Future North Vardø Future North Vardø FUTURE NORTH — VARDØ ON THE PAMPHLET SERIES ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Publication details Future North — Kola The research project Future North ON FUTURE NORTH 9. CO-CREATING A CULTURE Future North — Svalbard has been funded by Research → 7 OF CARE THROUGH THE Edited by: Future North — Vardø Council Norway (RCN) VARDØ HUB Andrew Morrison Janike Kampevold Larsen This is one of three pamphlets that Future North is grateful to Vardø 1. INTO THE FUTURE Morrison, Bertheussen Peter Hemmersam are outcomes of the Future North Restored, Jørn Jensen, Eva Lisa Andrew Morrison Skrydstrup, Kampevold project at AHO. They are designed Robertsen, Maria Bertheussen → 11 Larsen & Dimaki-Adolfsen Editorial assistance by: to complement more formal Skrydstrup for collaboration. Vlad Lyakhov research outputs as well as present → 105 material from the territories and ter- 2. RUINS IN REVERSE Cover photos by: rains the project team and adjunct Janike Kampevold Larsen 10. FUTURE VARDØ — Annie Breton members travelled and from where Janike Kampevold Larsen we were based. The pamphlets offer → 20 IMAGINARY CITY Jérôme Codère a mix of materialities and media, Morgan Ip Martin Danais showing experimental writing, 3. TRANSECT WALK → 119 student projects and reflections on All large scale photos by research. Peter Hemmersam Janike Kampevold Larsen unless → 32 11. WATER WORDS indicated otherwise On NODE Berlin Oslo: Narratta NODE is a Berlin- and Oslo-based Pamphlet series design: design studio founded in 2003 by 4. WALKING THE HIGH WIRE → 124 NODE Berlin Oslo Anders Hofgaard and Serge Rompza. William L. Fox The studio works collaboratively → 50 CONTRIBUTORS ISBN 978-82-547-0328-1 across various media for a diverse range of clients from individuals to → 130 Published by OCULS at AHO: institutions, focusing on print, 5. METHODS FOR PROBING www.oculs.no identity, exhibition and interactive FUTURES: VARDØ www.aho.no work. Besides studio projects, NODE gives lectures and holds workshops Henry Mainsah An outcome of Future North: at art and design academies. → 54 www.futurenorth.no 2019 © Future North 6. SAVOUR THE PAST, TASTE THE FUTURE Brona Ann Keenan and Miles Franklin Hamaker → 56 7. VARDØ TRANSFORMED Thomas Juel Clemmensen → 70 8. STUDENT WORKS: Vardø Transformed → 72 REVITALIZATION OF ALLMENNING Akie Kono → 74 UNEXPECTED TRAJECTORIES / VARDØ’S TRANSIENT HERITAGE Annie Breton → 76 TENDING THE LANDSCAPE Élisabeth Baril → 92 UNCOVERING AND DISCOVERING RETHINKING CULTURAL HERITAGE MANAGEMENT IN VARDØ Jérôme Codère → 96 HARBOUR(ING) HISTORY Heidi Marja Komonen → 100 4 5 On Future North On Future North The Future North research project studies the relationship between social development and landscape change in the Arctic. The main regions for the research are the Kola Peninsula, The Norwegian Arctic town of Vardø, and Svalbard. The project is funded under Research Council Norway’s SAMKUL programme, one that is particularly concerned with the prospective social impact of academic research. Central to Future North is to study places that are trans- forming as the Arctic region is under pressure from several transformation forces, including climate change with subsequent intensified interest from the extraction and transportation industry as significant drivers. As the polar ice cap is melting, and the summer sea ice recedes, areas for oil exploration and new sea routes are being planned. 6 7 On Future North 8 9 On Future North 1. Into the future 1. Into the Future Andrew Morrison Vardø lies just off the far northern coast of tor and critic of practices and inquiry into Norway. As a low lying island it has had a futures knowledge (Celi & Morrison 2017). long history of habitation, fishing and trade. The chapters that follow are offerings It’s strategic position has always been a key towards understanding the far north, the part of its identity and daily life. The entries Arctic, and just one part of it, the island in this pamphlet tell more about its past, town and community of Vardø. Once a present and futures. They do so from the vibrant fishing town, over the past three perspectives of a research project called decades in particular Vardø has lost most of Future North, located at the Oslo School of its catch, as it were, due to fishing restric- Architecture and Design and funded by the tions and changing practices and facilities. SAMKUL Programme of the Research Coun- Vardø is tethered to the land by a road tun- cil of Norway. Headed by Associate Profes- nel, served by two island harbours and one sor Janike Kampevold Larsen of the Insti- onshore. It boasts a local airport linking the tute of Urbanism and Landscape, the town to a national and international network project investigated the complex changing of global travel, tourists flying in to watch conditions and climate of cultural land- birds and live king crabs crawling their way scapes of the Arctic in the age of the in daily shipments flown to Japan. Much Anthropocene. As Kampevold Larsen and happens in this one small Arctic location; it her co-author Peter Hemmersam write in is a venue for many activities and perhaps their Introduction to the project’s major for both theoretical and applied research book publication: into changing landscapes and landscapes of change. It’s a space of possibility, of explor- In the Future North project, we have ing potential but within a setting that has studied territories that are imbued with a had to find ways to survive the loss of the promise of future potential. Traditionally main livelihood of fishing and to keep they have been regarded as resting asserting its long and proud history. beyond the well-known world, and have been particularly mythologized due to To speak of the future as an outsider in such their remoteness. To us, the circumpolar a space is to seem trite, short-sighted Arctic is a laboratory for investigating almost, unaware of how difficult it must landscapes in the making — their materi- have been to survive winter seas and to find ality and appearance as well as their ways to reconfigure a 20th century munici- cultural layers.’ (Kampevold Larsen & pality. Yet the future is already sown in the Hemmersam, 2018). present. The present spawns possible, potential and putative activities and events, Vardø is one of the three landscapes, along programmes and plans because it has to be with the Kola Peninsula and Svalbard, facing imagined. Futures Studies as a transdiscipli- the Barents sea that were selected for study nary field is undergoing changes of its own of relations between people and the changing as the future under the duress of our own conditions of climate and context. While the making through dependence on fossil fuels past and the present matter enormously in and models of ‘development’ that are sys- such an investigation, the project also looked temically unsustainable. Suddenly Vardø toward the future. Uncertain yet filled with seems like an island set out almost into the projections. Uncharted yet only navigable future, in the Barents Sea, a speck on the from given insights and tools. Always just global map of change, yet situated right at beyond reach, tantalising in its promise, the heart of changing Arctic landscapes and always potentially utopian and dystopian. Yet, seas, an island still yet metonymically all of for a university of architecture, urbanism, ours as we begin to more actively engage in landscape and design, such as ours, the fields facing the wicked problems and the wicked of Futures Studies and Anticipation Studies practices of extractive economics and are in need of inputs, that is practical and unbridled consumption. theoretical, for design to operate as a genera- 10 1. Into the future 11 Andrew Morrison While as Arun Appadurai reminds us, the substantial if often slow and deliberative artist Louise Bourgeois and the architect for engagement. For people in place and for future is a cultural fact (Appadurai, 2013), it processes of restoration, repurposing and Peter Zumthor, this monument also has a places that have people who are connected is now being played out ahead of us today as reinvigorating the character and the future disturbing series of mirrors that reflect an to community and who are engaged in work our insatiable human drive for progress and of the town. eternal flame back to one, searing the pres- and leisure that are buffetted by the weather a lack of care for the environment and ent with the agonies of the past. Hugely and shift within and between the expansive resources have led us into the slipperiness Svein Harald Holmen has been central to expensive, for some residents the installa- annual swings of dark and light. of the Anthropocene Age. This is a still very this resilience with revival. Its hard to think tion however is a symbol of a lack of consul- fuzzily yet fearfully framed aeon character- that the local hardware store or the North tation about its processes of selection and Here you will find a photographic essay by ised by the complex and dynamic changea- Pole Bar would not have existed without the placement in the very community in which it Janike Kampevold Larsen that addresses ble nature of climate change, (indisputably sheer determination and organistional skills, stands. For visitors it is a truly disturbing matters of solastalgia she summarises as acknowledged by science in a time of not expertise and collaboration that across the reminder of judgement past, grounded in a concerning ‘physical and mental stress that only fake news but facile politics of con- town have marked out the actions and fundamentalism of time and place. arises from seeing your home environment sumption and denial). It positions us within achievements of Vardø Restored. In our deteriorate due to climate change’ while our own self destructive experiential narra- view this has been possible because of the ‘The Damned, The Possessed and the summarising many of the activitie of the two tives today, and tomorrow and the days and will of local inhabitants to take care of their Beloved’ was the title Bourgeois gave her overlapping key projects.