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Paper short abstract

Arctic undergrounds (permafrost, soils, mines) demand methods beyond single disciplines. We propose collage as a curatorial research practice that brings Indigenous knowledge, urban climate science, and art into productive co-presence—revealing more-than-human urban entanglements in climate crisis.

Paper long abstract

Arctic urban undergrounds expose the limits of single-discipline approaches. As permafrost foundations shift beneath housing, urban soils carry mineral content alongside ancestral meaning, and mining-induced subsidence destabilizes entire settlements, the subsurface becomes a political and more-than-human arena that demands methods able to hold multiple ontologies without translating Indigenous knowledge into external terms.

We propose collage as a transdisciplinary curatorial and art-based research method for engaging subsurface complexity. Drawing on Sandra Harding’s borderland epistemology, collage works through deliberate juxtaposition, assembling urban climate science and remote sensing, Indigenous protocols, governance, and cosmologies, alongside everyday material practices and artistic forms, so that differences can remain visible rather than being forced into consensus.

Developed over five years through four Arctic collaborations, this method operates across scales—from monitoring data and field recordings, through co-produced materials, to public exhibitions. Collage-making in exhibitions and workshops placed, for example, acoustic recordings of thawing ground beside community-governed clay practices; mining-subsidence narratives beside satellite images; and data visualizations beside artist-made materials produced through agreed local protocols.

Crucially, collage can accommodate refusal: some underground knowledge must remain withheld to protect sovereignty and safety. Methodologically, this shifts the project from “including” Indigenous perspectives to redistributing curatorial authority through co-led and Indigenous-curated formats.

For urban research in the climate crisis, collage offers an ethical and epistemological framework that values entanglement over extraction and productive incompleteness over totalizing accounts, revealing what neither engineering, nor anthropology, nor art alone can see about how infrastructural fragility, multispecies life, and Indigenous futures are negotiated underground.