There Is Always Something More Important. Mariele Neudecker

Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

There is always something more important.

Mariele Neudecker

Some notes from, a month long trip in North West Greenland in May 2012, at times alone and at times with writer Gretel Ehrlich, Inuit subsistence hunters Mamarut, Mikeli and Gideon Kristiansen, Berta Dalager, around Qaanaaq, Hvalsund - Ikerssuaq and Siorapaluk. Later with painter Rosie Snell - around Ilulissat, Disko Island and Uummannaq.

Another remote field-station…

Apart from calling some places and spaces ‘field-stations’, my knowledge of these facilities is rather limited. It is based on short visits and brief experiences of abandoned, no-longer or rarely functioning ‘operating theatres’ of particular kinds of sciences. Field-stations are: outposts, often housing precious archives, evidences of work, in the field. How do you define the characteristics of different types of fieldwork undertaken by natural scientists, anthropologists and artists, one might ask … as they allow for the creative part of any field of research, to find the most interesting questions that are to be asked, based on evolving answers?

Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

We walked off the boat that took us there, after various flights and eight hours of negotiating endless amounts of icebergs in all shapes and sizes, between Ilulissat Icefjord and Disko Island. We even saw some Greenland Whales.

The large group of students had all left the day before – leaving a trail of scientific instruments, work clothes, papers and bits and pieces behind, in a rushed departure from the station. Did they go by helicopter? Or maybe the same boat we came on? I can’t remember.

‘Arctic Station, … the oldest research institution north of the Polar Circle’ … sounds familiar, and tells a story in itself. I suppose, there are so many of these stations, especially north of the Polar Circle. This one was founded in 1906, by Danish botanist Morten Porsild.

Ole Stecher, the current station manager, easily spent five hours, patiently and generously answering most of our questions about the station and his position there. The Arctic Station’s focus always was botanical and zoological research, and climatic measurements. Long-term monitoring. Some of the dry flowers in the cupboard were over 100 years old, never needing special storage, due to the dry air. The flowers, the papers, the shelves, the cupboards, the little room, … all at the back in the basement of the station on the edge of the island far out, off the West-coast of Greenland.

Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

Wandering and wondering in the labs, I felt like drawing all this. These archived plants, and the partly missing or outdated maps, but: I never did. Not there anyway.

I felt inspired, by walking into this time capsule, finding so many fragments of another world, as much as … leaving it behind again, with some more photos in my camera. Later, in the seclusion of my studio, I recollected, drew and overworked some of those images, printouts of the ‘Arctic snap-shots’ that I took away.

There is always something more important (2012) Mixed media incl. fiberglass, pigment, plywood and two channel looped video on monitors (installation at Museum Haus Sinclair, Bad Hombug, Germany. ALTANA Kulturstiftung gGmbH)

Lamentations …. or: The escape from the ‘grid’

When travelling to and in the Arctic, the experience is one of heightened awareness of our limitations of seeing, perceiving and getting a full view. The light, the open space the sense of being ‘up’… above the highest and maybe steeper bend of the globe, is unfamiliar and overwhelming.

On Day One of my arrival in Qaanaaq I was told: ‘You’ll either love it or hate it here … people get addicted to the open space or frightened away and never come back.’ I long to go back. I long to go back, to untangle the overwhelming scenery of this place from its ‘true nature’ within, … just a bit more. Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

Recent Futures (2012) - 24 Giclée prints, crayon (detail)

Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

There won’t be any ‘Northern Lights’ to look out for – it’s the wrong time of year and anyway, we are too high up North. I am not too worried. I am already paranoid that I will come back with Arctic ‘calendar’ pictures ….

Somehow the sockets of my eyes suddenly seem to be too small and close, too tight and deep. I want to have 360-degree vision. Needless to say, my camera lenses frame and crop everything way too small and too tightly.

I wanted to come this far to find and see a ‘nature’, beyond landscape. Do I? Did I? Was it not inhabited and cultured, continuously since 4000 years, and therefor no longer ‘untouched’? … And it takes a while to adjust, to take in how people live in extraordinary ways, as they seemed to have done forever. Then I realize that, of course, I wanted to see human relationships to the ‘landscape’ and nature. The people up there are indigenous Inuits, occasional Danes, and international teams of scientists or camera crews (most likely making documentaries on climate change, … attempting to portray how the Arctic is changing, holding up mirrors, for us to see ourselves and our behavior towards our environments, with a bit more clarity).

Nature shows its real power with the weather and the climate, and the changes in both. The Inuit cope; they still live a hunting culture: not 100%, but there is still a life style that is hardy, resilient and reluctant to ‘give in’ to certain things like snowmobiles, even while there is a willingness to adopt technologies such as mobile phones and digital cameras.

Neudecker A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)

Before I went on my Arctic trip, I had exchanged a few emails with a scientist on a marine expedition – on board the RRS James Cook, in the South West Indian Ocean near Antarctica. After I got back from the hunting trip in Greenland, I learned that even Mount Everest has G3 mobile reception, since October 2010. There are only a few places on this planet that are not ‘wired up’, where the air might be free of communications and signals. This was one of those places and maybe that was my incentive to go.

In this sense I truly managed to get away, for five days anyway … and there were six of us. No reception, no grid, no charge. …. Was it really just nature? The local Inuits, or rather their ancestors, used to hunt on the sea ice for several more months per year. For years, they have not been able to. Something is wrong … and getting worse.

I am encouraged to speculate even more about what defines the line between nature and landscape, and my contemplations on how to define the contemporary sublime are ongoing.

Perhaps it was a romantic act of breaking my own tradition of research that is looking at representations, photographs, paintings and other data. Maybe this time I was seeking the subjective experience that was so fundamental to the Romantic Sublime of the 19th century.

Mariele Neudecker (born 1965, Germany) lives and works in Bristol, UK. She uses a broad range of media, including sculpture, video and installation, and works around notions of the Contemporary Sublime. Recent projects include a solo exhibition at Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne, Germany, a major solo retrospective ‘Hinterland’ in Trondheim Kunstmuseum, Norway and Heterotopias and Other Domestic Landscapes, HOUSE, Brighton Festival. Recently she participated in a group exhibition, ARCTIC, Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark.

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