Scenic spaces of isolation1
Sabine Popp Fine Art Department, Bergen Academy of Arts and Design, Strømgaten 1, 5015 Bergen, Norway. Email: [email protected]
Scenic Spaces of Isolation is a body of artistic work grown from two residency periods in the polar night in Ny-Ålesund (2009 – 2010). Focus of the work was the experience of an isolated community in complete darkness, surrounded by a barren landscape under the influence of harsh climate, which isn’t visible but is nevertheless present and palpable. Under investigation was the relationship between physical and mental space on the one hand, and forms of practical solutions for the organisation of daily life on the other. Part of the investigation is complete immersion: Throughout the work, bodily experience and involvement with physical processes is juxtaposed with the examination and application of monitoring systems in the approach to and the understanding of place.
1 This research received funding from The Relief Fund for Visual Artists, Norway
Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
Ny-Ålesund has the world’s northernmost indoor-climbing wall. One can find it on the same road as the former school, which houses the Indian research station today, beside the old post office. The road leads down to the harbour, and the post office would be in use only in the short summer, when cruise ships arrive in Kongsfjorden and tourists need to stamp a proof of their presence so far to the north on their postcards. In winter, the tiny building’s inside walls and lockers can be covered with a sparkling layer of rime. The settlement is located on a plain at the foot of a mountain range at the southern coastline of the fjord. Buildings are spread along roads as in a normal village, but these roads do not stretch more than 4 km altogether and they end before they can reach the horizon of the settlement. There is no road leading anywhere outside of Ny-Ålesund, apart from the nearby airstrip, former mining areas and the station of a cable-car up Zeppelin Mountain. One can get to Ny-Ålesund only by small plane or boat. It wouldn’t be possible at all to place a village like this so far to the north, without the warm currents of the Gulfstream passing along the west coast of Svalbard, providing the necessary conditions only on this side of the archipelago. In the summer, the sun never sets; between November and the beginning of March it does not rise. From mid-December to mid-January the sun is so far below the horizon that there is no difference between noon and midnight – the period of polar night.
Figure 1. Remote Sensing: a play on darkness in four acts, detail, C-print, Titanic Gallery, Turku, Finland, 2011.
Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
The village came into existence because of coal, which was extracted from 1916 until 1962. In the 1970s, Ny-Ålesund became increasingly interesting for fieldwork in the natural sciences and developed into an International Scientific Research Center, which today has much of its focus on climate change. About twelve nations have their permanent stations there; others would use facilities provided by others to conduct specific research in limited periods. Five stations have personnel on site throughout the whole year. The organization and administration of the overall infrastructure is provided by Kings Bay, the Norwegian state company, which in the early days of the village had responsibility for coal mining.
Figure 2(a), (b). Remote Sensing – a play on darkness in four acts, detail, C-prints, Titanic Gallery, Turku, Finland, 2011
The project started as a photographic search for scenic spaces – stage-like artificially lit outdoor areas where actors already had left or not yet entered – to emphasize the unreal feeling of existence on these latitudes (Figure 1). The polar night creates a natural Black Box theatre: objects, bodies and movements seem constructed and staged. Isolated from a larger context, they invite questioning – about their purpose, about their being and acting. In the development of the project, focus shifted from the empty space to actions carried out in space, to the engagement of bodies with their physical surroundings (Figure 2(a), (b), 3). The work responds to and works with the friction between the absurdity of the body’s geographical location and the built-in normality of a village with its domestic infrastructures and daily routines. I approached this continual negotiation from different angles, attending to the work, meals, leisure, infrastructure, power supply, communication systems and emergency exercises that define life in this extraordinary village.
To conceptually and physically grasp the place, I extended my physical experience of Ny- Ålesund also to the network of sites that sustain it. In December of 2010 I got on board of the last cargo ship of the season from Tromsø on the Norwegian coast to Ny-Ålesund. Rather than follow the usual course of a flight, this slower movement allowed me to internalize some of Ny-Ålesund’s relations – its supply chains and data infrastructures – as a corporeal geography, an embodied experience of distance.
Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
Figure 3. Remote Sensing – a play on darkness in four acts, detail, C-print, Titanic Gallery, Turku, Finland, 2011. Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
The gathering of material, conducted with lens-based equipment (photographic and video camera), sound recording devices, notes from dialogues, and the collecting of images and text from archives, led to a public installation in Longyearbyen, the main settlement at Svalbard in 2009 (Figure 4), and a show in a gallery space in Finland in 2011 (Figure 1, 2(a), (b), 3, 5). I regarded my apparatuses as belonging to the same category as the observing technology on site. I questioned their use in the same way as I do regarding Ny- Ålesund’s technology. What can actually be mediated?
Figure 4. Future’s Past (Against the Anesthetic of Familiarity), detail, videostills from nine loops for a 72-hours public installation, with videoprojection and sound in former coal mining building, Longyearbyen, 2009.
The core of investigation concerns performances of people, objects and matter in the framed space of a locality under specific geographical conditions. As the affective and sensuous dimensions of life in a scientific station resist recording, I carried out a number of physical tasks, including repetitive walks along random lines in the researched area, building of constructions and experimenting with (technical) equipment (Figure 6(a), (b)). These actions don’t need to end in any specific result. The tasks are the goal, with the experience that appears alongside them. These actions have the capacity to create ruptures in the local daily life and to open up for dialogue. Fellow residents would find themselves audience and collaborators alike. The work is driven by the attempt to touch upon issues of the human condition, but without overemphasizing any individual’s narratives. Through a selection of fragments from dialogues, discussions and archival material perspectives blur into each other to open up for a variety of possible meanings.
I choose to look at technological devices in two ways: as simple tools extending the body to improve its abilities, or as objects placed between the body and an immediate experience, creating a distancing layer. The more complex the technology, the greater the distance. Maybe. One can see it the other way around: Technology enables the researcher to come much closer to the core of physical conditions than would otherwise be possible, by moving the point of perspective outside the body. But focus of attention thereby shifts from the object of investigation to the tool of observation as the physical reality actually related to – until one gets so used to applying the tool that it’s not seen any longer. As long as it works. In this way function and disfunctionality as such also can provide information on given physical conditions.
Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
Figure 5. Remote Sensing – a play on darkness in four acts, overview first act, videoloops and sound, Titanic Gallery, Turku, Finland, 2011.
Figure 6(a), (b). Wrong Time Wrong Place, on-site installation, videoloops and sound, Ny-Ålesund 2009.
Popp A Home for Science, Social Studies of Science 46(6)
In contrast to the extreme extension of technology in Ny-Ålesund, the pure bodily experience is an important one, even in scientific research: at the local station of the Norwegian Polar Institute, analog weather observations, called synoptic observation, are performed in addition to the automated monitoring system. This is done three times a day, exactly at the same time (UTC) as on any other station in the world, where these observations are carried out. Observation becomes important where the object of observation can’t be measured: the formations of clouds, their shape, amount, height and accumulation speed, the specific visual quality of fog or precipitation are all recorded (written down) and sent as a codified system to centers collecting meteorological data. The task seems impossible – or at least difficult – in darkness. Conversations on this issue pointed to the importance of heightened awareness of the whole body for surrounding conditions at any time of the day, to develop the ability to make statements about specific conditions at the moment of observation – even without sight.
Long term physical engagement with surroundings, based on a structure of everyday routines, and seen as a two-way interaction between body and space, seems obsolete against the backdrop of ever growing mobility of bodies, or the accessibility of places via transferred images or data. Distance and isolation are likewise mental constructions as physical entities. The body can experience distance by overcoming it, but the mind is limited in fathoming distance meanwhile staying in one place. Ny-Ålesund is remote and very accessible due to infrastructure and technology. But the present body has access to information of a different kind – in direct encounter with matter and other beings.
Sabine Popp is visual artist, born in Germany, and currently living and working in Bergen, Norway, where she’s assistant professor at the Academy for Art and Design. She gained her MA degree from the same school, after having accomplished studies there, at the University of Barcelona and at the Glasgow School of Arts. Since then she has based her practice mainly on site-specific, temporary projects, following her interest for life in the High North, with residencies in Iceland, Greenland and Finland. She has been involved in cross-disciplinary projects and shown work in Scandinavia, Slowakia and the UK.
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