____expedition diary / logbook

Little did I know: As an outsider and a rather naïve one, I jumped into the closer-to-the-arctic experience in January 2009, invited by Åsa Sonjasdotter (Professor at the Art Academy in Tromsø) and Svein Ingvoll Pedersen (Director of Tromsø Art Gallery) to develop a project with Tromsø based artists and art students at the Tromsø Art Gallery, supported by artist Kristin Tårnesvik. The unique profile of this art academy allowed me to meet a well aware group of students and artists, very much used to work collaboratively and with a determined and pleasurable access to theory, a specific aesthetic consciousness, and a strong critical standpoint to art schools and art worlds distinctions and competitions, and the implications of the white cube: The self-organized-politicized-experimental-complex, which are the founding principles of Tromsø Art Academy.

With my first visits to several archives in Tromsø I developed a more thoroughly idea of collectively re- and counter reading of these archives. Some images especially incited my interest and enthusiasm: a photograph from Svalbard/Longyearbyen, a long line of demonstrating activists in the wide wilderness of ice and snow – the backside-caption of the photo telling more about this image: It is supposedly the 1st of May Workers Demonstration in 1918 of miners working in Longyearbyen. In this super panoramic shot one can see the banners and posters the men are carrying – an image quite different from the solo-hero-hierarchy-posing of expedition entrepreneurs. Some albums from arctic- and antarctic expeditions at the Polar Institute stroke me as well: Men sitting around, darning their socks, men dancing with each other, some strange, rather sadomasochistic Neptun baptism’s rituals, which show the need to include queer rituals into hetero normativity, and also numerous letters telling about the huge (economic) pressure of these early expeditions, the always imminent threat of failure...

From all my research visits in archives over the years, this overwhelming experience of being confronted with the materiality of history, of facts, fictions and images put me in this mood of being attracted to things which re-adjust my comfy knowledge of how things are. I appreciate this suffering from archival fever, in between waking up from heavy and screaming dreams – books and files and photos and films – and being lost to the crimes and exploits and power structures which I always feel are embedded in these archival collections; the historicity of images and the iconicity of history. Of course it’s about a re-interpretation. Archival research makes you completely aware of the overall process of marking, punching and labeling clichés and stereotypes, and during our workshops in Tromsø many of our discussions evolved around these questions. In this process there are powerful mechanisms at work, which take part in the invention of (the) nation (state), in the normative power struggles of defining what will make it into the history with a capital H.

Our workshops leading up to the exhibition, were exactly about negotiating how we might deal with this overload of arctic, polar and other northern images, deciphering them with subjective anger and lust, attacking them (un)friendly from the side, diving in an eclectic and passionate way, into the so-called dry authoritarian world of databanks, classification systems and restricted cold rooms. And the original title „failed expeditions/missing archives“ was frozen, as the group’s access evolved to be much more eclectic and disrespectful, not at all scientific, much more dealing with arctic comical hysteria, with the style and the staged poses of the exploring men, with re-inscribing women into these adventures, with making fun of and taking serious the polished truth-look of expeditions and the claiming drive of explorers. We were also thinking more deeply about the human/animal relation, about all the necessary controlling and protecting mechanisms during an expedition and what lies underneath. And to re-edit digitally and - with the (cheap) tricks available on the internet – to elaborate the fact/fiction paradox and pointing to all these inherent glamorous absurdities. So we gave away the supposed seriousness, the kind of 1990’s smell of the project’s first title and came to ICEPLOITATION! subtitled with the explorer Ernest Shackleton’s pathos-down-to earth-quote “superhuman effort isn’t worth a damn unless it achieves results“. Iceploitation is a new word. Our way to it was via the blaxploitation genre, a film genre mainly from the 70ties when low budget films with a lot of sex- and violence- exclamation marks were made to get access to the African American audience: It’s this place where sensationalism and overstatement meet in a fundamentally funky attitude. The economic, commercial twist, the meaning of “exploitation“ embedded in the word, suddenly embraced all what we had been discussing concerning questions of collective memory, the fabrication of memory, the invention of tradition, as well as the power/gender/colonial relations embedded in the idea of the heroic expedition into the arctic.

The building of Tromsø Art Gallery being originally built to host Tromsø Museum from 1894 -1961, with it’s 19th Century displays of densely exhibited taxidermic objects and other arte facts gave an additional background for developing the exhibition displays more into the direction of an updated salon hanging. Art Academy professor Nicolas Siepen delivered an inspiring input of Marcel Broodthaers’ ideas, which consider the social and the signifying power of the art space as crucial constituents.

A library with books and films, which have been our supplies during the workshop will be embedded into the exhibition. And the Iceploitation poster designed by Kaja Czyx Andersen came out of our discussions and findings as well. During our preperational journey questions were also raised of how to address the audience, as well as the touristic institutions where many of the fabricated arctic clichés find their distribution and market (ability). And a beautiful idea came up on how to intervene into the city, how to create a dialogue between Tromsø Art Gallery and The Polar Museum.

Madeleine Bernstorff, march 2011