LEARNING FROM ICE: NOT PLANET EARTH

The Svalbard Arctic Archipelago is an environment saturated with politics, but little if anything of these politics is readily perceptible within the visual field. Taking the aesthetic regime of climate change seriously involves ‘a’ recognition that the conditions of image production are themselves deeply entangled with the environmental conditions they seek to document and the histories of image extraction that have long colonised our Western imagination.

This video acts as a footnote to the film Arctic Archipelago (2021) and reflects upon the many conditions of image production that circumscribe access to and engagement with this cryospheric environment.