymers anywhere we pleased. So, we erased the history of plastic as much as we could during our visit. And yet the coasts of the archipelago still gleam with green and blue fishing ropes, bits of detergent caps, broken brackets, and the occasional seashore toy pail, little yellow flowers blossoming in the moonlight eternally.

The language of color might be one of the strongest cases for our [humankind’s] prolonged witness and involvement in the land of Svalbard. Bifrost¹⁴ after bifrost radiates up from the shifting basalt and ice— little rainbow bridges to tiny halls of the Gods, in each footprint and windmark. Color called to us as we did our shore clean-ups, color sang to us as we marveled at small rocks, the soft chunk of maroon leaving mauve pigment against quartzite and granites, agate or carnelian-esque pebbles littered pink amongst and around ever tinier grains of sand. We were seeing these things as if minerals and ice never existed until we crossed 80°. The context, so new, casting the light of novelty and discovery on all mundane elements. And their colors are communicating, presenting story, vibrating narratives. We catch one or two words and fail to hear the rest. We couldn’t repeat the story later over beers if we tried.

❄

The cold and quiet places in Svalbard are choral arrangements of infinite complexity and absurdity— who could speak all of these languages well enough to know what they say, much less reply to them in kind? Huddling in against the wind which is passing by in shhhushes and whispers, toeing around bits of algae-green plastic ropes and twines caught under pale gray sand frozen solid with a message from the fox “I was here, but now I am not. I jumped toes together and then scampered toes in a neat line.” Speak fox! Hear, fox. The white puff of canid shimmers over crowns of black rock as if hovering. Her movement and her silence, a tongue.

The remnants of anemone, sand-dollar, spiny urchins scuttled and strewn, the wind papering them a bit. The munch, the goo. Rich lipids coalescing and freezing in the hot blue light of the autumn sun burnishing the waves.

“Where are we hunting and what can we eat?” How are the winds changed today from yesterday, from moments ago? The light fades and softens, and darkness grows each day more into night, and the surplus of information is both meaningless and pregnant with meaning, awaiting interpretation. All the asemic writing of the wind and stone and water fueling a heat in the space between my eyebrows, the cavernous zone of my heart.

One day, nearby to Smeerenburgbreen, Hildoggo¹⁵ and the ringed seal spoke with their eyes and with their urgent, padded shoreline tracking— staring at each other, murmuring. Dog of the sea, seal of the land. Genetic echoes bubbling into the desire to play— or ravage— piqued curiosity, inspired amiable cousinship. “Hello! What hunting do you have? Friend or food?” These are the things that matter. And surely in the spaces between, the rich inner worlds of their lowing gave depth impressions, quotes to be uttered months later, inspiration fodder. The two-leggers, blubberless and nose-handicapped as we are, took snapshots of the reunion across evolutionary epochs, and mused about their conversation— “cute!” This is no diminution— aware of our blindspots to their dialogue, we appreciated what we could.

And these all just the snippets from canidae and their cousins, washing over our dumbness. What a relief to not know what is going on, to be relieved of responsibility. But all communication is about relationship. Our dispossession and inability to translate any of it doubles-down on our unbelonging, but cannot completely do away with our complicated longing to be there, and be long there, to relate, and let belonging unspool along with the time, which behaves so strangely so near to the pole, and in such fit states of wonder.

//

“Woke to full moon and dawn sitting across from each other over the ship.”

//

Astral bodies in their revolutions, us stamping our feet and staring at the tides awestruck, as if they weren’t moon-beckoned, feeling the swishing and ebbing within us. Hard not to love the moon, when you see her. Hati and Sköll slowing down, wolf-pawing their predators’ way confidently, closing in on Máni [moon] and Sól [sun] at the shoreline. Tea time (a spongy cake, today). Pleasure cruise. Ragnarok. The end of the world.

❄

All communication is about relationship. Some speaking happens with a long wait before its interpretation can be had— messages telegraphed across epochs. Language of the land is climatic, geologic and lithic, and also the cry of the pre-migratory kittiwakes, terns and gulls. The rich rings of golden orange lichens and spongy flora blossoming on the centuries-old killing fields’ fat-soaked bricks. Almost all of what was being said in Svalbard was unintelligible to us. But the animist glossolalia of all things filled our ears and eyes, noses and mouths. Our skin tingled against the sentience of the place, knowing our unknowing. Aware, dumbstruck, our puny language failed us at every turn. Lexical gaps erupted from yet another gorgeous sunset. Witnessing the sublime became chore-like, and even painful. Until a bear sighting, however far away, binoculars straining, ripped us through yet another ceiling of wonder. Cute-aggression and the cynicism of exhaustion from beauty would fall away as the first snowflakes drifted down from a familiar white-out of the sky, as the fabulously timeless good-ship Antigua smoothly swan-ed into the cove under full sail. This oscillation of total lack of understanding and complete knowing, what comfort that it never idles.

The frozen rivers of time and compacted snow nestled on rock faces like even more sleeping dragons.

❄

Svalbard is no more special than another place, this whole world a whorl of clustered gems in blues, greens and reds in a swirling Black Mass of space. But the sublime is evident there, in Svalbard, precisely because we could not be inured to its features, its speaking. Novelty— and strangeness, became a deified dyad that also braided with the mythologized expectations and stories we brought with us— whether from family histories, academic specialties, the accounts of Nansen & Scott, the histories of extraction, or in my case, the deep love I felt for Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass, and its careful magical-alternative-historical treatment of the polar North, the magic of the northern lights, and the icy isles of the armored bears.

Each padded step I took on ice or stone my heart begged the secret effluences of the world to reveal a panserbjørn, even as I knew in my head that I would never want Sergei or Terhi, our undaunted and jovially over-serious expedition guards, to be put in the position to evacuate us. And even though the reality of Svalbard in the autumn of 2022, a plague year by any measure, buttoned up in musher’s gear and wearing three pairs of socks, was more colorful and joyous in appearance than Pullman made it out to be, I felt silver-tongued and dæmonified even when tongue-tied.

They say the sounds Gods make would be unintelligible and shattering to a human ear, that even angels unmuffled would bring you to your knees… whose sides are the angels on, anyway? I revisited The Golden Compass for maybe the twentieth time, thousands of nautical miles and dozens of latitudinal lines away from the Cold Coast, and felt the prickles of communication happening across time, out of order. When did I visit Svalbard? What is this deja vu of poetry? Prescience of the traveler’s sensations some 20+ years on were embedded in the story written out and published in pulp and ink back in 1995, gobbled up by a 13-year-old as much as the 13-year-olds in the story were gobbled up by the Gobblers…

❄

…the moon was high in the sky, and everything in sight was silver-plated,

from the roiling surface of the clouds below to the frost spears and

icicles on the rigging.

They’re strange, en’t they, bears?

You think they’re like a person, and then suddenly they do something

so strange or ferocious you think you’ll never understand them.

I’ll probably freeze. I been cold down on the ground, but I never been

this cold. I think I might die if I get any colder… Yeah, I will. If I was

going to die, I’d rather die up here than down there, any day.

Slipping and sliding on the rough rocks, away from the waves

and up the beach a little, and found nothing but rock and snow,

heard a noise, something scraping on a rock, and turned to see what it was.

It was a strange bear, clad in polished armor with the dew on it

frozen into frost. Out of the fog cam another bear, and another.

Stood still… clenching… little human fists.

Stumble over the harsh and slippery rocks, following the bear

Every projection and ledge on the deeply sculpted facade was

occupied by gannets and skuas, which cawed and shrieked and wheeled

constantly around overhead, and whose droppings coated

with thick smears of dirty white. The bears seemed not to see the mess,

however.. over the icy ground.

As the temperature rose… so did something else.

The smell was repulsive: rancid seal fat, dung,

blood, refuse of every sort.

Bears! I know too much about them, and they daren’t kill me.

They daren’t do it, much as they’d like to I know, you see.

I have friends. Yes! Powerful friends.

Fights between bears were common, and the subject of much ritual.

For a bear to kill another was rare, though, and when that happened it was

usually by accident, or when one bear mistook the signals from another…

Tested the sharpness of his claws on a fresh-killed walrus,

slicing its skin open like paper, and the power of his crashing blows

on the walrus’s skull (two blows, and it was cracked like an egg).

Tears that froze almost as soon as they formed… Bears, who didn’t cry,

couldn’t understand what was happening to her;

it was some human process, meaningless.

Leaving her little footprints in the snow.

A bounding and a heavy clank of metal, and in a flurry of snow…

What terrible thing?

Bears clustered… white faces filled every window, and their

heavy forms stood like a dense wall of misty white ahead,

marked with the black dots of eyes and noses.

At last he found what he wanted: a firm rock deep-anchored in the permafrost.

Narrow white and red ribs like the timbers of an upturned boat.

A roar like that of all the sea-smooth pebbles in the world in an ocean-battering storm.

The way was long and hard. The interior of Svalbard was mountainous, with jumbled peaks

and sharp ridges deeply cut by ravines and steep-sided valleys, and the cold was intense…

The air here was more penetratingly chill than any she had experienced before;

Fireplaces that burned great blocks of coal, mined and hauled

A wide broken slope of tumbled rocks and ice, where a track had been

laboriously cleared, led up to a crag outline against the sky.

There was no Aurora, but the stars were brilliant. The crag stood

black and gaunt, but at its summit was a spacious building

from which light spilled lavishly in all directions.

She made for the door, and felt the cold strike

her throat like a sword and freeze the

tears at once on her cheeks.

The way was clear, for the moon was high and the light

it cast over the snowbound world was as bright as it had been…

the world of bright silver and profound black.

Out of nowhere a veil of radiance had fallen to hang shimmering

in the northern sky. All those unseen billions and trillions of charged particles,

conjured a radiating glow out of the upper atmosphere.

-found/erasure poem from the pages of Philip Pullman, The Golden Compass [Northern Lights] (New York: Knopf, 1995).

//

Walruses! Glaciers! Whale boiling circles and bricks from the mud of rivers in Holland. An old slaughtering ground covered in 60 +- walruses (walrei) lounging and rolling. Smelly downwind. Grief caught me about [at] the whaling site.

//

❄

Snapshot taken by the author near Ymerbukta, Svalbard, October 2022.

Photograph by Candace Jensen.

I found a lump of ochre, maybe, near a land-accessible glacier named Ymerbukta. A simple scratch test of the rock on a more slate-like stone produced promising results— a mark like a brilliant hand-made pastel. I took it with me, my one rock of the day, coveted and harvested. A witch likes a rock in her pocket. And it had waited there on the pebbled beach so long— the glacial mass had finally yielded it, and as my colleagues cheekily lapped at the glacier’s face and made tasting notes, I recalled a story, but very badly:

In the Poetic Edda, perhaps, Ymir the giant is frozen in ice, but a cosmic, primeval cow— Auðumbla— licked the salty ice to reveal the life within. His body, thawed, eventually produced offspring? The [Norse] Gods? Perhaps they killed him, and his limbs and torso and genitals became the land and the soil and the mountains? His blood caused an enormous, ferrous flood. He was the first life but also the terrain for life yet to be

There seemed to be so much more to the story, that I couldn’t recall, that I couldn’t google, pull open a book and refresh the old remember. The story had to take root in what I saw, and express itself as best my poor memory could chance. No Norwegian Fir myth, but a Charlie Brown tree of a story, which sufficed. Was my mind losing its acuity for literature out here in the sub-freezing temperatures, four pairs of socks wrapped over my chilled toes and my mittened writing hand stiff, lungs whimpering a bit [the rest of me was perfectly fine, toasty and warm, full of hot tea and wrapped in woolens and Gore-Tex]?

Snapshot taken by the author near Ymerbukta, Svalbard, October 2022. Photograph by Candace Jensen.

But that Ymir had lived, and lived outside of context in the chasm of Ginnungagap, and had been released by the compassionate thirst of a primeval cow, and eventually fallen to his heirs— that felt solid enough to share over beers that evening on the ship, circulation to toes restored. I tried to explain the story, the importance of recollecting it on Ymerbukta, what with the revealed ochre, a pigment of long human relationship¹⁶ sitting there on the beach like a giant nestled in a void. And next to the ochre, again the Gebo rune [ᚷ], an offering of plenty but also a pact of debt.

Snapshot taken by the author near Chermsideøya, Svalbard, October 2022.

Photograph by Candace Jensen.

“There was in times of old, where Ymir dwelt,

nor sand nor sea, nor gelid waves;

earth existed not, nor heaven above,

‘twas a chaotic chasm, and grass nowhere.”

-from Völuspá, in the Poetic Edda¹⁷

❄

“Language(s) must then begin to reentangle themselves¹⁸; with each other and with the vast terroir of the senses… whose portals, fecund orifices we may borrow, mimic, to alchemically transform what has stiffened into barriers (perceptual and literal, figurative and physical), back to a state of fluidity and, yes permeability. Any perceptual boundary constituted by a language may be[come] exceedingly porous and permeable— barriers no longer, [then] thresholds and paths of ingress and routes of egress, a veritable gift economy cycling not only information but also meaning, animating the liminal spaces that were previously so concrete… Language(s) may then become animistic, an agent unto itself, Alive. What then? Living sound a compatriot, [an] antagonist, deity or demon? We remember the wind. Directional consciousness, not inert, that rides each swirl and eddy and breeze… Citizenship and solitude are called into question. Bodies never end or begin, but are rather shared and expanded….”¹⁹

Belonging blossoms like a season, and fades, but has the recursive ability to appear again, steadfast like the stones and ice. The speculative fiction of language, sound or script, is an important fantasy borne on the dragonwings of observed, material realities [materialities]. The ontologies of things are numerous, folded possibilities and their numinous languages are echoing parallel, occupying the same spaces in unique spacetimes. My mind, my memory, is full of Svalbard. And when on Svalbard, my ears and tongue and eyes were awash in the polylingual, elemental meanings of the material world I flitted through, but simultaneously I emanated the stories and romanticizations of my homes, my former selves, the novels and songs carrying fortune’s tales and dirges of what may never come to pass, recursive. I was never there. I will always be there. The fox read my footprints, the ocean drank my spit, stories were swapped. A Godless place where Gods walk the earth, and all things are meaning and all languages are spoken but none are understood, but no matter— a Babbel archipelago. An aurora’d kingdom with no kings, only bears.

Vox Populi Vox Dei. Begin again.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Asemic Land Alphabet

Candace Jensen

The Asemic Land Alphabet & Asemic Glyphs for Svalbard are an experiment in responding to glyphs and gestures in the landscape, and creating a collection of possible letters for a written language for, of and about Svalbard. The gestures came from observing landmasses, elemental chemistry in the land, shapes found in rocks and ice, and from evidence of organic life on the archipelago. The alphabet isn’t proscriptive or presumptive, merely playful. No meaning or specific sound is yet attached to the glyphs— any artist would need years or lifetimes there before such depth could be chanced. These drawings were made with stylus and brush made by the artist using materials gathered on landings in Svalbard; a quill made from a pinion feather from an unknown species of gull, and a brush made with found reindeer bristle fur.

Asemic Land Alphabet, Exemplar. Sumi ink and water on suminagashi marbled watercolor paper, marks made with found Arctic gull quill and brush made with found Svalbard reindeer-fur, Approximately 20” × 30”, 2023-24

Asemic Glyphs for Svalbard (A Land without Letters), Ink on toned paper, marks made with found Arctic gull quill and brush made with found Svalbard reindeer-fur, Approximately 13 × 12 (diptych, 1 of 2), 2023

Asemic Glyphs for Svalbard (A Land without Letters), Ink on toned paper, marks made with found Arctic gull quill and brush made with found Svalbard reindeer-fur, Approximately 13 × 12 (diptych, 2 of 2), 2023

Found Arctic gull quill used to make Asemic Glyphs for Svalbard, 2023.

©2023, Candace Jensen. All Rights Reserved.

Slapdash reindeer fur bristle brush made with found fur and repurposed chopstick, used to make some marks in Asemic Glyphs for Svalbard, 2023.

©2023, Candace Jensen. All Rights Reserved.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.

Moonrise, Esmarkbreen

Harley Cowan

Moonrise, Esmarkbreen, Silver gelatin print, 2022.

©2022, Harley Cowan. All Rights Reserved.

The author declares that they have no competing interests.