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- Convenors:
-
Isabelle Gapp
(University of Aberdeen)
Jonathan Peyton (University of Manitoba)
Peder Roberts (University of Stavanger)
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- Formats:
- Panel
- Streams:
- North & Nordicity
- Location:
- Room 18
- Sessions:
- Friday 23 August, -, -
Time zone: Europe/Helsinki
Short Abstract:
This panel considers the transformation, modification, extraction, and destruction of northern circumpolar and Arctic environments through art and visual culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century.
Long Abstract:
What stories have been told about Arctic environments in the history of visual culture? During the nineteenth century, the common narrative of Arctic environments was one untouched by humans, a time typified by Anglophone polar exploration of “barren” and “unknown” lands and waters. It was a time of capital expansion, where global “time-space compressions” encouraged Arctic explorations for exploitation, transportation, and scientific knowledge.
In this panel we are interested in how the transformation, modification, extraction, and destruction of northern circumpolar and Arctic environments has been documented within art and visual culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century. Focusing on Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and makers, we aim to bring ecocritical and landscape art history and visual culture studies into the larger conversation of environmental history, and vice versa. Painting, photography, film, and printmaking, alongside the huge diversity of Indigenous artistic media, all offer the means through which to engage with historic concerns of Arctic extraction. With this, we are also mindful of Stephanie Rutherford’s injunction to not read Indigenous histories, cultures, or knowledges extractively.
Foregrounding interdisciplinary perspectives, we welcome papers from art historians, visual and material culture historians, geographers, and environmental historians whose research encompasses the North American Arctic, Greenland, the Nordic Countries, or Russia, with a particular emphasis on Indigenous communities around the Circumpolar North. Paper topics may include, but are not limited to: deforestation, hunting and fishing, whaling, the fur trade industry, mining, oil and gas industries, military installations, geopolitical conflicts, scientific expeditions, and ethnographic fieldwork.
Accepted papers:
Session 1 Friday 23 August, 2024, -Paper short abstract:
This paper will explore the histories of two ethnographic collections, contending that failure to recognize the specific interpersonal relations that led to their formation allows them to continue to exist as untroubled and unanalyzed “facts” of “precontact” Arctic Indigeneity – fabricated origins.
Paper long abstract:
In this paper, I will explore the histories of two ethnographic collections. I will contend that a failure to recognize the specific interpersonal relations that led to the formation of both allows them to continue to exist as untroubled and unanalyzed “facts” of “pre-contact” Arctic Indigeneity – fabricated origins. One, the Barrow Arctic Collection at the British Museum, was made for John Barrow Junior by Royal Navy personnel participating in the search for John Franklin in the mid-19th century. The other was made by Robert Peary for the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH) in the North of Greenland in the 1890s. Both collections, created roughly 40 years apart, are products of influential imaginaries of the Arctic region constructed around Franklin and Peary, key figures in the history of Arctic “exploration.” Further the Barrow Collection, amassed at the instruction of an Arctic enthusiast who never ventured there himself, and the Peary Collection, made at the behest of important personalities in early American anthropology, illustrate the roles influential figures and their networks played in the formation of early Arctic collections. I will share preliminary findings of work in archives held at AMNH, the British Museum, the British Library, and the Royal Geographical Society. Considering historical correspondence among collectors, collections records, and exhibition notes alongside present-day display documents, I will illustrate how the exhibition of these collections has obscured and continues to obscure the multiple meanings and values they hold as they are used to convey overly simplistic narratives of Arctic life.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores gendered more-than-human tensions in Nansen’s Farthest North. Considering its compositions with animal centered approaches, it examines evolving, gendered relationships between sledge dog and polar bear, and considers more-than-human trauma to find where our histories fall short.
Paper long abstract:
The relationships between polar bears and the sledge dogs which hunted, feasted on, and played about them are vividly captured in the visual and written record of nineteenth century circumpolar expedition logs and memoir. Indeed, the compositions in these works convey in terms unrecordable by language the disagreements and dynamics between the animals who filled roles from “domestic companions” to “monsters”, as well as the settler gender roles which European expeditionists ascribed to them. Scholars have made laudable efforts in disentangling the settler-colonial legacies encapsulated by the relationships between sledge dogs and the European polar expeditionists who led them, and considerations for the canids’ entanglements with white masculinity have shed light on examinations of extractive colonial expeditions in Northern frontiers. Similarly, consideration for the transitioning gender roles recorded in artistic and literary impressions of animals — domestic and wild — throughout late nineteenth century art and media have inspired exciting intersectional work. However, while more-than-human relationships are perhaps nowhere more evocatively recorded than in visual culture, direct application of animal-centered approaches to ecocritical consideration of the circumpolar region have yet to relate extensively to settler gender dynamics. Building on previous work, this paper explores the gendered tensions underwritten in Nansen’s Farthest North, taking its visual compositions in concert with more-than-human frameworks. In problematising the evolving relationships between the gendered sledge dog and the gendered polar bear, it considers the extraction of more-than-human trauma alongside settler human attempts to understand where our histories fall short.
Paper short abstract:
This paper traces the history of Blomstrandhalvøya, an island of solid marble in Svalbard that was, in the early nineteenth century, represented as at once a sublime, ‘otherworldly’ space and a place for potential resource extraction and colonization.
Paper long abstract:
In the first decades of the twentieth century, the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard was recast as a site of mineral possibility. This paper examines one effort at industrial extraction there: a marble quarry which would, according to the Northern Exploration Company (NEC) that ran it, supply the world with marble of unparalleled quality and beauty for generations. The paper interrogates how Anglo-American perceptions of the Arctic played out at Marble Island: on the one hand, the Arctic as a sublime, ‘otherworldly’ space, on the other, the Arctic as a place for potential resource extraction and colonization. These stories were woven together by the NEC through two visual mediums: evocative images of Marble Island, and polished samples of the marble itself, both of which circulated beyond the polar North.
These notions of Arctic nature fused in a myth explaining the failure of the quarry: the permafrost-infused marble crumbled as it was sailed south, ‘resisting’ human efforts at commodification. The frameworks are both entangled and obfuscating: they ‘sublimate’ the Arctic environment and diminish attention to the hard materiality of ice and rock. That Marble Island failed makes it a useful case study not because it is a site of nonhuman agential resistance, but because it allows us to pry apart the historical impulses that have constrained the deep history of the Arctic to a shallow story of sublime capital, and interrogate how and why the visual extraction of Marble Island was, for a short time, such a powerful currency.
Paper short abstract:
Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation extracts one of the world's highest concentration of iron ore on Baffin Island, some of which is destined for low carbon steel manufacturing in Germany. This multimodal project points a lens at Baffinland's corporate HQ to locate Arctic mining activity in Toronto.
Paper long abstract:
Baffinland Iron Mines Corporation extracts some the world's highest concentration of iron ore from Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago. Some of the ore is destined for German steel manufacturers developing low carbon steel in a hydrogen-based steel manufacturing process that requires high grade iron ore. Indeed, the iron ore extracted on Baffin Island is touted as key in global efforts to transition to a carbon-free steel manufacturing process, which currently accounts for 25 percent of global industrial emissions. This multimodal project is comprised of photo and video documentary images and a critical paper. The images look at Baffinland's corporate HQ to locate Arctic mining activities in the southern suburbs of Toronto while the paper critically examines global efforts to create "green" steel. The images specifically look at the corporation's departments, such as sales, marketing, engineering, and communications, as the location of extractive activity while the paper unpacks the colonial dynamics at play in which resources continue to be extracted from the periphery for the benefit of a core and to the detriment of local communities, regardless of its green qualities. This project is part of a dissertation that takes Toronto, a southern city in Canada, as an Arctic landscape, given its outsized influence over Arctic issues.
Paper short abstract:
This paper explores how the 1960 film Land of White Alice sold US civic groups on the colonial logics of conquest and contamination undergirding the construction of the vast Alaskan "White Alice" communication system, and the short-term utility and long term environmental degradation that followed.
Paper long abstract:
In the early 1960s, the film Land of White Alice circulated among U.S. school children and civic groups, promising glimpses of a remote Arctic frontier referred to as "the great land." The film impressed upon viewers the need for "White Alice," the code name for a joint Air Force/Western Electric communications system, to protect the entire nation from its Cold War adversaries. Posited as a solution to what the film called the "communication barriers" of Alaska's environment, Land of White Alice aimed to generate consent and consensus regarding the urgent military-industrial need to envision much of Alaska as terra nullius, a largely empty Arctic space to be conquered in the name of military-industrial communication. "The purpose" of imposing this technology on the environment, White Alice's official literature rationalized to audiences, was "to let Alaska speak."
Drawing on the film as well as the accompanying Western Electric-produced booklet and additional official educational material, this paper explores how the Alaskan environment in this cinematic narrative is wrapped up in the colonial logics of conquest and control that frequently rendered the vast and varied environments of Alaska empty of not just Alaska Natives but often devoid of ecosystems entirely. I conclude by contrasting such narratives with the short term utility of these "White Alice" sites, which were considered obsolete within two decades, and have long since become contentious, litigated centers of significant environmental pollution that disproportionately impacts Alaska Natives.
Paper short abstract:
The presentation will explore how visual representations of Finnish nature are present in government materials, tourism platforms, and social media. These representations symbolically exploit the forest and shape the expectations and practices of people of immigrant backgrounds.
Paper long abstract:
Finnish forests have long held a central place in the national identity, portrayed as serene spaces of pristine nature, abundant with natural beauty and recreational opportunities. These representations, however, are often rooted in cultural and historical narratives that may not align with the experiences and expectations of immigrants who have recently arrived in Finland. This symbolism is visually communicated and exploited within the framework of immigrant integration. For example, government materials, tourism platforms, and social media platforms construct an idealized version of Finnish nature. The research employs a multi-species ethnographic approach to explore how immigrants perceive and engage with these representations. Finnish government information packages for immigrants highlight the symbolic use of nature as ‘pure’, ‘clean’ and ‘tranquil’ to create an idyllic and embellished version of Finland (Bodström, 2020). The nonmaterial resource extraction of Finnish forests happens primarily through tourism and national promotion.
Based on ethnographic fieldwork research, this presentation will explore how these representations shape immigrants' understanding of Finnish society, their connection to the Finnish landscape, and their expectations for coexistence with local flora and fauna in the context of climate change. During the integration process, immigrants are encouraged to embrace Finnish nature and participate in the activities in nature. In the presentation, I will explore how visual representations impact immigrant experiences, affect cultural exchange, and challenge prevailing stereotypes. I will focus on the interaction between nature’s visual representations, immigrant experiences, and the broader societal landscape, to highlight the dynamics surrounding immigrant integration in the Finnish context.
Paper short abstract:
Hunting, herding, space exploration; mining a vein of iron ore; reindeer's eyes dissected to study the body adapting to light; a camera photographs the sky—every minute of every night. Elements of extraction surface throughout my work and often remind us where the earth is in relation to the sun.
Paper long abstract:
"Arctic Scandinavia, December 2014: The sky shifts into darkness—each day, eight minutes of sun are lost, until there is no sun left to lose. Still, the darkest days are those spent traveling into the earth."
In 2014-15 I began an ongoing project, working alongside scientists at the Swedish Institute of Space Physics, Sami reindeer herders, and a neuroscientist who studies seasonal adaptations in the eyes of Arctic reindeer. Until There Is No Sun is a body of work consisting of photographs, videos, and 19th century maps of human and celestial bodies.
Ten kilometers west of the space institute lies the town of Kiruna—a town now famous for an iron mining project so big and worthwhile it forced the migration of humans and infrastructure away from the town. I walked alongside hunters and reindeer herders, story tellers, scientists, miners, healers—all of whom were of Sami blood; I worked with an image archive from an automated camera that has photographed the night sky for over 60 years; I dissected the eyes of Arctic reindeer with a scientist who studies a structure that adapts to light and changes from summer to winter. Elements of extraction surface throughout my work, revealing relationships and dualities: of light and seeing, earth and sky, science and myth, human and more-than-human nature.
Link to images — http://www.clarebenson.com/Until-There-Is-No-Sun