Bright 9: Expedition by CCW Research Events

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CONTENTS Series Editorial Editorial

7 9

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings Ruth Little

Leafcutter learning Daro Montag

A Cry in the Wild Tyrone Martinsson

Packing Light Mich猫le Noach

Carbon 14 David Buckland

Night Time Stevie Bezencenet

Expedition to the source of the Dollis Brook Nick Edwards

Where ice goes to die Chris Wainwright

Expotition Hannah Bird

105

SHORTCOURSE/UK Si么n Parkinson

107

I wonder where you are? Anne Lydiat

129

Contributors Further Reading Image Credits

145 151 155

SERIES EDITORIAL Dr David Dibosa, Series Editor, Bright Publications

The Bright series returns to the fundamental mission of higher education: to produce, store and disseminate knowledge and experience for the sake of the expansion of human consciousness. A lofty ideal indeed – but these ideas nevertheless still lie at the centre of a vision that enables learning to remain sustainable despite impediments. Through the series, Camberwell, Chelsea and Wimbledon Colleges of Art and Design (CCW), con solidates its existing networks of communication, linking those engaged in art and design both within the University of the Arts London (UAL) and those working beyond its boundaries. Bright facilitates the circulation of debates taking place across a range of art and design disciplines. Today’s learning environments are not only international, they are also inter‑disciplinary. There is therefore a pressing need to trace the develop ment of thinking both across national borders and disciplinary fields in order to identify the emergence of innovative practices and to build on them. One important dimension of the Bright series is the recognition that different levels of engagement with knowledge production and dissemination take place according to the place we occupy within existing learning networks. Students just starting out on an exploration of their ideas cannot be expected to work at the same level as that of professors with established research careers. The question, though, is not about length of experience; it’s about the intensity of a person’s commitment to furthering their ideas.

EDITORIAL Chris Wainwright

I have been where you have not been I have seen what you have not seen Captain of the Grigoriy Mikheev, Disko Bay, Greenland 2008

The research and production of new knowledge is a conventional role assigned to the Academy. Expedition invites us to reconsider this role. There is no call here to excavate new material, to explore new territory, or to further extend the frontiers of knowledge. Rather, the tendency is more towards a rediscovery and recontextu alisation of what we already experience and witness, much of which is on our doorsteps. ‘Economic’ and ‘crisis’ are two familiar terms that have dominated the second decade of the twenty-first century, and that have given rise to shifts in political discourse fuelling concerns for artists, environmentalists, social scientists and anthropologists alike. Add to this an increasing public awareness of climate change brought about by human activity and in particular an escalation in resource extraction to fuel our economically oriented greed and desire for material wealth. If you couple this with (at best) a slow and ineffective agenda of political action, it becomes clear that we are now entering into a critical era that will significantly shape the way in which future generations live their lives. On the one hand, politicians and some analyst call for a new spirit of enterprise, encouraging the profitoriented development of new markets and further exploitation of the earth’s resources in order to feed them. Think Canada’s exit from the Durban Conference; think the sifting of the oil tar sands of Northern Alberta and the queue of multinational oil companies eager to exploit the arctic oil and gas resources that are now accessible due to the melting sea ice, caused ironically as a result of the burning of fossil fuels. On the other hand, the old adage that crisis gives rise to opportunity is cited in the rethinking of attitudes towards the Amazonian rainforest with reforestation initiatives replacing defor estation as a central driver for rural sustenance in the northern states of Brazil. Amidst all this repositioning,

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shifting perspectives, and moral and ethical questioning, what role is there for the cultural practices of artists and designers to influence debate, to raise consciousness and to alter opinion in this volatile terrain? The rethinking suggested by Expedition calls for a return to the legacy of the colonial adventures that set out our current conventions of geographical orien tation around the globe. Expedition doesn’t invite us to dismiss this legacy, to throw it on the pyre of analysis or to dispose of it in the incinerators of critical reason. Expedition asks us to look again, to recycle and reuse these figurations in new ways. Are there ways of figuring the heroic and the highly gendered not on the tundra of new continents but on the horizons of the everyday? Can the mundane, the overlooked, the routine, provide sites of discovery of that which has been seen time and time again? Many of the contributors to Expedition have focused on a local context, often in a highly personalised way, or through engaging fellow participants and asserting that our daily actions and activities can be leg itimised as a process of discovery. There is also a tacit understanding that what we do on a local level can have an effect on the broader picture. The way in which we live our lives in an urban context affects our fragile natural world and in turn, the natural world responds and exerts a major influence on our urban existence. A prime reference point and cultural influence for Expedition and for many of its participants, is the work of Cape Farewell, an artist-led organisation that since 2001 has been pioneering a cultural response to climate change by creating opportunities for artists to work hand-in-hand with scientists to witness and experience the frontline of climate change at first hand, mainly in the arctic region and more recently including expeditions to Peru, the Scottish islands and Canada. Cape Farewell is also a partner organisation of the CCW Graduate School and creates opportunities for researchers to parti cipate in and devise projects, expeditions, workshops, exhibitions and debates, as well as providing a focus for our core thematic enquiry around the issue of the environment. We cannot invite reflection on our actions without offering a critical context for our thoughts. Questions as pressing as the ones posed here need a critical framework. Critiques of capitalism prove useful

Editorial

in understanding the crisis over the earth’s resources – a crisis that we glimpse every now and again. By using the critical positions already taken, we can understand dangers posed to our existence by our stubborn focus on increasing capital accumulation. Our attachment to consumption, driven not by need but by greed, anxiety and good old-fashioned envy, also requires some critical reflection: the pressure to intensify production so as to broaden the range of commodities available for consumption simply cannot be sustained. Existing frameworks for criticising the risks of unbridled finance capitalism are significant but they can only go so far. Macro-economic insights are useful but what impact do they have on the way that we live our lives every day? Expedition largely returns us to the terrain of the mundane, to ask ourselves where we can start to make changes, even if the peaks of critical reasoning have left us feeling high and dry. The world of competing demands, of consumer choice, can feel a far cry from the exploits of global multinationals. There is a limit to how much we can challenge the decisions made in boardrooms and executive suites – but what about the decisions made in our daily lives and the Academy? Artists, designers and creative teams can and do demon strate innovative means of accessing and using resources differently. Expedition invites us to think differently, creatively even, about how we can take a different approach to the resources that we use; and in turn, to reconsider those who we credit with the accolade of ‘explorer’; and to question just what can and should be considered acts of heroism in our current climate.

THE SLOW CRAF T OF CONTEMPORARY EXPEDITION: ISLANDINGS No man is an island; no island is an island either. Ruth Little

This chapter is a reflection on navigation and stewardship; on the role of the participant-observer in values-based journeying; and on boats, islands and sea passages as both real phenomena and as metaphors for the experience and behaviours of ‘edge’ thinking. Metaphors allow us to think at different levels of scale simultaneously, linking the minute to the infinite. Like all fractal phenomena, they can be scaled up or down whilst still retaining the same organising structures, the same meanings for us, in the way that a tiny web of capillaries in the human body has the same structure and is based on the same shaping principles as the spreading delta of a river, as a giant networked river system itself. Fractals teach us that we’re not alone; that we’re made of the same materials and operate according to the same patterns and processes that function throughout the universe. The idea of fixed boundaries that comes to us through geopolitics, law, social custom, even through the sense of our skin as a barrier between the world and our inner selves, doesn’t accurately describe how we actually live and interact. It doesn’t allow us to express what we know intuitively; that at every level of scale, we exist in a context, and that context is as vital, dynamic and interwoven with other contexts as we are. Cape Farewell was set up by artist and sailor David Buckland in 2001 as an experiment in reorienta tion. Buckland wanted to work with artists to explore alternative forms of communication of the science of climate change; to generate composite experience in a shared place between art and science, between specialist knowledge and public awareness. Cape Farewell began as an expeditionary sailing organisation with a focus on place – specifically, the High Arctic – where empiricism and imagination could be brought alongside one another in a rapidly changing, highly articulate environment.

Noorderlicht

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The emphasis here is on place rather than space, on physical environments as arenas for embodied knowledge and felt response.

Ice Lens, Ackroyd & Harvey 2005, Carved from glacial ice, 1m × 0.8m × 0.35m Frozen fjord, Svalbard, Cape Farewell expedition 2005

Art ultimately delivers its insight and its potential to bring about behavioural change in the realm of feeling, in the body; its affective power is, in essence, a fully renewable resource. Climate change, at either a notional or purely empirical level, is difficult for us to conceive of, to grasp. We abstract carbon, as geographer Doreen Massey points out, in order to measure it and accord it economic value. But by taking it out of context, we remove the idea of carbon ‘from the particularities that give rise to it, the unsustainable means of the generation of energy, the means of mobility, the oilintensive agriculture’.1 Contemporary expedition is a means of the restoration of ideas to the materials which embody them; it is also an experience of process and

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

flux that asserts the dynamism of materials and energy, and thus their perpetual interrelatedness. There is, of course, a long tradition of natural history artists, scientists and navigators collaborating during expeditions (Cook and William Hodges; Shackleton and photographer Frank Hurley; painters Augustus Earle (‘artist supernumerary with victuals’) and later Conrad Martens joined Charles Darwin on the Beagle’s South American journeys). There is also a long tradition of explorations paying scant attention to the knowledges of cultures and communities that their journeys encompassed. Early usage of the noun ‘expedition’ generally referred to military campaigns or journeys carried out with purpose or force and conducted in haste – expedited with military efficiency. Their aim was also to acquire new geographical or epistemological territory. They pushed culturally specific ideas of human knowledge beyond their known edges – they were unidirectional. But the historical record of discovery, conquest and possession rarely acknowledges what was tacitly known by many explorers (being vulnerable individuals): that it was the edge itself – the live border between different versions of the known – that was the fertile territory. There is another notion of expedition implied in the origins of the word itself – going out on foot, at pedestrian speed. To ‘walk out’ is to seek an evolving continuity between self and context, between the self that sets out in innocence or ignorance and the self that is subject to unpredictable encounter and transformation. The expeditioner has both an inward and an outward orientation and is inseparable from his or her context. There are resonances here with the ancient custom of ‘beating the bounds’ – walking parish boundaries to ascertain, anecdotally, where they lie and to pray collectively for the well-being of the land. We are, above all, storytellers, bound-beaters, and our stories are maps that prove more enduring than any atlas. In the days before maps were common, this kind of embodied knowing was vital; an intimate coalescence of sensory impact, communal folk ritual and oral transmission.

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We Crossed the Minch, 2011, Alison Turnbull, graphite and coloured pencil on Ordnance Survey map, 84 × 71cm

Expeditions, at every level of scale and in all contexts, are modes of narration and storytelling. Cape Farewell takes artists and scientists to sea, tells its stories; in part, to consider the meaning and value of slow travel, cooper ation and resource constraint; and in part because the oceans are our home – they link us all to one another and to our origins. Life itself, according to natural philosopher William Bryant Logan, is the story of vessels that learned to contain the sea.2 Oceans are the largest active carbon sink on earth, covering seven tenths of its surface, and yet we know very little about them. We do know, how ever, that they’re warming up and becoming increasingly acidic – the rate of change in ocean PH today is faster than anything seen in the last fifty-five million years – and that they’re choking with plastic and pollution. In Scotland, some fish species are moving hundreds of kilometres north and new arrivals are disturbing fragile dynamic balances, affecting seabird breeding cycles and at times resulting in population crashes, as on the Orkney and Shetland islands in 2004. The interconnectedness of the marine ecosystem magnifies many impacts of

Eigg

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

climate change, ultimately affecting all of us who look outwards from the shore for our resources, our exchanges, our weather, and for the promise of new arrivals. And that’s most of us. It’s estimated that in three decades, nearly seventy-five per cent of the world’s population will live near the planet’s coasts. Two thirds of our megacities are in low-elevation coastal areas. But we tend to think differently, separately, about the land and the sea, instead of recognising their absolute interdependence and our perpetual relationship with them both. It takes a cataclysmic event on the scale of a tsunami to reorien tate us, temporarily. We produce maps of the sea and maps of the land, but rarely do we create land-to-sea maps which recognize that a border is not a boundary; it’s porous and changeable, and the ecologies on both sides rely on exchange for their health, knowledge, common wealth and prosperity. These improvisatory passages, most particularly the journeying of Cape Farewell’s current project across the islands of Scotland – Sea Change – express the value of slow travel (with projects given space to evolve over several years); of seeking diverse forms of knowledge in places expressive of the reality of change and exchange, in vessels that bring people together in close, sometimes uncomfortably close proximity, with limited shared resources and in the context of uncertainty and unpre dictability. There’s nothing like being at sea to strip away the illusion of control and to teach us about our needs and limits as individuals and as groups. The word ‘expedition’ refers not only to the journey but also to the travellers who make it; likewise, the word fare in ‘farewell’ comes from the Old English word for journey or road, and also for companions on that journey. The poet Cecil Day Lewis put it simply: ‘Traveller, we’re fabric of the road we go’. If the ‘farewell’ in Cape Farewell once referred to an imaginable future of absence and loss, it now simultaneously and strategically asks the question of what it is, what it might be, to fare well: what values, practices, models, dialogues, metaphors and languages can teach us to live together, better? The boat has been the primary mode for the journeys because it is so obvi ously a shared place. On a boat, the division of materials is a prosaic, unavoidable fact. 3

Boot room, Noorderlicht

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The most basic tasks and functions require cooperation, coordination and multiple uses of limited resources. The boat is both a reality and, scaled up, a metaphor. We’re all in the same one. The Sea Change project focuses on Scotland’s islands because island communities and ecologies, just like boats, offer both palpable and symbolic evidence of the reality of resource constraint; the relationship between needs and limits that is in the end the stuff of climate change.

Sea Change

These islands, in particular, with their immediate exposure to natural forces, their deep human histories, their processes of change and exchange, and their rich and fragile ecologies, remind us that we face the same challenges, only at different levels of scale and at varying rates of acceleration, across the planet. In urban environments, it’s easy to look away. On islands, this truth is concentrated in wind and weather, in the disinte gration of familiar coastlines, in the costs of obtaining resources and removing waste; and also in opportunities for radical, small-scale and contained experiment in resource use and energy supply, in projects which strive, at times against the odds, to develop and maintain community cohesion, and economic, social and environ mental diversity and resilience.

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

Eigg Electric

These experiments in adaptation and resilience raise visible questions that concern all of us. What are the capacities and limitations of all of the agents, human and non-human, that share a place?; and how can these capacities be defined, supported, communicated and exchanged in different contexts? These questions, voiced and faced so ardently on Eigg and within other buy-out communities, have been put by Sea Change to the artists who have sailed with us or become involved with us onshore. In 2011, thirty artists and scientists came together for a four-week journey across nineteen islands and twenty-six sea passages. But the journey actually began the previous year at Cove Park in Scotland, with a gathering of fifty artists, scientists, funders and curators – many of them islanders – who sought to help us define the orienting questions and values of the four-year project. Can we reconceive the idea and the process of expedition? Can we maintain its emphasis on process, knowledge transfer and connec tion, but scale it down and localise it? Can we attend to

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our own context with the same curiosity and humility with which we might go to more distant and ‘exotic’ places? Can expedition become a journey not so much of discovery as of recovery and listening – attending to the knowledges that already exist, that are held in place and community, tradition and context? Can we undertake expeditions into our cities, our communities, our own square mile, and what can we do with what we learn? Who needs to know? What do we need to know? The Sea Change project, now in its second year – a year of making and developing new projects and partnerships – has come to focus thematically and physically on edges. Islands are shared spaces, defined by their edges. But the edge is, crucially, a beginning, not an end; a passageway rather than a barrier. Edges and borders are the places where sharing begins. Coastlines around the world support a dispro portionate number of people because their ecologies are diverse and vital. The most interesting things in the universe, according to many physicists and complexity scientists, happen on edges. But one person’s edge may be another’s centre. All space is shared – we live in intimacy with other forms of life and with nonhuman materials. We participate in ‘assemblages’, according to philosopher Jane Bennett. 4 Places are events; they are constantly changing, admitting and letting go of resources and materials. This fluidity of place directed our own landings, passages and encounters. Boat journeys are inevitably non-linear; their context of wind, weather, needs and limits produce unpredictable narrative structures which extend the possibilities for encounter. Similarly, permaculture design principles maximise the length of the edge through spiral planting and undulat ing, uneven boundaries. This approach can be applied to the notion of journeying and ‘expedition’ if we think of movement through place as the perpetual creation of a live edge between what we know and what we don’t yet know, between those we know and those with whom we will enter into new exchanges. Islands are connected by corridors of sea enabling mobility of natural resources and ideas, with both con structive and destructive outcomes. Strong storm surges and flooding in South Uist, for example, have resulted in

Scottish Islands journey

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

the loss of life and the displacement of coastlines and causeways. But they have also prompted the development of more ecologically attentive coastal protection schemes and community collaborations within and without the island. The seaweed of the outer Hebridian coastline offers great potential as a biofuel, but also raises complex questions about its large-scale removal from western beaches, where the fragile machair relies for its very existence on the storm-dumping of seaweed.

Kyla Orr, Balranald, North Uist

Meanwhile, these islands are also embracing the dynaÂ mism of their environments â&#x20AC;&#x201C; their winds, waves and tides â&#x20AC;&#x201C; through local renewable energy schemes. Resilient communities give and take. They go to their own edges to find what lies beyond. Like islands, like conscious travellers, they maintain both an inward and an outward orientation. Island communities know their resources intimately and the ways in which they change, and climate scientists like Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia have argued for far more direct and integrated approaches to policy-making which recognize the value of local knowledge.

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Stephen Hurrel’s Barra Maps is a digital mapping project about naming, made in partnership with the Scottish Association for Marine Science and Barra’s fishers.

Barra Maps, Stephen Hurrel

Through the gathering and mapping of on-and offshore Gaelic names of features, fluxes and forces in the area of the contested Barra Sound marine reserve (SAC), the Barra Maps project recognizes meaningful and utilitarian place-naming as an act of dynamic knowing, of bound-beating. At the same time, the project aims to create a community resource using new technologies. The emphasis in the project is on oral tradition as a means of connection to a world in constant flux, recognising tradition not as a bulwark against change, but as a navigational aid – what writer Marilynne Robinson refers to as the ‘great reef of collective experience’. 5 Hanna Tuulikki’s Air falbh leis na h-eòin/Away with the Birds is a vocal/movement work to be performed on the island of Canna. Drawing on Gaelic mimicry of bird sounds and placing the human voice within the natural soundscape, or biophony, the project emphasises the contingency of cultural and natural systems, and finds new form for what we stand to lose if we turn deaf ears to our changing context.

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

Air falbh leis na h-eĂ˛in/Away with the Birds, Hanna Tuulikki

In Things Unseen, artist Anne Bevan considers the secret life and language of the sea, imagining at different scales the microscopic life forms on which, ultimately, the food chain depends.

Foram 9, Anne Bevan

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Bevan is also investigating the sources, aesthetics and technologies of cyclic, sustainable, threshold energy, such as wave power. Things Unseen is a polyglot project, a collaboration between marine biologists, engineers, visual artists and prose writers, which recognizes multiÂ plicity and the value of consilience in its form. On Mull, a community of knitters working with textile artist Deirdre Nelson has combined a celebration of slow craft with the issue of the impact of climate change on migratory sea birds.

Bird Yarns, Tobermory

The project has resulted in a flock of over 80 knitted arctic terns created in five countries, made from Mull wool and recycled plastics. The Bird Yarns project is a tangible reminder that shared space means shared, often contested resources, and insists that the story of the terns is also a story of disappearing sandeels, warming waters, commercial fisheries, tourism, seasonal cycles, weather, naturalists and knitters. On-and offshore, the Sea Change artists have been gathering resources in situ, combining the methodÂ ologies and empirical data of science with the craftsmanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s emphasis on process, duration and materials.

Anne Bevan

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

Each seeks to find the edge of the artist’s current knowl edge and extend it through encounter with people, place and resources. Knowledge transfer happens on the border between different realms of experience, between fisherman and visual artist, human geographer, marine biologist, local producer, maker and storyteller. The border brings things into unexpected proximity, producing the conditions for what Stuart Kaufmann calls ‘the adjacent possible.’ 6 Ideas are not islands; they’re almost inevitably networks of other ideas, a cobbling together of spare parts in new contexts. We need to develop a broader sense of context in order to develop ideas that work in the world. Doreen Massey writes of the multiplicity of the world around us, the co-existence of other things. In writing about rural landscapes, she talks of ‘space as a dynamic simultaneity, always in the process of being made, and open to alternative ways of being made. Neither ungrounded globalism nor inward-looking bounded localism can be the basis for a better future. We need to be aware of the multiplicity of the local, and open it to the wider world.’ 7 Massey’s argument is that all things, all places, are processes – and they can be narrated in many different ways. We are the places where we live, and our thriving depends on theirs. We don’t have to move, according to Massey, to be, or feel displaced.8 Of course, there are many visible absences in the Highlands and islands. But organisations like GalGael in Govan grew out of the loss of identity of an urban shipbuilding community deprived not of place but of work, wealth, hope and the recognition of individual capacity.

GalGael

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Now, GalGael is a centre for knowledge exchange and traditional woodworking skills, and is collaborating with young people in South Uist on their coastal protection scheme. From an ‘island’ of internally displaced people, GalGael has become the base for multiple forms of outward-facing connection and inwardly oriented regeneration. The words ‘host’ and ‘guest’ share a common Indo-European root: host and guest may change places – indeed, they must change places – to better under stand the dynamic, the narrative and the meaning of home. New maps of ecological health are multiple in their perspective: they recognize land and sea as shared spaces, chart civic and cultural capacity, social capital, diversity and resilience, fuel security and distribution, well-being, exploitation, conservation and biodiversity. Art in this context of twenty-first century ‘narrativemapping’ is inevitably and necessarily a social practice – enriched by new contact and new ways of seeing.

Stranded, Ackroyd & Harvey, 2006, Minke whale skeleton, alum crystals, 7m × 1.8m

The notion of shared space extends from the city street to the global commons, but we may represent and experience places very differently and at different levels of scale, acknowledging the multiplicity of the local. Extending the reality and concept of the island to the archipelago allows us to create, narrate and chart connected specificities: Govan extends to and finds a common purpose with South Uist; Mull with its diaspora community in Nova Scotia; a Tobermory knitter gets a feel for an Arctic tern. We live in a world of islands which are really a series of networks, mobilities and connections. Einstein insisted that ‘the distinction between the past, present and future is only a stubbornly persistent illusion’. We exist only in the constantly selfgenerating, constantly decaying present.

Hiort’ St Kilda Project, Jennifer Wilcox, 2010, medium format photographic negative, 25 x 25cm

We must learn to shift our register, change our lenses, expand our languages in many different contexts, to live as if all at sea, constantly developing the life-craft of adjustment and dynamic adjacency. ‘Sometimes’, according to Jane Bennett, ‘ecohealth will require individuals and collectives to back off or ramp down their activeness, and sometimes it will call for grander, more dramatic and violent expenditures of human energy’.9

The Slow Craft of Contemporary Expedition: Islandings

We can only map this present, describe, respond to and inhabit it fully if we draw on multiple sources of inter connected knowledge and experience to supplement our own, to draw us away from the high water mark of our reckless disconnection from the places that we share.

Massey, D. (2011) Landscape/space/ politics: an essay. The Future of Landscape and the Moving Image [Internet blog]. Available from : <http:// thefutureoflandscape.wordpress.com/ landscapespacepolitics-an-essay/> [Accessed 03 September 2012].

Logan, W.B. (2007) Dirt: The Ecstatic Skin of the Earth. New York, W. W. Norton & Company.

Ian McEwan expressed human ineptitude in the stewardship of resources through the metaphor of the ‘boot room’ in his novel Solar, 2010. If this small environ ment – the storage space for outdoor footwear on a sailing boat – cannot be managed rationally and collaboratively, the novel asks, what hope for the earth’s resources on which we draw so voraciously?

Bennett, J. (2010) Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, Duke University Press.

Robinson, M. (2010) Can science solve life’s mysteries? The Guardian [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.guardian. co.uk/books/2010/jun/05/marilynnerobinson-science-religion> [Accessed 03 September 2012]

Kaufmann, S. (2003) The Adjacent Possible. Edge [Internet blog]. Available from:<http://www.edge.org/3rd_ culture/kauffman03/kauffman_index. html> [Accessed 03 September 2012]

Massey, D. (2011) ibid.

This is the basis of philosopher Glenn Albrecht’s theory of ‘solastalgia’.

Bennett, J. (2010) ibid.

LEAFCUTTER LEARNING Daro Montag

An expedition is a journey of learning; of new experienÂ ces gained in unfamiliar territories. To embark on an expedition is to leave, temporarily, the familiarity of a home environment and exchange it for the unknown and unpredictable. What is encountered on the way can often be surprising and unforeseen. In order to deal with unfamiliar experiences, one has to develop new behavioural strategies that call upon previously learnt skills and abilities. Such learning takes place through a process of creative response and its application to the new situations encountered. Expeditions, where predictable routine is often disrupted, provide rich opportunities for individuals and societies to take creative leaps forward; they allow the collective mind to adapt and be reconfigured in a slightly new form. For approximately 50 million years, colonies of ants have been making expeditions for the purpose of seeking untapped food sources and suitable places to establish further colonies. They have evolved highly sophisticated means for maintaining the stability of the colony, providing it with sustenance and propelling it forward into new territory. The ant colony is so perfectly adapted to its environment that it is hard to imagine the incremental steps that have led it to this position. It is easy to forget that this social behaviour, which has come about over a prolonged period of time, has developed through small acts of group learning. It has been suggested by HĂślldobler and other leading entomologists that it is more accurate to think of the colony as a superorganism that is greater than the sum of its individual ants.1 A superorganism is able to grasp a situation and make collective decisions that would be beyond the scope of an individual member of the community. It is this faculty that has contributed to their success and their ability to thrive as a species. A similar motive, of learning through a group expeditionary experience, led 20 artists and scientists to gather in the Peruvian city of Cusco, the ancient heart of the Inca Empire. They were, however, not there to explore the ancient Inca trails or buildings, but to learn about the impact that climate change was already

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beginning to have on the region. Travelling on a Cape Farewell expedition, the group was destined to journey from the high Andes to the Amazon rainforest where their path would eventually cross with the leafcutter ants.2 Despite Cape Farewell’s international reputation for organising art-science expeditions to global climate hotspots, this was the organisation’s first foray into the tropics. On arriving at the small airport of Cusco, the team of artists were greeted by a Peruvian taxi driver holding a sign that read ‘CAPE FIREWELL’, suggesting a prescient knowledge of global warming that was not lost on some of the group. Their expedition was planned as a downward journey from a high mountain pass of the Cordillera Vilcabamba range, through the cloud forest and down into the low-lying rainforest; a descent of approximately 4,500 metres. Beginning at the foot of the snow-capped peak of Mount Salcantay, the air was crisp and thin. As the highest peak of the Cordillera Vilcabamba, Salcantay’s brooding presence hung over the group. Its name, which is derived from salka, meaning wild, savage or invincible, seems entirely fitting. The summit was not climbed until 1952, only one year before Everest was conquered, and two years later it claimed the life of the experienced Austrian mountaineer, Fritz Kasparek, who was one of the first to climb the north face of the Eiger. Despite the cool night temperature of minus ten degrees centigrade, it was obvious that the region was changing and that its glaciers were in unambiguous retreat. Resting beside the emerald green lake at the foot of Mount Huamantay, it was easy to visualise the glacier gently withdrawing from the valley it had once carved out of mountainside. The softly curving rock bore evidence of glacial advance in previous millennia. The next stage of the journey involved a trek around the puna at Tres Cruces. This mountain ecosystem in the Andes occupies the land between the permanent snow line and the tree line. It would be familiar to any one who has travelled the west coast of Scotland or visited alpine tundra. Consisting of rough dry grassland and small scrubby trees, it marks the transition between the arid highlands and the dripping cloud forest ahead.

Leafcutter Learning

Leaf-carrying ants on branch

From the open landscape of the puna, the ground drops away steeply until, at the foot of the slopes, the vast expanse of the Amazon rainforest stretches beyond the curvature of the earth. From this high perch on the Eastern slopes of the Andes, the rainforest below is completely shrouded in clouds. Rolling in at dawn, they deposit tons of rain every second before the sun rises to burn them off. Above the clouds, the group felt exhilaration inspired by the mystique of the jungle, and combined with a sense of trepidation of the anticiÂ pated pain and hardship still likely to be encountered. To reach the pulsing heart of this land involved a descent down the Trocha Union, an ancient path used for centuries of coca trading. This two-day trek led from the mountainous cloud forest to the flat Amazon Basin below. During the journey, the team gathered soil and data to enhance the scientific understanding of climate change. As one of the worldâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s most bio-diverse habitats, the cloud forest offers an unrivalled location for studying how a rich array of species are struggling to adapt to the already changing environment. As the planet warms up, the cloud forest, which hugs the contours of the mountains, is gradually being forced to move uphill. The devastating effect that this has on the plants and

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wildlife, neither of which will be able to adapt quickly enough, can already be observed. Compared with the Andes and the puna, the cloud forest is a totally different world. As one leaves behind the open, unrestricted skies, light levels begin to drop and the gloom of the cloud forest closes in. Vegetation sneaks up, hiding snakes and venomous insects, pressing its dampness against any exposed flesh. After centuries of use, the rough track carves its way through the foli age, and tunnels under roots and branches. On either side of the path, the undergrowth and overgrowth merge together – an impenetrable blanket dripping with moss and lichen. It appears that anything that stays still for too long soon becomes part of this all-engulfing vege tation. The one exception is a small hanging nest of hummingbird eggs that the team stumbles upon in the darkness. Tiny and perfect, they are the only things we find that are not covered by a film of moisture and an earthy green mat. The cloud forest is carbon in colour. We tend to think of carbon as the black stuff that provides energy, warmth and pollution – coal and oil – forgetting that sparkling diamonds are also carbon; and that the carbon com pounds that are heating the planet are invisible to our eyes. When combined with other elements to make carbon-based life forms, it becomes vivid and rich in colour. The wall of vegetation is a green carbon block ade; the bamboos are rockets shooting carbon skywards; and the humming bird is brightly coloured carbon in flight. Every day, the river washes soil and the orangebrown carbon it contains into the Amazon Basin, and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. Trekking through the jungle, with their 18% carbon content, our bodies are also carrying carbon towards our destination – the Amazon. Having descended through the clouds and this changing landscape, the group arrives on the flatter ground of the rainforest itself, where the only way to travel is by boat. Accompanied by the shrieks of macaws and the clicking tymbals of cicadas, the group arrives at the Manu Learning Centre, a small gathering of five or six timber and straw buildings. It is here that the Cape Farewell crew first encounter the ants of the Attine tribe, the fungus-growing leafcutters.

Leafcutter Learning

So industrious and full of purpose, the leafcutter ants are constantly engaged in the long journey from nest to tree. Often the first sign of their presence is their extended foraging trails. These trunk and branch roads are maintained and kept clear by the tramping of millions of tiny feet, and the labouring roadworker ants whose role it is to maintain the superhighway. Each branching track is about ten centimetres wide, and can be over one hundred metres long. Scaled up to the size of a human, this would be equivalent to a distance of eighteen kilometres â&#x20AC;&#x201C; quite a hike to get a piece of leaf, and furÂ ther than we had just hiked through the cloud forest in the name of science.

Pile-up of leaf-carrying ants on left side of paper

Along this carriageway, there is a continuous line of empty-mouthed ants streaming from the nest into the jungle. Picking up the scent of pheromones, they follow the well-trodden route towards the selected tree where their sisters are cutting leaves and dropping them to the ground. Here they each pick up a section of leaf and head back towards the nest with the fragment carried in their mandibles like a sail. This constant flow of ants is reminiscent of a busy street during rush hour; there is an urgency in their motion.

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Once inside the nest, the leaves are passed to other ants whose role is to cut them into smaller pieces. These are then processed and placed into the mass of fungal cultivars that sustains the colony. This fungus is their primary food source; in their bid to expand and propagate the colony, everything is geared towards the feeding, fertilising and harvesting of this crop. Some 50 million years before humans stumbled across agri culture, the leafcutter ants had developed their own form of farming. So successful have their methods been that, next to humans, leafcutter ants form the largest and most complex societies on Earth. Their ‘cities’ can cover a few hundred square metres and contain up to 8 million indi viduals. Their valiant efforts and relentless natures com bined with their massive populations add up to a huge force shaping the ecosystem. According to Hölldobler and Wilson, leading authorities on these social insects, the dry weight of all the ants in the Amazon rainforest is approximately four times that of all the mammals, birds, reptiles and amphibians combined.3 For millions of years, the world of the ants has remained relatively stable. Operating as part of a superorganism with the queen at its head, individual ants have specific and clearly defined roles. There are those responsible for cutting leaves and for collecting them; for tending the fungal gardens; for looking after the huge number of eggs laid by the queen; for defending the nest; and leaf carriers. Here at Manu Learning Centre, this evolutionary stability was about to be challenged. A puzzle suddenly confronted the flowing stream of ants that would test their ability to learn and adapt to a changing environ ment when, apparently from nowhere, a potentially devastating disruption occurred to their well-worn trail. This disruption took the form of a sheet of white A4 paper placed strategically across their path by one of the Cape Farewell artists. Nothing in their 50 million years of evolution had prepared them for such an eventuality. With only 5 metres of leaf-carrying left before the carriers could safely hand over their foliage to the next ants in line, their path was inextricably blocked. With no visible route available, and the orientation pheromone absent from the clean sheet, a pile-up of ants began on each side of the paper; leaf-carrying ants on

Leafcutter Learning

one side, empty-mouthed ants on the other. For a while, no ants ventured onto the paper and the pile-up grew larger. Before long, there were a few hundred ants on each side of the paper, confused and moving randomly with no discernible sense of purpose.

Leafcutter ants approach the carbon line

After a few minutes, one or two of the ants without leaves strayed onto the paper and drifted around, appearing lost. Then, after about 10 minutes of random movement, the first few covered the short distance across the paper, although the majority were still congregating at each side. Once these scouts had safely traversed the 210 millimetres of unknown territory, an increasing number began to follow, gaining strength in the knowledge that their world was not about to end, and confidence as increasing levels of pheromone re-established the trail. Gradually, a steady stream of ants began to move across the paper and it was no longer seen as an obstacle. Just as the trail was restored, a curious thing started to happen: some of the larger leafcutters moved to posi足 tions around the edge of the paper and for a moment, they appeared to be guarding it. Their fierce mandibles, that can easily puncture human skin, looked set for a

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Leafcutter ant drawing 1, Carbon and oil on pre-used paper â&#x20AC;&#x201C; showing cuts made by the ants and sections of paper removed

Leafcutter Learning

Leafcutter ant drawing 2, Carbon and oil on pre-used paper

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confrontation. But the ants were not guarding the paper or their sisters. Instead, the mandibles came down to the paper and the mouthparts started to cut through it as though it was a leaf. As each ant moved the jagged edge of the leading mandible against the stationary one, they started slicing the paper with their menacing pruning shears. Some of these paper-cutting ants abandoned their task part way through, perhaps realising that this material was not a leaf. A few others cut ant-sized pieces and started to carry them off in the direction of the nest. The flowing line of reddish brown ants carrying green sails was punctuated by the occasional white sail, as an ant headed towards the nest with its piece of paper. But then each of the ants carrying the paper, so meticu足 lously cut from the sheet, gradually abandoned it beside the trail. Perhaps the realisation dawned on them that it was not a suitable food for their crop of fungus. Or perhaps they were simply trying to clear the obstacle from the path, piece by piece. Then, within the space of an hour, their world changed for a second time. A line of oily carbon was gently brushed across their path from the top of the paper to the bottom. What did it mean? How were the ants to comprehend this second intrusion into their wellstructured existence? This blockage was more menacing than the first. The mixture of oil from the Manu Learning Centre kitchen and carbon from a burning candle created a surprisingly impenetrable barrier. The ants that had braved the paper and laid a new path of pheromone were now completely confounded by the sticky black sub足 stance. Although only a couple of centimetres wide, no ants were able to step onto the goo. Those that placed one foot into the oil quickly withdrew, leaving tiny black footprints on the paper. The majority ran around in circles, clearly unable to fathom something that millions of years of evolution had not prepared them for. After many repeated attempts to find a way through this simple maze, one or two ants were eventu足 ally able to solve the problem. Whilst the majority still milled around, confused by this new situation that was completely outside their previous experience, a small number refused to be defeated. Perhaps it was sheer persistence and chance that enabled the lucky ones

Leafcutter Learning

to forge a new route. Or maybe some of the ants were slightly more creative in testing out alternative strate gies than their colleagues. Could it be that some ants are actually wiser than others and have the role of leading the colony on new expeditions? 4 Studying these ants it would be hard to believe, as some mechanists still do today, that these small creatures are programmed like machines obeying some predetermined blueprint. Although an individual ant is totally replaceable, and makes little sense outside the superorganism of its colony, it is not simply a cog in a machine. Inside this small creature experiences are being assimilated, decisions are being made, learning happens. And perhaps, when the line of oily carbon completely blocks their trail, it is not too far-fetched to suggest that, in some small way, creativity is taking place. Before leaving the Manu Learning Centre for the last time, some of the Cape Farewell crew paid a final visit to the leafcutter nest at the head of all the ant trails, to retrieve the now well-trodden sheet of paper. The stream of ants poured in and out of the small opening in the soil, oblivious to their observers. Deep underground, the colony thrived, with probably more than a million workers and just one huge queen at the head. Did this brief encounter with a carbon drawing somehow seep into the mind of this superorganism? Was there some trace of this encounter recorded in the collective leafcutter memory, permanently etched into a few small ant neurons as they trek down their evolutionary path for a further 50 million years? This leads us back to reflect on our own journey; not just the three-week expedition of artists and scien tists trekking through Peru, but the greater human venture. As a species, we are becoming increasingly aware that our dependency upon fossil fuels is having a dramatic impact on our climate. For two hundred years, we have been laying down a black line of carbon in the geological strata that is drastically changing the environ ment, and that could well bring our civilisation to an abrupt halt. Will we respond with the fortitude and collective creativity of the ants, and find a way through this seemingly impenetrable disruption to our expedition on the face of the Earth? Or shall we hopelessly run around in circles, as did some of their number, in our journey towards extinction?

Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson collaborated on the definitive book on these insects, The Ants (Harvard University Press, 1990) for which they were jointly awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1991.

For further information about Cape Farewell and its expedition to Peru see: <www.capefarewell.com/ expeditions/2009.html>

Hölldobler, Bert and Edward O. Wilson, The Leafcutter Ants: Civilisation by Instinct (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011).

A video of this creative collaboration with the leafcutters can be viewed online: <www.capefarewell.com/ expeditions/2009/video-gallery.html>

A CRY IN THE WILD Tyrone Martinsson

Henry David Thoreau’s essay Walking from 1862 1,with its reflections on the differences between a wild landscape and a cultivated and urbanised landscape, is as relevant today as it ever was. Reflections that John Muir, 40 years later, would use as well when writing about America’s National Parks. Thoreau understood the need for a culture’s relationship to its counterpart: the wild places and wilderness areas. The techno-industrial culture that developed throughout the nineteenth century and beyond does not see itself as part of the natural world but rather as the ‘caretaker’ of nature and its resources; where man is the given dominant species and nature is ours to consume for our ever-increasing needs. The 1995 Nobel Prize winner in chemistry, Paul J. Crutzen, has rather frighteningly argued that we have entered a new geological era in earth’s history, the Anthropocene era.2 Caused by mankind’s interference with earth, this is an era that will most likely continue for a long time to come despite an urgent need for a strategy of sustainable environmental management to relieve the stress induced by man‘s ecosystem on earth. The questions, reflections and thought provocations generated by Thoreau, Muir and Crutzen became part of the basis of an idea for an expedition to Arctic Svalbard in 2011; questions, reflections and thought provocations that were also evident from a dialogue with history through photogra phic documents of a specific site in the Arctic; far away from the financial centres of the world, consumptiondriven mega-cities and industrial complexes. The site is a remote small lake on an island facing the northernmost shores of the Polar Sea and the place has a story. In the summer of 1896, a Swedish expedition was searching in the northwest corner of Svalbard for a site to establish basecamp.3 It was the Andrée Polar Expedition. This was to become one of Sweden’s most famous and mythical expeditions ever. The fate of the expedition would come to overshadow the otherwise very successful tradition of Swedish scientific expeditions in the Arctic. The story of the Jules Vernian Andrée balloon expedition the following year in 1897 that left Danskøya in Svalbard to sail into the unknown and become a mystery for 33

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View north from Danskøya Top: Kennedybreen, September 10, 2011 Below: Kennedybreen and The Andrée Balloon expedition sailing across Smeerenburg, July 11, 1897

A Cry in the Wild

years is well covered in research and told in many other publications and media. Here, I am interested in a detail connected to that expedition concerning a series of photographs, a panorama, from the north side of Amsterdamøya, north of Danskøya in the Smeerenburg fjord. The expedition photographer Nils Strindberg took the photographs in August 1896 during a survey job while waiting for the right southern winds for the balloon. Strindberg, together with expedition member Nils Ekholm, was using photography to update the map of Amsterdamøya and its surroundings. This became the most important scientific work made by the expedition that year. In the process of mapmaking, the person conducting the survey had the opportunity to name places and features in the landscape. Strindberg was no exception to this and the panorama covered here has symbolically marked the landscape with the story of the young photographer’s last dreams of love, and his fate is echoed in a spot on the maps of the area. The glacier depicted in the panorama is called Anna’s glacier after Strindberg’s fiancé, Anna Charlier. They had been engaged in the fall of 1896 after Strindberg had returned from Svalbard with his photo graphs for the map. In the process of making the map, and naming places of interest and features in the landscape, he then gave the most beautiful of places that he had photographed his fiancés name. The massive glacier covered the slopes of Hollendar Mountain and from the top of the mountain it had another leg dropping all the way to the sea behind the mountains, across the little lake in the panorama. Strindberg gave that other leg of the glacier the name Retzius glacier after one of the expedition sponsors. The lake had no name in 1896 nor did Strindberg name it: it was named Gjøyavatnet in 1988. However, he gave the cape northeast of the lake the name Cape Gjøya, most probably after a Norwegian sealing vessel called Gjøya that might have visited the area when Strindberg was working there (the same Gjøya was used by Norwegian explorer Roald Amundsen in 1905 to sail through the Northwest Passage). The romance between Anna Charlier and Nils Strindberg was threatened by a dark cloud on the horizon as they both knew that Strindberg was to go back to the Arctic in the early summer of 1897 for a second attempt to sail into unexplored regions. The map that Strindberg and

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Ekholm produced was published in the spring of 1897. Six months later, Strindberg was dead at the age of 25. He had his last birthday on an ice flow in the Arctic sea approaching Kvitøya, the outmost northeast point of Svalbard, where the expedition was to make their last camp, and snow and ice sealed their fate and buried their dreams. He was found 33 years later. The bodies of the three men that had been in the balloon, Nils Strindberg, Salomon August Andrée and Knut Frænkel were buried at the North Burial Grounds in Stockholm under a sculpture monument made by Strindberg’s youngest brother Tore. In 1949, the remains of Anna’s heart joined Strindberg in his grave in a small silver box. Anna’s husband, Gilbert Hawtrey, fulfilled Anna’s last wish and she was to spend eternity with the man she had never forgotten in life. This entire story is symbolically still present in a name on a glacier on the maps of Amsterdamøya. In the late summer of 2011, I finally had an oppor tunity to visit the site where the panorama was taken. While working with images from the area, I have often tried to picture the place at Gjøyavatnet. I had passed it on several occasions on ships going north through the Smeerenburgfjord but never had the opportunity to visit. In September 2011, as a research leader for a project funded by my faculty at the University of Gothenburg, I had the opportunity to decide that the ship we had chartered for our expedition should visit the place of Anna’s glacier. It is often very difficult to get a sense of space and place through historic photographs of land scapes. When working with photographs for research purposes, we gain a lot of knowledge from visiting the sites where they were taken. I had for a long time wanted to rephotograph this particular panorama. Strindberg took his photographs on August 12, 1896 and 115 years after Strindberg on September 10 2011, I finally came to the rock-covered grounds where he had taken his photographs. The mountain wall on the opposite side of the little lake looked the same except for missing stripes of ice on its slopes and a small, fallen pinnacle. But where was the magnificent front of Anna’s glacier that was so striking in Strindberg’s photo of the place? It was gone. Not only was the front wall of the glacier gone, the entire glacier had collapsed and was melting away. Having learned about the special surge glaciers of Svalbard, it is always a delicate issue of not jumping to conclusions as

A Cry in the Wild

Frozen polar bear paw print in frozen mud at glacier in northeast Svalbard

North coast AmsterdamĂ¸ya at the site of Annabreen, September 2011

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Approaching Waggonwaybreen in Magdalena Bay 2011

Mirroring mountain wall at Gjøyvatnet, Amsterdamøya, 2011

A Cry in the Wild

to what has caused such fast retreat of a glacier in the area. But my friend and research colleague, glaciologist Professor Per Holmlund, who stood with me looking at the site where the glacier had been, remarked that it was indeed an extreme retreat and melting of a glacier. The volume of the large glacier in Strindberg’s images had sunken into the gorge between the mountain ridges it had once covered. The aim of our 2011 expedition to Svalbard had been to discuss questions regarding the environment and our relation to the land. As I walked around on the rocks searching for a close enough position to rephotograph Strindberg’s images, questions filled my head. Questions of the future for wild places. Questions of being a father to my young daughter and the future world she will inherit. The places I want her to see and the wilderness I want her to be able to visit for the tonic of wildness that Thoreau expressed our need for. It was a very strong moment standing there by the mirror lake in a light rain looking at the remains of ice on the mountain slopes and listening to the melting glacier as the only sound in the Arctic stillness. A sound that reminds us of a concept of a frozen north, literally changing while we are watching it disappear. The sound of melting water was the inter ruption that amplified the stillness that ‘bordered on the sublime’, to quote Captain Beechey of Captain David Buchan’s expedition to these regions in 1818.4 Buchan’s expedition describes a landscape with almost magical beauty in the mix of rugged mountain ranges with deep valleys in between, either filled with immense beds of snow or with glaciers down the slopes of the mountains and into the sea. The views of these unfrequented places and remote wildernesses that Beechey and so many others who came before us described are often already gone or at least dramatically changed. The concept of wilderness is now such a rarity that Edward Abbey’s call for it to be ‘the only thing left worth saving’ 4 sounds more like a hollow echo from past times than it does a call to arms, from the wild, for the environmentalist movement.5 Climate scientists and academics, as well as writers on nature and environmen tal issues, remind us that man has interfered with earth to such an extent that it is perhaps now difficult to argue for any true wilderness in its original sense. Of course, there are places that are truly wild and that can be

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experienced as wilderness areas but sadly man, through atmospheric pollution and toxic waste in the seas and rivers has interfered with the entire ecosystem of the earth as James Lovelock discusses in Gaia. Thoreau praised the need to access the wild and gain its tonic of life. We need to argue nature’s intrinsic value in a desperate economic system based on all industrial states and ideologies of progress with its runaway expansion and growth. Thoreau already knew, in the dawn of the indus trial economy, as did John Muir later on, that modernity’s progress was destroying the very foundation of what mankind is made of and the very foundation of our future. The preservation of the world in the wilderness and the wild that Thoreau called for is to preserve the foundation for the history of mankind. We need to remind ourselves that, as Aldo Leopold (1949) wrote: ‘wilderness is the raw material out of which man has hammered the artifact called civilization’. Arguably, there is a need to ensure that some of that raw material is saved, if only to preserve a sample of what our society came from: what we were made of and what we are about to lose. The only sustainable (a word so misused by the ideologies of consumption of the industrial states) society is one that would completely rethink and recreate its economic system and attitudes towards progress, consumption and the quality of life, as Arne Naess argues for in his book Ecology, community and lifestyle.6 That would be a society aiming for a balance between man and her culture and nature, and a revaluing of the anthropocentric worldview of modern man towards an ecologically aware society valuing biodiversity and a living landscape instead. A cross-disciplinary range of environmental scientists has for decades warned about the consequences of, and argued against the exponential growth of production and consumption, which characterises modern urbanised techno-industrial society. Nowhere on earth do the consequences of our modern lifestyles become more evident than in the Arctic. How can the study of photographs form part of research that struggles to create awareness and change? As a point of entrance into the complex dialogue concerning living landscapes, and industrial and cultural progress, the history of photography, being also the

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A Cry in the Wild

Grave site at GjĂ¸avatnet, AmsterdamĂ¸ya Svalbard 2011

Kjenndalsbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Kjenndalsbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Glacier site in Bengtssenbukta, northeast Svalbard 2011

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Packing Light

Annabreen, Gjøyvatnet, Amsterdamøya, August 12, 1896, during cartographic work

Panorama at Gjøyvatnet, Amsterdamøya, Svalbard, September 10, 2011

Kongsvegenbrae, lenticular print, 37 × 22 cm, 2010

Kongsvegenbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Brixdalsbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Brixdalsbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

A Cry in the Wild

history of modernity, is an interesting platform for inves tigations and research projects within science, art and the humanities. In ‘Snapshots of modern life’ 6, Susan Sontag defined photography as the ‘modern way of seeing’ where photographs become and are a connection, to the complexity of the real – the cultural and natural world – through their very unique apparatus of produc tion.7 Photographs become documents of what has been as well as of what has changed, and what is about to change, is in progress. The very same photographs from the archives of modernity also empower us and provide us with the possibility to not only investigate and analyse the visual representations of modernity, but also to reconstruct or even more so to rediscover views and revisit places as in rephotography. Photographic studies on site, in the field, based on historical photographs show not only changes over time through specific data in the images, but also address issues regarding shifting cultural views of how areas of wilderness have been visualized over time. They are also part of a wider and interdisciplinary debate about how these areas of the earth, the wild places, have been valued and are valued in our contemporary world. This aspect looks at perspectives of how the land is used by either native communities or visitors of different kinds and purposes and their connection to the global economies of constant growth. The result is a visual record – photographic documents and artistic representations – as Ansel Adams repeatedly defined the photograph. It is the dialogue between science and art that lay within Adams’ definition of the photograph that makes photo graphy and its history part of research dealing with the questions of the consequences of our attitudes towards nature and its resources and a sustainable future society. The changes revealed in this micro-example of northwest Svalbard are part of environmental issues currently taking place on a global scale. What future has mankind when the wild places and the beauty of enchanted natural places are gone or forever changed and destroyed? What will this place look like in twenty, fifty, a hundred or even ten years? How will the concept of a frozen north change our perceptions of the Arctic? If the ice is gone, the number of seals will decrease, the polar bears will be gone: what then will characterise the Arctic?

Thoreau, H. D. (1862) Walking. Atlantic Monthly, 9 (56) June.

Crutzen, Paul J. (2002) ‘Geology of mankind’, Nature, 415 (3) January.

For geographical locations on map see: <www.npolar.no/no/tjenester/kart/>

Beechey, F.W. (1843) A Voyage of Discovery Towards The North Pole. London, Richard Bentley.

Abbey, E. (1975) The Monkey Wrench Gang, Philadelphia, Lippincott Williams & Wilkins.

Naess, A. (1989) Ecology, community and lifestyle. Cambridge, Univeristy Press.

Sontag, S. (2003) ‘Snapshots of Modern Life’. The Scotsman, August.

PACKING LIGHT Michèle Noach

It is a truism to say that when you travel you carry your mental baggage with you, but it’s also inevitable that you collect new things on the journey. Expedition, as a heightened variant on travel, is therefore a delicious, traumatic and ultimately soul-rearranging affair that leaves you looking at the world anew. This is not the case for everyone. I have known those apparently untouched by otherwise eye-scorching vistas of gargantuan icebergs and 360˚ icescapes of wordless beauty. These few characters are a mystery to me. Deep below the surface, surely something shifted? But for me, a three-week sailing expedition in 2004 that circumnavigated Svalbard, the archipelago smack between the Northern tip of Norway and the North Pole, did enough positive damage to my carefully structured self that I really cannot claim to have been the same person on return. Perhaps it was due to being on a century-old Dutch schooner that silently slid past 35-kilometre-long glacier fronts, seeing the many polar bears (impressive mothers with their tumbling cubs or huge fight-scarred males tearing a reindeer in half with visible relish), spending day after day walking on ice caps and freezing shorelines, up into basalt mountains, listening to the music of the frozen air: all this allowed me to be ‘in’ the place, in as organic a way as possible given our modern intrusion. And therefore to feel part of it, even if only in a tiny but vivid way. There were 17 artists and scientists and five Dutch crew. It was a fairly small boat. We were right in the High Arctic and we had to get on with it. We took ice-core samples, watched the scientists diligently scribbling their findings and recording captured speci mens, we helped hold un-nameable and priceless bits of equipment, took photographs, drew, filmed, sailed: but ultimately, the artists spent their time absorbing. And whatever it was that we absorbed, it restructured us to some degree. Standing just a few degrees from the literal top of the world, knowing that virtually all life was below my feet – a dizzying, hysterical thought – turned me over.

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It was the first time I physically understood the globeness of the planet, felt the physics of the Earth. I finally understood the cooling systems that the poles maintain, the climate patterns set up by these local geographic and meteorological features: the crucial in-your-face reality of their impact, wherever we live on the planet. The work I made when I returned home was a series of pseudo-measuring devices in 3D (lenticular prints) called The Arctic Feel-O-Graphs, an attempt to measure the one thing that the scientists couldn’t: how it felt to be in the Arctic. The devices had names like The Overwhelmometer and The Trouble-We’re-In-O’Clock. These were shown at the Natural History Museum in 2005 as part of Cape Farewell’s The Ship exhibition, which then showed internationally for several years. After this expedition, I also started collecting Victorian-era postcards of Arctic glaciers, as my fasci nation grew for ice as a material in itself – devoid of the climate debate. The textures, light, forms and tones of ice, all captured on the fine lenses of old cameras, were beguiling to this artist. After a while, I realised that these amounted to an accidental yet scientifically sound baseline of the movement of glaciers over the last century. I chose several glacier postcards and decided to go back to the exact spots from which the photo graphs had been taken. I travelled across the Arctic Circle taking pictures of the glaciers I had so far only seen on postcards. And so I developed my own archive of the glaciers as they stood now. I made 3D pairs of old and new glaciers, adding characters from the original old postcard to the new scene: glacial valleys bereft of ice, with century-old travellers looking for their glacier, asking us what we’d done with it. This series of glacier lenticulars, Through The Ice, Darkly is exhibited with the UNFOLD exhibition that Cape Farewell launched in Vienna in 2011, featuring works by artists from the last four CF expeditions, and this is currently touring international venues (Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography, New York’s Parsons The New School of Design and Liverpool John Moores University).

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Packing Light

Annabreen, Gjøyvatnet, Amsterdamøya, August 12, 1896, during cartographic work

Panorama at Gjøyvatnet, Amsterdamøya, Svalbard, September 10, 2011

Kongsvegenbrae, lenticular print, 37 × 22 cm, 2010

Kongsvegenbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Brixdalsbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Brixdalsbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

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A Cry in the Wild

Grave site at GjĂ¸avatnet, AmsterdamĂ¸ya Svalbard 2011

Kjenndalsbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Kjenndalsbreen, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Glacier site in Bengtssenbukta, northeast Svalbard 2011

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The process of creation and evaluation for both scientists and artists often takes time: water samples and animals are dissected and analysed in laboratories; data is added to climatic modelling; whilst the artists struggle to evolve a salient story within their media – a book, a film, an artwork. How have we, as humans, caused something so massive as the northern ice cap to melt? What are the consequences of this for us all and importantly, what are the solutions? Scientists have, over the past half-century, aler ted us to the escalating danger that is the by-product of our feverish human activity, where our international societies rely heavily on burning fossil fuels to meet our energy demands. The science of climate change is det ailed and complex, but it is now becoming very assured and certain. Our atmosphere is becoming polluted by excess quantities of carbon dioxide released from burning fossil fuels, which in turn is multiplying the greenhouse effect and causing dangerous warming to our atmosphere and habitat. The beginning of the twenty-first century has witnessed a fundamental shift in human activity as we grapple with the realities of expanding populations and their effect on our environment. Neither science nor the arts work in a hermetic bubble and market forces can influence and distort the lines of enquiry envisaged by both artists and scientists. The pressure to conform to market forces is a serious reflection of our time. There has to be a binding value placed on the cultural engagement with climate change. This is not the current wisdom of capital engagement with energy production, where there is enormous market pressure to invest in the status quo (oil, coal and gas production) even when it is becoming obvious that this is the road to potential Armageddon. Herein lies the scale of the challenge that seems to allude to the need for a fundamental shift in how we, as a global society, can become sustainable and able to live within the confines of our (tiny) planet. Can this be achieved so that we still maintain the scale of human ambition and drive? On a simple platform, it is about energy and the source of that energy. It is probably possible to recycle the energy of the sun, wind, thermal reserves and gravity to fulfill our energy demands, combined with smart conservation; but to achieve

Packing Light

Bondhusbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Bondhusvatnbreen , lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

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A second expedition in 2008 to Greenland was a very different experience. I went on a Russian research vessel, crewed by impossibly Russian Russians and there were now 45 crew members, not 22. This time we brought society with us. A hyperbolic, brilliant and unpredictable crew loosely shepherding a wayward collection of artists, scientists and mostly musicians. Too much talk and not enough time spent on land. I felt the almost painful draw of the iced terrain pulling at me as we stood on the frozen deck looking out. I did discover a great deal about the societies in Greenland whom we visited, and the long-term change in climate and the many ghastly ways that it was affec ting local life (whole teams of dogs disappearing through the thinning ice and livelihoods lost in a moment; their inability to hunt as the waters started opening up where once there’d been solid ice for nine months of the year; the unpredictability of the seasons and so on). There were lectures, wildlife guides, heated discussions. We also trekked across glacial valleys and up beside retracting ice rivers. And all the startling and subtle strangenesses of the Arctic revisited me: the light with its sideways monochromism, the absence of smell, how ice changes everything around it, the Aurora Borealis, the tricks of sound in a frozen landscape, and the appeal of sparsity. I left the Arctic knowing for sure I’d have to go back, that as with all opened doors, the new universe you peek at reminds you how little you know. Whilst in Qeqertarsuaq, Western Greenland, I collected some Arctic poppy seeds (with permission from the authorities) and brought them back home. With great timing, I was offered a long-term artist resi dency at The Eden Project, which afforded me access to one of the best botanical minds in the country, namely Ian Martin. With Ian, I grew and experimented with this fragile yet feisty flower and I learned much about its adaptive abilities over a three-year period of observa tion. My aim was to assess, in a temperate Cornwall, how the poppy might adjust to a warming Arctic. I wrote up our findings (and also notes on the vagaries of collaboration) in the book Poppyflakes, and an exhibition of lenticulars that revelled in the beauty, delicacy and robustness of the little plant was shown during the summer of 2012 at The Eden Project’s Core building under the name The Arctic Poppy Chronicles.

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The Cape Farewell process of expedition interrogates the scientific reality of climate change and, through engage ment of the creative community, evolved a different language to articulate the complex and often abstract work of the climate scientist. The project has evolved a climate language on a human scale, one that is emotive and vibrant. On each Cape Farewell expedition, we had a clear starting point and an end point was drawn; but, as in all expeditions, it was the journey along the way that wasn’t predictable. Here, among the interchange of information and debate between the scientists and creative community who made up each expedition, was where the magic lay. In detail, it is about process, how the scientists and artists conceive a line of enquiry, crafted from something that is only a glimmer of an idea, and then transform it into a sculpted form. This enquiry through expedition becomes synonymous with process. The rationale of scientific reasoning involves data and conclusions, whilst the artist sets about making artworks that inspire and will hold up within the public domain. Being on a schooner allows for a very unique and powerful dialogue,: 25 artists and scientists, hundreds of kilometres away from another living soul, working the boat collectively, sailing among islands, glaciers, in storms and calms. Each expedition has a scientific and cultural objective; the boat is a research platform, a vehicle for social engagement and creative exchange. The concept of expedition is interesting and pertinent to climate change; the start point is a given, the route is a guide, and natural forces and intellectual curiosity det ermine a path that has the capability to illuminate and articulate a way forward. After each expedition, everyone arrives at a place that could not have been imagined at the start, each affected by the journey where in new and creative possibilities are formed. The poet Nick Drake states: During the Cape Farewell expedition to the High Arctic, I began to glimpse how everything is truly connected in nature; indeed, my trips to the shops, my TV and my warm apartment are paid for up here, because in the end, we’re drawing on this vast treasury of ice. The arctic holds a mirror up to us all; and I see now that we’re living like gods on borrowed time.

David Buckland, 2012 3

Packing Light

I continue to track glaciers as they swell and contract, and take my photographs of the flinching ice; and a new fascination is cloud cycles as they absorb and are absorbed by the water that feeds the glaciers. I cannot tire of the icescape, as I now feel part of it. And any time Iâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;m back above the 66th parallel, I find myself opening up my mental bags and inviting the Arctic to step right in.

Images from The Arctic Poppy Chronicles, 2012

CARBON 14 David Buckland

The Carbon-14 atom is a metaphor of where we might be at some point in the future as the planet warms and natu ral systems become unstable, edgy and transformative. By extending this metaphor, the Carbon 14 exhibition for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto (2013–2014) becomes a collective name for artistic engagement that interrogates the near future space we humans will inha bit as climate disruption becomes a physical reality. This new habitat will demand that human activity becomes pioneering, subversive and electric as it strug gles to adapt. In this paper, I will describe a gathering that took place on 11th November 2011 in Toronto when 11 ‘Informers’ and 26 artists/creators gathered for a unique expedition (which didn’t physically move anywhere) that was designed to facilitate the making of new artworks. I think of art, at its most significant, as a DEW line, a Distant Early Warning system that can always be relied on to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.

Marshall McLuhan, 19641

The notion of expedition is familiar territory for an artist. The quest is to push boundaries, to explore the new, to struggle to articulate an unknown but discoverable idea or place. It is mostly a solitary quest, alone in the field. Besides working on solo exhibitions, making artworks, books and videos, I have also worked extensively in theatre, where artists, designers, directors and perform ers combine skills and creative input to craft a combined whole – a collective artwork. There is a thrill in doing this when you arrive at a collective place of creation, trading and being inspired by each other with a weather eye always on a shared objective. Expeditions are always associated with wild undiscovered places, of derring-do, tragedy and failure, and wild success. Making an artwork collectively goes through such similar journeys of dis covery, of failure and wild success. In 1998, during my process of being an artist, curiosity led me to enquire into a field so large, so resonant, that it became obvious this could not be

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resolved as a solitary journey. I began working with mathematical modellers, climate scientists and the international world of climate change. It was a personal life-changing evolution: what the scientists were predic ting was so fundamental to our notion of our global society and the stresses that we are placing on our shared habitat. What started as a solo artistic quest became a life-long-work from which I created the Cape Farewell project, now in its twelfth year. Since 2003, there have been seven expeditions into the High Arctic aboard the schooner, the Noorderlicht, one expedition to the Andes and the Amazon, and one to the Scottish Western Isles. On each expedition, there have been a team of interna tional artists and climate scientists, all focused on how anthropogenic activity is affecting our habitat. Climate change is a reality, our planet is warming and the burning of fossil fuels is the cause of this over-heating. It is very clear that we, as a global society, are heading for a serious and fundamental challenge as the effects of our over-heated habitat begin to manifest. This will not be a walk in the park, it will be serious and many people will suffer. It is a future truth but it is already clear from the very destabilised weather patterns currently affecting us worldwide that this change is upon us now – the arrow is in flight. Aligned to this is the continued process of global denial and perhaps, as Marshall McLuhan stated in 1964, it could be the voice of the artistic process that awakens us to the inconvenient knowledge and reality of climate change. The challenge is to inspire and sculpt this artistic voice into a form that is loud enough to be heard. How do we interrogate the future and how can the artistic process clarify the changes that are upon us? Can we move from observation, from gestalt and towards praxis; move from reflecting on the place that we are in towards envisioning a place that could or will be. To quote Ian McEwan, We have got ourselves into this situation where we are hav ing to address the needs of people unborn. Even the most idealistic thinkers and actors on the world stage have in the past only addressed themselves to problems in the present. To bear the weight of the future in this way is both interest ing and difficult and runs probably counter to our nature.

Art from the Artic, 2005 2

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Carbon 14

David Buckland, 2012 3

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Packing Light

Bondhusbrae, lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

Bondhusvatnbreen , lenticular print, 37 x 22 cm, 2010

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this probably demands a shift in notions of value, greed and supply. But even this alludes to us refocusing our relationship to the natural laws that govern us. Human ingenuity should define that this transition would lead us to a place far more successful and satisfying than the one that we currently inhabit. The realities of climate disruption mean that engaging in this change is not an option: crafting a better future should be our ambition. The ASK of the artists is to interrogate and through a process of action-based research, make work that resonates, excites and encompasses what could be. The Cape Farewell project is a research and delivery platform. By evolving the creative programme to move from communicating the climate reality to working towards visioning solutions was a strategic dec ision and a necessary new direction. The challenge was to take a well-established and successful programme of action-based research through expedition (the Arctic, the Andes) and evolve it successfully to address solutions and societal shifts. The Scottish Islands and the Urban

Cape Farewell exhibition, Carbon 13, 31 August 2012 Automated feather and ink drawings. Ackroyd and Harvey, 2012, paper, ink

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University Short Course are developments of this idea and have established themselves as both valid and successful. To facilitate public engagement with the art pro duced, I have curated three exhibitions, Carbon 12 – the Art and Science of climate change, which opened in Paris in 2012 and Carbon 13 – Climate is Culture, which opened in Marfa, Texas in August 2012. Both Carbon 12 and Carbon 13 are stable isotopes; carbon is also the original drawing tool of artists; and carbon dioxide is the gas at the root cause of climate change. All the work shown was the product of the artists who have travelled on Cape Farewell expeditions, collaborating directly with scientists, working solo or working in partnership with other artists. The Carbon 14 exhibition will open at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, in September 2013. The essence of the Carbon 14 exhibition will be, like the isotope, something edgy, unstable, exciting, electric, pioneering, and subversive. The atom Carbon 14 is very rare and because of its properties of gradual transfor mation, it is used to date objects in historical time, a process referred to as ‘carbon dating’. As our habitat continues to warm and the weather systems become ever more fractious, this atom becomes a metaphor of where we might be at some point in the future and natural systems become unstable, edgy, transformative. By extending this metaphor, Carbon 14 becomes a collective name for artistic interrogation into the near-future space that we will inhabit; a place that will be, by necessity, pioneering, subversive and electric. It will be all new artworks generated by a unique group of artists gathered from Canada, the USA and Mexico who came together in Toronto in November 2011. The gathering was an expedition that didn’t physically move but whose objective was to explore the whole canopy of human activity with one single coda: the feverish human activity that for 200 years has achieved extraordinary successes with one notable downside – our dangerously overheating habitat. If the by-product of 200 years of human ingenuity, conflict and indulgence results in the destruction of our own habitat, then it must be considered a failing system. The arrow is in flight. How and what would transform its flight towards a healthy and sustainable target?

Carbon 14

Eleven informers and 26 artists/creators gathered together in Toronto by Lake Ontario to interrogate the now and perhaps ‘tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it’. For a two-day expedition that explored the worlds of climate science, economic systems, social sciences, twenty-first century art practice, eco-theology, sustainable energy generation, politics, oceanography, anthropology, food production and digital/social media.4 The intense two days of the Carbon 14 workshop were as exciting and dangerous as sailing through ice bergs, or skirting glaciers and encountering polar bears. The Carbon 14 workshop experiment rewarded us all with unsurpassed energy, inspiration and a collective spirit of ‘can do’. Claire Sykes and I (and all who are Cape Farewell North America) thank everyone for entering into the two days with an open spirit and boundless energy and engagement. The wrench of leaving each others’ company and intensity is mirrored by a commitment by us all to take this forward and achieve real and tangible work; which will engage on a local and international level. David Buckland, December 2011

Deconstructing how a society operates and how it might be if it buys in to achieving a stable climate and a sustainable future was the objective of the informers. Each ‘expert’ or informer was chosen for their commit ment to change and climate engagement, and they were given time during the workshop to inform us about their professional work with a short précis. As in the arctic expeditions, we mapped intermediate targets whilst giving significant time for individual exchange, trusting the well-tuned processes that each artist has developed for their own practice. These artists, cultural producers and professional informers are at the top of their individual specialities. They are not activists nor is climate their sole focus, but our ask from them was to enter into this shared and focused engagement. Endlessly on the Cape Farewell expeditions, the inter change between those taking part lifts the bar of possibility, allowing for ideas and work to germinate into unimagined possibilities. Over the two days, there evolved a defined objective. In September 2013, 18 months after the

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Cape Farewell exhibition, Carbon 13, 31 August 2012 INTERNAL COMBUSTION. David Buckland,2012 Steel, aluminium, plastic, carbon-base fuel, water

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workshop, there will be a major exhibition at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto and the call was to produce works for this event. Not only was the museum available, but there are also theatres, media platforms, radio and urban screens all available for artworks, plays, films and music in Toronto. The ambition, like the silo-busting of disciplines within the workshop, is to achieve the same with public engagement. The final part of the workshop was a free-form debate, an open exchange of ideas and the first airing of artistic proposals. Nine months have now passed and there are over 15 pro足 posals for the making of artwork. The creative producers teamed up with each other, with chosen informers and other outside specialists. Claire and I continue to work with each other and we are now joined in a collec足 tive process of production. The scale and vision of the art proposals is stunning and ambitious. Realising them is now in process, keeping them within the realms of the pioneering, the subversive and the electric. For the moment, the art proposals are at a deli足 cate stage and can only be shared internally within the group. The enclosed environment of an expedition has to remain until the artists have the security of closure and can go public with the process and artworks. The challenge and risk of delivering an expedition that starts without moving yet that allows new heights to be scaled over the process of a year and a half was, like the isotope, unstable and rare. What we were trying to achieve here was to use this process of creativity, partnership and invention, and to focus it collectively to address what is the most important issue of our time. Historically, stories of expeditions dwell as much on heroic failure as they do on the objectives achieved. The Cape Farewell programme is artist-led, which becomes important when the ASK from others is to walk together into the unknown and create. There are no contracts to achieve targets, only the shared value of engagement and process, and the desire to produce. Getting lost, failing to narrate and the exploration of a terrain not understood are all part and parcel of a process that delivers success and uncharted vision. Each of the creative producers has been left to navigate their own course and partnerships, and each will have their own story to tell.

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Whilst the work of the other artists is, at this time of writing, in purdah, I can articulate my own process of discovery. The way of viewing the world offered by the eco-theologian, Dennis O’Hara, fascinated me and offered something closest to my current curiosity. I find blind faith difficult to handle and I am therefore secular but I was intrigued to get lost in what is a powerful human force, and historically societies worldwide have always evolved a spiritual dimension as part of their fabric. As Dennis O’Hara pointed out, humans have the need for what is collectively called religion. Ever since we made marks to record our evolution, we have built edifices, written books and told stories that give us a perspective of life beyond our own meagre short stay on earth. We do this collectively and gather to make a collective of like souls that has serious power. It is here that I have mistrust: organised spiritual forces can appear to distort what is a pure insight and they have done it for misguided and often vicious gender-dominated actions that rally this force against opposite tribes and different religions. This does not change the fact that finding a perspective beyond our own personal existence is often searched for under a cloak of what is termed religion. If you align the spiritual and religious quest of the world that Dennis inhabits with that of the artist and our fascination with the sublime over the logical domination of the enlight enment, with emotional knowledge, with knowing the magic of nature and the beauty of human relations, with the creative act, then Dennis and I have plenty to discuss and share. Add the word ‘eco’ to theology and I am closer still to his world, and to the world of the pagan – I find standing stones, the first creative marks made in carbon on cave walls and ritualistic stories beguiling. Dennis is happy and profound within his own faith and I am content within the messy process of art practice. So he and I have embarked on a journey, shared. We mostly get lost inside each other’s worlds; our fine- tuned mapping of our own course is often thrown and shaken by each other’s terminology and sense of knowing. For him, faith, the sacred and the trinity are cornerstones upon which he has built his framework for knowing; for me, the photograph, that hard instant document that we often mistake for truth, is paramount

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Cape Farewell Marshall McLuhan concert, 10 November 2011

to how we know and construct modern lives. Both worlds are central to what it is to be contemporary and human, both are powerful practices that dominate our underÂ standing of where we, as humans, construct values and both could be powerful in inspiring a sustainable cultural shift. The common refusal to engage with the reality of anthropogenic global warming is a personal mystery â&#x20AC;&#x201C; every society cares for their children as a basic law yet here we are selling them a legacy of indefinable horror. What is it in us that doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t want to engage and see just how good a new built future could be, one that is sustainable? Where is the switch that might orchestrate change? For me, it is a cultural shift; for Dennis, it is a spiritual engagement and upholding of the sacred, not a desecration of it. If we are going to achieve a cultural shift, then the world of the sacred will surely be as influential as the power of art and culture. So Dennis and I are engaged and I have set my course to produce something, an artwork, made in partnership

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with eco-theology. Historically, religion and art have been very productive bedfellows. Dennis and I are intrigued to capitalise on this rich seam of possibility yet are struggling to layer it with a new cloak of need. This has to be a shared effort to explore with all the pitfalls of getting lost, of making mistakes, of failures and, of course, I have every confidence that it will involve Eureka moments and the pure joy of the creative process.

McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York, McGraw-Hill.

Art from the Arctic. (2005) Directed by David Hinton. London, Cape Farewell and BBC [film].

Buckland, D. (2012) Climate is Culture. Nature Climate Change (2), March, pp.137–140.

An expedition of the most salient kind.

INFORMERS Alanna Mitchell is a freelance journalist and author of the international bestseller, Sea Sick: the global ocean in crisis. Andrew Weaver is a Professor, Research Chair, and Lead Author in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. David Miller is former Mayor of Toronto (2003–2010) and an international advisor to corporations and governments for the creation of sustainable urban economies. Professor Dennis O’Hara is an eco-theologian and Director of the Elliot Allen Institute of Theology and Ecology at St. Michael’s College, University of Toronto. He is also an associate member of the graduate faculty at the Centre for Environment at University of Toronto. Dominique Scheffel-Dunand is Associate Professor of Linguistics at York University and the Director of the McLuhan Program in Culture and Technology at University of Toronto. Ian Mauro is a Canada Research Chair at Mount Allison University and Co-Director of Qapirangajuq: Inuit Knowledge and Climate Change. Mary MacDonald is the Environmental Program Director at Metcalf Foundation and advisor to Mayor Bloomberg as Chair of the C40 Large Cities Climate Group. Peter Victor is an economist, author and pioneer of the emerging discipline of ecological economics. Rick Smith is an author, environmentalist and campaigner dedicated to improving

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governments‘ environmental and health policies. Ron Dembo is founder of Zerofootprint, an organisation that helps individuals, governments and corporations to measure and manage their carbon footprint. Tom Rand is an author, speaker and entrepreneur interested in carbon mitigation. He is CleanTech Lead Advisor at the MaRS Discovery District. CULTURAL PRODUCERS Donald Weber is an investigative photographer whose work has been featured in numerous international publications from The Guardian to Rolling Stone. Eamon MacMahon is an award-winning photographer whose work explores the North American wilderness. Erika Blumenfeld is an internationally exhibiting artist who creates photo-and video-based works through the study, witness and documentation of the natural world. Franco Boni is the Artistic Director of Toronto’s Theatre Centre, and has been an instrumental force in the vision and success of both the Rhubarb and SummerWorks theatre festivals. Heather O’Neill is a Montreal writer whose first novel Lullabies for Little Criminals won the Canada Reads competition and the Hugh MacLennan Prize for fiction. Janna Levitt is a Principal at Levitt Goodman Architects and a member of the National Steering Committee for the Canadian Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale. Kevin McMahon is an acclaimed documentary film-maker whose work has been celebrated with retrospectives by The Canadian Film Institute and Hot Docs. Kim Simon is a Toronto-based curator of contemporary art. Lisa Steele and Kim Tomczak are co-founders of V-Tape and have collaborated since 1983, producing

and internationally exhibiting videotapes, performances and photo/text works. Mel Chin is a conceptual artist from Houston Texas, whose practice is motivated largely by political, cultural and social circum stances. Chin works in a variety of art media to calculate meaning in modern life. Melanie Gilligan is a Canadian-born artist working in video, performance, text, installation and music. Micah Lexier is a prolific artist, a collector of things and sometimes a curator. Minerva Cuevas is a Mexican artist whose work is founded in context-based research, installed everywhere from public spaces to museums. Myfanwy MacLeod is a Vancouver artist using popular culture, folklore and art history in a range of media, including sculpture, drawing, performance, video and photography. Nancy Vonk is an award-winning Creative Director, formerly Co-Chief Creative Officer of Ogilvy Toronto, and currently Co-founder of Swim. Patrick Watson is a Canadian singersongwriter; winner of the Polaris Music Prize who will also be headlining our concert on November 10th at Koerner Hall. Rebecca Belmore is a Vancouver-based artist working in installations and performance. She represented Canada in the 2005 Venice Biennial.

NIGHT TIME Stevie Bezencenet

Here and now, at this moment, I relinquish what I know from dawn to dusk and embrace that other place… night time. As a photographer with a particular interest in landscape, I have often ignored the performative nature of making images – the physical process of negotiating terrain and the narrative aspect of the journey have tended to become overwhelmed by the aspiration to create ‘work’, even if the work is, in itself, underwhelming. Here, I want to shift the idea of ‘capturing’ the landscape, in fact abandon the idea of landscape altogether and inves tigate the experiential process of being and walking that accompanies the production of images, with specific reference to the nighttime. I am interested in the nighttime – in night time – in what we can learn about our environment and oursel ves when we explore familiar territory at an unfamiliar time. The slipping away of the day and the turn from twilight to dusk to night offers us opportunities to experience our environment differently – to reconceive our relationship to space and time, movement and stillness, sight, sound and sensation. Exploring the countryside at night means to relinquish the familiar ally of daylight and the certainties that it seems to offer. Twilight, dusk and night have their own qualities of light and dark, revelation and conceal ment, and to explore this transformation of the visible world is to open oneself to new relations to our sur roundings – to appreciate the world close at hand differ ently. Recently, I made a series of forays into the Suffolk/ Essex countryside between dusk and deep night in an expeditionary frame of mind to rediscover what can so easily be taken for granted and ‘overlooked’ in the democracy of daylight.

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July 22nd In the late evening, I made a circular night walk from Nayland by the Stour, along paths, across the river and through the fields, copses and dells; past bullocks, bats and insects; hearing unknown birds, planes, a couple of dogs and the odd car; seeing colours bleed away and the stars gently come into focus, the constel lations slowly becoming more complex as the light ebbed away; and finally, the Milky Way appeared, an old friend, unseen during all those years of city living. As dusk fell the poppies stood out alongside the white of the cow parsley and slender trunks of the silver birches. The silhouettes of the trees made them appear even more solid than a few hours previously, an impres sion I found hard to fathom. On a small bridge over a stream I stopped to listen to the quiet, and the willows moving, and the water passing and the bats beginning, seeming to fly so slowly that I might have caught them with my hand. At the edge of a field, I crouched down at wheatheight to have a different vantage point on the land scape. The sudden close-up startled me and I stood up feeling self-conscious. I tried again and managed to hold the position for longer; it was not only a physical posi tion but a conceptual one, whereby a shift of focus from background to immediate foreground made me take note of precisely what I was looking at – ears of wheat – rather than embracing the idea of a landscape. I watched the sky from west to north-west as the hues became layered in ever more complex ways and the sky in the south reduced to deep blue-grey and so quietly enjoyed a panorama that was new to me. It was familiar topography but was becoming a different terrain and I slowly became part of how it changed minute by minute. I have many memories and sense impressions from this first walk and I particularly remember: … black slugs on the path; how quickly and yet imperceptibly the sky changed colour; and the moon – a pale pink crescent moon that disappeared behind the trees an hour into the walk – it became hidden by the silhouette of the trees and it became clear how quickly the earth rotates… … realising that I did not know the names of most of the flora and fauna and wondered what difference the capacity to name and order made…

Night Time

… how the path changed as I developed my night vision and it seemed as if I was progressing along a brief stretch of ground that kept on repeating itself with variations of incline, width, surface, edges and nocturnal movement… … that I passed no people, apart from the family fishing at the start and no cars apart from one that passed me after midnight and did not stop – perhaps because I turned away and, dressed in black with a hat pulled down, the driver didn’t think of slowing for a stranger on a lonely road… … the deep sloping field where I could not find the stile under the trees and wondered at the churnedup mud underfoot; on leaving, a large yellow sign boasted ‘beware of the bull’ and I was grateful for not knowing… … the heat had melted the tar in small patches along the final stretch of road – or it might have been water, but that made no sense unless a vehicle had intermittently and rather haphazardly been leaking, or something else had left a trace as it meandered ahead of me through the dark… … that awareness became combined with wariness and was finally overtaken by weariness, as new pleasures and new uncertainties became masked by fatigue. July 26th I sat on a bench next to a large copse at the apex of a nearby hill and watched the twilight develop into dusk. I spent a quiet hour there with a half moon rising to my left and the sun setting to my right. I did not move except to slowly lift the binoculars. I felt like a spectator. The colours around the setting sun were magnifi cent, especially when viewed in close-up through the binoculars so that the atmosphere became a phenome non rather than a ‘picture’. The half moon was at an angle of about 85º and imperceptibly became vertical, and then continued to move through another 5º during my stay as the planet turned away. The hill sloped away from me across fields and was echoed by the hill opposite – there were hedgerows, an abundance of trees, animals, no people, a few houses and a small church. The colours and shapes of the trees, and the air between the groups of trees was especially

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captivating as I became aware of the wealth of tones and hues between greens and greys, which the diminishing light and the wisps of mist transformed moment by moment. Rabbits were everywhere when I let my gaze settle to see them – they dashed around, grazed, became alarmed and grazed again in a continuous state of alert. Two young rabbits appeared out of the wood to my left, scampered around and headed down the hill. A little later, I noticed that a group of adult rabbits were sitting upright in a semi-circle, absolutely still about 100 yards away. Checking what might have alarmed them, I saw a large fox weaving its way along the hedge further down the hill. I thought it might be stalking them, but they did not move and after stopping every now and then, the fox passed through the hedge into the field below. A few minutes later, I heard movements in the undergrowth behind me and thinking it might be a badger was surprised when two foxes sprung out of the wood a few feet away. After some uncertainty, they raced down the hill scattering the rabbits. When the foxes reached the hedge and disappeared through the gap, there was still a lone rabbit watching from the edge of the field. I could not tell if this was the beginning of a more sophisticated hunt, but as dusk became night I could no longer see the details of what was taking place on the hill – only moonlight, starlight, shapes and shadows. I was reminded of what stillness can bring – it offers more than an absence of environmental distur bance. It also gives the opportunity for intellectual quiet, for being in the place and the moment, and reflecting on what is there – what is right here – and what we so easily pass by in our everyday lives. I had moved on just a little from being a spectator. July 30th I had thought to walk and take my camera this time, maybe make some pictures in the light of a waxing gibbous moon, but the clouds thickened and it began to drizzle and I lost interest. On looking out of the win dow at dusk, I saw a complete rainbow over the village for the second night in a row. The last of the sunlight caught the houses across the green, the sky was a greypurple and the rainbow arched from the trees opposite

Night Time

to beyond the pub – a terrific backdrop for an evening, a watercolour, a postcard. I stood there getting wet and trying to take a photograph that would capture the qualities of the scene, but failing. The scene had too quickly become caught up in the motifs of the picturesque, and I stopped looking. Turning away, I glanced down and noticed the colour of the old brick wall that bordered the lane – it was an old deep red and worn down in places and the roughness of the brick was partially hidden by the yellow and green of the grasses that grew from the stones at its base. So I photographed that and discovered it was more interesting. August 4th It was a clear night with a moon rising at 9.30pm – a few days past full. I took a short walk past the church and the allotments, and over the hill to fields, a track, tree-covered hills, planes passing high in several direc tions, a mass of stars, and a radio mast with a line of three vertical red lights to split the horizon and provide the only vibrant colour in the night. There were no ani mals and only an owl to be seen, but many living or dying things heard – some close, others a distant happening. I walked a short way noting how everything seemed more immediate. It was a matter of both actively looking and more consciously absorbing information in a variety of non-visual ways. When I go out in the countryside at night, I learn to see differently – to ‘see’ in a manner that requires me to not see very much at all, or rather, to diminish my optical experience in favour of a broader relation to my surroundings, so that they are ‘revealed’ in a more varied – sometimes vibrant, some times quieter – immediacy. However, as a photographer, I wondered how to create an image that would suggest how moonlight ‘coats’ the landscape – how it lies over the folds of the terrain, shaping it with dark shadows and colour-absorbing light – how it reveals, yet without showing very much at all. It offers a sketch without much visual detail and that is what I managed to record. Details are not only visible qualities, but are also about relations – between things and between oneself and these things. Night vision takes a few minutes to become effective and then one can see well enough without artificial light – unless you are anxious, in which

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case it is best not to continue, because you need to let go, to abandon believing that you know where you are going and what you are going to encounter. Moonlight offers us: objects without substance; shadows deeper than they should be; being taken by surprise by almost anything; the cool promise of a light that offers revelation, but beyond the visual realm; fear; a tantalising environment, but one where I am uncertain; being presented with spaces and places that I thought I knew; being unsafe because, if I do not know my environment in the way that I thought, then what is it to me? What am I to it? Moonlight compels and it denies. It compels wandering and stimulates a desire to move through what one already knows, anticipating the familiar, but not finding it. The environment is made strange, so that surfaces, mass, colour and form become unfixed from our everyday experience of them. Objects and the relations between them become transformed and one moves through this night space as if in a dream. Daylight offers fixity and certainty, and so contributes to our sense of self. Moonlight undoes; it undoes in the sense that it undermines what we take for granted, what keeps us ‘in place’. A moonlit night promises the anticipated in a new light, but in a knight’s move, by taking us some where unexpected, somewhere foreign, somewhere extraordinary. It has been said that explorers discovered new territories because they ‘projected their imaginations’ and followed them. However, we can all do this and we can do it tonight.

We shall not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time. T.S. Eliot, Four Quartets

Night Time

11pm 2 hours after moonrise, 4 August 2012

EXPEDITION TO THE SOURCE OF THE DOLLIS BROOK Nick Edwards

All experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discoveries, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely. Edgar Allan Poe (1840)1

The Dollis Brook is a river that runs through north London and flows into the Welsh Harp reservoir near Brent Cross – it’s a typical urban river, culverted, diverted and managed. And like most urban geographical features, the Dollis Brook is ignored to the point that it is often mistaken for a drain, and is treated as such in places – yet, this anonymity, this forgotten, mistaken water makes it an ideal river to explore. It also has the added attraction of being local to where I live and answers the criticism of my travel habit by offering a destination that has a minimal carbon footprint. ‘Exotic’ and ‘enchanting’ are two words rarely used to describe suburban landscape. In the Dollis Brook, I wanted to try and discover amongst the flora and fauna, and the detritus, a magic that I had seen in the Arctic. It was the Dollis Brook’s ‘lostness’ that attracted me; its slightly sad, melancholic, grubby trickle that drew me to plan an expedition to discover its source, and along the way to perhaps answer questions that had increas ingly occupied my thoughts. My first experience of an expedition was to the Arctic in 2004 with Cape Farewell. As we explored the Arctic region around Svalbard, taking readings of the tempera ture gradient from the North Atlantic current as it plunges down to meet the cold Arctic melt waters, I saw at first hand the debris of our profligate and wasteful culture. The Anthropocene is evident in every inlet and windswept beach. Reminded of Wallace Steven’s poem, Anecdote of the Jar, the jar ‘took dominion everywhere’: its existence is a fact, it is as natural as the ‘bird or bush’ but it is of us, and sets us apart from the wilderness.

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Anecdote of the Jar I placed a jar in Tennessee And round it was, upon a hill. It made the slovenly wilderness Surround the hill. The wilderness rose up to it, And sprawled around, no longer wild. The jar was round upon the ground And tall and of a port in air. It took dominion everywhere. The jar was gray and bare. It did not give of bird or bush, Like nothing else in Tennessee. Wallace Stevens (1923)2

In the Arctic, I saw that, of course, climate change is a problem for politics and science, but it is the culture of our civilisation that is at the root of the problem. Our culture has an ethical system that seems to place very little value on land/nature. The exploitation and consumption of resources is encouraged in order to maintain and grow our consumer culture.

Bear Island, 2003

Consumer capitalism makes culture an excuse for the production of consumers; as well as the capitalisation of social spaces, it assimilates them into endless cycles of destruction and reconstruction. I returned from my expedition to the Arctic asking, ‘Can I imagine a culture that values our continued existence over temporary wealth?’ And looking over the yet uncultivated scene, the mind’s eye may see far into futurity. Thomas Cole (1836)3

With our consumer debris obscuring Thomas Cole’s ‘futurity’ here on earth, I looked towards space for possible new untrammelled territories to explore. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries life began to reach beyond the surface of the earth, where it had been marooned for millennia. In 1961, Yuri Gagarin launched into space and our universe expanded to the

Svalbard, 2003

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limitless vision of Star Trek. Our distended cybernetic senses began to show us a universe of magnificent proportions, and it seemed as if we might soon have a vision of everything, an explanation for all existence. As we looked further into space, it turned out that 97% of the universe appeared to be missing – it seems that the outer arms of galaxies are moving faster than their observable mass is capable of producing – and in order to make the mass equal the speed, 97% more mass has to be added to that which can be observed. The problem is, no one seems to be able to detect this extra 97%, as it never emits nor reflects any radiation. This unseen (and as yet) unseeable Dark Matter is the Terra Incognito, a land of the imagination. And if 97% of the universe is missing, can we say with any real certainty that we know where we are? Are we in fact lost? My conversations with other artists during my first expe dition to the Arctic were dominated by thoughts of the sublime, this venerated word framed by Edmund Burke’s 1757 book A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was not able to convey my feelings for what I saw and experienced, it fell short of my response.4 For Burke, the highest manifestation of sublime power is the intervention of a deity in human affairs; a show of absolute power. The sublime requires a belief in God, and an ignorance that in the twenty-first century was impossible for me to feign. Can there be awe if there is no ultimate authority? I realised that our cultural vocabulary remained arrested whilst our understanding of the universe expanded. The sublime is an artefact of the eighteenth century and, as such is open to critical reassessment. I began to think, is the sublime the aesthetic peak it’s long been believed to be? Or is it, along with the beautiful and picturesque, a mere foothill to a greater range that is yet to be discovered? Is it possible that there are yet to be discovered territories of aesthetics? During my second Arctic expedition in 2005, when we circumnavigated the Svalbard archipelago, I began to experiment with my senses in order to find an alternative to the sublime.

Svalbard, 2004

Svalbard, 2005

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Once away from the ship there were no modern sounds and only vast expanses of wilderness. In silence – standing on the ice cap, the gently curved ice disappearing north, and just listening. I heard music, voices and laughter. Now with nothing to catch my eye in either land or sea, just the blue vault above, isolated like some cosmic speck, floating in the air, subject to nothing but the laws of gravity. I saw stars, flashes of colour, a mountain floating in the air. Magnificence opened up before me; what was the feeling gripping me? It was thrilling. I swam in boundless space, I vanished and was lost. Losing things is about disappearances. There are objects and people that disappear; you lose a book, a friend, a key. You still know where you are – it’s the object that’s lost. Sir John Franklin knew where he was in the Arctic, he was equipped with the skills and instruments to be able to survey precisely where he was on the face of the earth, and I’m pretty sure that David Livingston knew where he was too – it was the rest of the world that didn’t know where they were; Franklin and Livingston were lost to everyone but themselves. Being lost is about disappearing. When I get lost, my world shrinks to the limit of my senses. Beyond my senses lie imagination – a world different to that of maps; maps don’t show the mysterious labyrinths and vast plains that lie beyond the edges of vision, with the familiar falling away. If we are to imagine spaces for these times, if we are to see where we are and where we might go, we have to pursue an alternative imagination. An imagination that is prepared to admit that it’s lost, an imagination that has stepped into the unknown. Lost is the finished state – everything else is process. It is what lies beyond the margins that I am exploring, the missing 97%. What does the invisible look like? As Plato’s Meno said to Socrates, ‘How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally

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unknown to you?’. Our corporeal senses have been aug mented, amplified and finessed to the point where we are able to experience the universe without the need to resort to metaphor. Language, vision, sound, dissolve, merge, echo – I search for a word that does not exist, a concrete word that will finally do for the sublime, a Higgs Boson of a word, a word from a vocabulary that speaks of life’s purpose, our purpose, to understand, to feel, to inhabit. These enquiries into landscape, space and science had by 2008 led me to ask three questions. Is there a future for our culture? Am I lost? Are there un-explored territories to be discovered? These three questions formed the basis for my future expeditions. But first, I questioned the need to travel (at all) in order to explore. As the notion of travel for travel’s sake is a difficult activity to justify, I looked instead to George Perec’s idea of Endotic travel. Endotic travel is an exercise in staying close by. We do not leave the familiar and travel interstitially or liminally through a world that we thought we knew. It is an exploration of the local, or what Perec calls the ‘infra-ordinary’. In Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (1974) Perec asks, How can we speak of these ‘common things,’ how, rather, can we stalk them, how can we flush them out, rescue them from the mire in which they remain stuck, how can we give them a meaning, a tongue, so that they are at last able to speak of the way things are, the way we are? 5 I wanted to turn exploration on its head, to see the world as if through the eyes of an Amazonian, encounter the local inhabitants as if it were they who were un-discovered by the rest of the world. The process of exploration, particularly in terms of exploring new lands, is usually a precursor to migration, invasion or annexation – I wished to explore

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as a precursor to liberation. I aimed to liberate my imagination and see the world unmediated by eighteenth century acronyms. My exploration is not an archaic witness, but a dynamic process. It is, I believe, what we are here to do, it is what all life does, it seeks out new worlds. Our urge to explore is Earth’s current best chance of achieving life’s purpose, to be a dream that becomes reality and spread throughout the stars. It was in this spirit that the expedition to the source of the Dollis Brook was embarked upon, or to give it its full title: The Expedition to the Source of the Dollis Brook in search of the consequences of the ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful.

Dollis Brook, 2009

The expedition took place on June 15th 2009 when I led a small party from the Welsh Harp reservoir towards the source of the Dollis Brook. Starting early in the morning, we first had to hack our way through a dense, almost tropical forest that fringes the reservoir, eventually emerging into a tangle of tunnels, overhead footpaths and interlocking round abouts of the M1/north circular junction.

Dollis Brook, 2009

Dollis Brook expedition members. Left to right: Bergit Arrends, Curator – Contemporary Arts, The Natural History Museum Nina Horstmann, Programme Manager, Cape Farewell Andy Webster, artist researcher in the Art, Nature, Environment research group (RANE), University College Falmouth Nick Edwards, expedition leader and Zuleika Testone, MA student, Camberwell College of Art

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At this point, the brook is at its most mediated, culverted into a narrow straight concrete channel. It’s easy to forget that it’s the brook that have set the stage, over millions of years; geology and gravity has caused water to take this course – humans have only recently intervened. Beyond the culverting, the brook takes on a more ‘naturalistic’ form, a negotiation between the local council and pure physics. It was in this strip of civic wilderness that we came upon a rustic folly, the sole survivor of a previous attempt at arcadia.

Dollis Brook, 2009

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Here we stopped for a ‘blinkered viewing’. For this exercise, I’d made blinkers with narrow slots cut either horizontally or vertically – my intention was to change the point of view that the familiar is seen from, to try and get lost in the familiar – and to force the focus we inserted ear plugs. Once I had calmed my agitated thoughts and relaxed into this novel experience, my mind began to drift, the rumble of the North Circular faded and I began to dream; perhaps now I could find some clues to the questions I’d set out to answer. Could I see a future, a way ahead, an unaffected frontier? It seemed like a hopeless ambition, but this is the point of exploring – to go in search of Meno’s ‘totally unknown’ with no guarantee of success. My search for a word had begun and I believe it may lie somewhere near the source of the Dollis Brook. ‘We’re going to discover the North Pole.’ ‘Oh!’ said Pooh again. ‘What is the North Pole?’ he asked. ‘It’s just a thing you discover,’ said Christopher Robin carelessly, not being quite sure himself. A. A. Milne 1975 6

Dollis Brook, 2009

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Poe, E. A. (1840) The Daguerreotype. Alexander’s Weekly Messenger, 4.3, p.2.

Stevens, W. (1923) Harmonium. New York, Alfred A. Knopf.

Cole, T. (1836) Essay on American Scenery. The American Monthly Magazine 1, January.

Burke, E. (1757) A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. London, Printed for R. and J. Dodsley.

Perec, G. (1974) Espèces d’espaces. Paris, Galilée.

Milne, A.A. (1975) An Expotition to the North Pole. London, Methuen Children’s Books.

Blinkered viewing

Blinkered view

WHERE ICE GOES TO DIE Chris Wainwright

Approaching 80.2Ë&#x161; latitude, off the north coast of Spitsbergen with no Arctic sea ice. 16 September 2011

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Where Ice Goes to Die

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Where Ice Goes to Die

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Sailing east off the north coast of Spitsbergen in fairly bad weather and rough sea. Heading towards White Island (Kvitoya). Watched the movie Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Ship pitching and rolling as we sailed through the night. Secured ourselves in our seats and watched, and endured the film with an eye always on the dramatically shifting horizon, occasionally visible through the portholes. Diary entry 16 September 2011.

The story of Frankenstein begins with the British explorer Captain Robert Walton sailing to the North Pole when his boat gets stuck in the ice and an air of despair descends over him and his crew. The despair is inter rupted by the sight of a man riding a dog sledge across the ice coming towards the boat. The man turns out to be Victor Frankenstein, the creator of the Frankenstein Monster. Victor tells Walton his life story and soon after he falls ill and dies. The Frankenstein story develops as a series of tragic episodes that centre on fear of the Monster, the ethics of its creation, and how it is perceived as dangerous and murderous; whilst its feelings, emotions and sensitivity are deeply misunderstood. Eventually, the mounting tide of regret and revenge result in Victor chasing the Monster across the globe and he eventually encounters him, self-exiled in the Arctic, close to the North Pole. The Monster, on finding the dead Victor on board the stricken ship, takes him away on to the ice, where he too goes to die.

Still from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein

Where Ice Goes to Die

The weather worsened and we never made it to Kvitoya; instead, we headed back west and south into the shelter of the land. At Rijpfjorden, we landed and on the way to Rijpbreen glacier, we came across a dead polar bear that had probably died of starvation from being stranded on the island due to the lack of sea ice, which would have normally enabled it to roam and hunt for seals. The barren land of Nordaustlandet held little in the way of food in the winter period, fast approaching at that time of year. Accounts of bears coming into settlements and attacking humans, whilst not commonplace, are increasingly reported, as is the somewhat justifiable reputation of the polar bear as a skilled predator and hunter. To attribute such characteristics as instinctive or genetic however, fails to recognise that a substantial impact on the current behaviour of polar bears is due to human activity. In particular, the warming effect of carbon emissions have caused a dramatic reduction in the volumes of sea ice and led to increasing difficulties for the bears to migrate in the winter. On 16 September 2011, the levels of Arctic sea ice were extremely low. As I write now twelve months later, sea ice in the Arctic region has shrunk a dramatic 18% this year to a record low of 3.41m sq km. We have in the second decade of this century already exceeded the predictions for Arctic ice melt for the end of the century and are facing huge challenges to the way that we currently live our lives. There is irrefutable evidence that our econom ically driven and uncontrollable desire for energy consumption has had a dramatic climatic effect on the way that the Arctic region behaves. Changes in Arctic conditions will have a potentially irreversible knock-on effect that will threaten our way of life, unless we make some significant changes. Depressingly, the new race to explore the Arctic and extract its resources for economic gain is alteady on. ‘Lets go up there and drill for oil’ is the cry of Shell and others. There is no more perfect indictment of our failure to seriously address one of the greatest threats to humanity. Who are the real monsters of the Arctic as we move from fiction to the future? 16 September 2012

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Rijpbreen glacier, Svalbard, 2011

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Rijpbreen glacier, Svalbard, 2011

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Tsukiji fish market, Tokyo, 2009

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Tsukiji fish market, Tokyo, 2009

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SHOR TCOURSE/UK Siôn Parkinson

Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE/UK began in conver sations between three of the UK’s leading art schools: Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon Colleges of Art and Design in London (CCW); University College Falmouth in Cornwall (UCF); and Liverpool John Moore’s University (L JMU). These conversations concerned the state of UK art schools, their future, and the position of ecology in the education of today’s artists. And though the habit of discussing new models for art education with recourse to these terms is hardly new or remarkable, the way in which we were applying them was: metaphors abounded of earth and dirt; air and breath; of waters, deep and dark. These were soon supplanted with ones of arsenic, pollen, plastic, fish, the fume of flowers and the dirge of birdsong. Suddenly, physical location became essential to how we would continue these discussions, somewhere where teaching and making would have their twin genesis in place and environment. Over the course of three years and three different locations, a series of unconventional tours, beyond cordons and behind hoardings, has visited some of the most extraordinary sites and territories within the cities, countryside and coastlines of the UK. Since Spring 2011, aboard a series of barges, tugs, clippers and RIBs, we’ve sailed to the subtropical gardens of the Scilly Isles, barely 30 miles from the mainland, to hear of shifting winds and ocean currents that threaten the islands’ strangely un-English gardens. We’ve journeyed up the fattening tail of the Thames Estuary to Europe’s second largest landfill to hear of waste and wastelands, trash and trash culture, materi ality, and archaeology of the contemporary past. We’ve navigated Liverpool’s dockland ruins, journeying to the city’s ship canals to re-examine the archetypes of industrial architecture in the cooling towers, coal stores and oil refineries that pepper the banks between two rivalling cities. We’ve camped overnight in some remarkable and unlikely locations. A sweltering night in a cockroach-infested rainforest deep within the clay pits of St Austell, for example; finding ourselves in the morning in a sweat lodge ceremony led by a Peruvian

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Ayahuascan shaman. And more recently, we walked across the sands to Hilbre off the Wirral where, cut off by the tide, a team of singers and ornithologists gave context to the double meaning of ‘ringing birds’: of data-capture and sonic resonance. Each expedition, usually three to five days long, culminates in a period of making and exhibition. It is a project designed to stimulate a creative response by immersing emerging art and design students in environ ments that challenge and enable them to take their learning outside of the studios, seminar rooms, and lecture theatres. And so it stands outside the architec ture and hierarchies of the art school. And there it seeks to question: what is the role of the art school in a time of environmental crisis?; how can we reflect a growing interest in multidisciplinary learning, where expertise is shared, and where concern for sustainability and local environmental issues figure prominently?; or are all these hollow-eyed terms (‘sustainability’, ‘environmental’, ‘eco-’, etc.) that demand new vitality?; and finally, it asks: what is at stake now in being called a sculptor or a painter, an architect or a designer? SHORTCOURSE/UK is, then, a surrogate art school of sorts; a placeless cohort comprised of a temporary student body and changing staff of artists, writers and scientists, bobbing up and down, floating between academies and journeying between cities. www.shortcourseuk.org

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SHO R TCO URSE/ UK

Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE/UK expeditions,

Cornwall (May 2011)

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Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE/UK expeditions,

London (October 2011)

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Cape Farewell’s SHORTCOURSE/UK expeditions,

Liverpool (May 2012)

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SHO R TCO URSE/ UK

Aaron McPeake PhD

Fine Art, Chelsea

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Toll, 2011, video of ice bell melting in real time, running time 17 mins

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Cadi Froehlich

MA Fine Art, Camberwell

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40 Litres (average water volume of one human being), 2012

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Charlie Abbott

BA Graphic Design, Camberwell

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The monuments to Daniel Defoe series, 2012

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Katriona Beales

MA Fine Art, Chelsea

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~*%^^^&£@!£${}&*^~, 2012. Mixed media installation with kinetic sculpture and video projection, dimensions variable

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Mรกrio Pires Cordeiro

PhD candidate, Fine Art, Wimbledon

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Limehouse marina to Tottenham Hale, installation at Triangle Gallery and video stills, London, 2012

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Rebecca Hooper

MA Fine Art, Chelsea

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Mattress, 2012

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Sam Cook

BA Fine Art, Chelsea

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Untitled, 2012

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I WONDER WHERE YO U AR E ? (Wonder: an emotion comparable to surprise that people feel when perceiving something rare or unexpected.) Anne Lydiat

Several years ago, I made a decision to make some changes in my life and my sense of being. It seemingly takes something to threaten our way of being in order to make us contemplate change, and I was at that point. I needed time and space in order to reflect, to reconnect with my artistic practice and my sense of self. I was given a three-month sabbatical! I was free at last to embark on my expedition into the territory of self, that started with a desire to ‘get lost as a positive action’. I wondered what I would do with this aporia, this space of absence and dislo cation? What if I lost myself, and like Hansel and Gretel couldn’t find my way home again? In Lost and Found. The Location of Disorientation, Irit Rogoff writes: One of the surprises of exploring the discursive and linguis tic articulations of the states of being lost, is that they are always aligned with a form of location either concretely topographical or as a state of mind – ‘lost in time’, ‘lost in space’, ‘lost in the woods’, ‘lost in thought’, ‘lost horizon’, ‘she has definitely lost it’ – in every known metaphorical configuration, ‘being lost’ is the active state of existing between paradigms, no longer in one nor yet within the other. Thus being lost is never unlocatable but always a some-where and a some-thing of ‘inbetweeness’. It is this duality, this ambivalence between nowhere and some where that gives the state of ‘being lost’ its frisson of excitement, for we quickly understand that within it we can trace links to great moments of ‘becoming’, of transition and of perception. The difficulty I experienced was that as soon as I began to wonder how I might get lost as a creative con dition, the possibility of achieving this desired state of being seemed more remote than ever. How does one

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deliberately ‘get lost’? Where and how might I attain the ‘great moments of “becoming”, of transition and of perception’ that Rogoff posits as a possibility and how might my deliberately attempting to ‘be lost’ as a space of creativity bring this about? The first stage of my expedition was to travel alone to Europe. I planned to visit the Beguinages (Bejinhof) – women-only spaces and some of them silent spaces – mainly in Belgium and Holland. Travelling alone, and in silence, I wondered whether silences would be the same in different countries, for example would I find a French silence, a Russian silence or a Japanese silence and how might these silences be translated? I made a blank book, an authored space of silence needing no translation, entitled lost for words…

lost for words, 1999

Where might this book be placed? What would be its space – a space of absence perhaps, or an interstice? …I subsequently secretly put the book in libraries wherever I travelled, as an intervention, a donation, or a gift. I placed lost for words… in the Philosophy sections, under ‘L’ for Lydiat, usually in between Kant and Lyotard! I then took a photograph of the book in its contingent space and left it as an officially unacknowledged presence, ‘a some-where and a some-thing of inbetweeness’. What was I trying to say in this interstitial space of absence – was I trying

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to speak of my own creative state of ‘being lost’? I wondered would it, or I, ever be found?

lost for words… (library in a Philosophy Section. Europe)

In an unpublished text written to accompany my exhibition Permission to Speak at the Freud Museum in 2002 1, Dr Nicky Coutts wrote: Lydiat has been exploring ideas surrounding personal loss and displacement for several years. Her work hankers and probes at the furthest outreaches of the graspable in its quest to unravel and represent conditions of absence, silence and loss. What does it mean to be lost? Is it possible to be lost to ourselves? Can an individual experience their own absence? Can we knowingly become lost? Lydiat explores these questions through the ambiguities of lan guage and their reflection in form. A recent piece, elegantly cementing the two together is ‘lost for words…’, now per manently installed at the Freud Museum. ‘lost for words…’ takes the form of a book with a white blotting paper cover, its title printed lightly on the front and on the spine. The pages within it are blank. ‘Lost’ has been translated by Lydiat into an infinite repetition of absence, words are unspoken into silence, promising to say nothing. It is only the marks made by those who handle the book that reassert its presence, confirming it found. The work only exists at the threshold of its own disappearance, at the moment of its transformation into a secondary phase.

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Performing the City, Anne Lydiat, automatic drawing, ink on paper, 2001

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Performing the City, Anne Lydiat, Automatic drawing, ink on paper, 2001

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As Rogoff states, ‘being lost is never unlocatable‘ and the photograph became the means of locating my book, and me, in time and space. Why did I need to take a photograph? Was I taking a photograph to satisfy the desire to capture the moment for myself, as proof of my existence? Would the unrecorded experience of the moment not have been enough? I wondered what would have been ‘lost’? As a means of ‘getting lost’ in the city, I utilised the Situationist’s dérive. (A dérive is ‘an unplanned tour through an urban landscape directed entirely by the feelings evoked in the individual by their surround ings, serving as the primary means for mapping and investigating the psychogeography of an area… with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience’ according to Wikipedia.) This time, I decided not to take a photograph to locate myself as I wandered through the city as the artistic flâneuse. Instead, I made drawings of the traces of my routine movements whilst walking. In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit writes: Walkers are ‘practitioners of the city’, for the city is made to be walked. A city is a language, a repository of possibil ities, and walking is the act of speaking that language, of selecting from those possibilities. Just as language limits what can be said, architecture limits where one can walk, but the walker invents other ways to go. 2 The chance, or serendipity, of my drawings was deter mined by the duration of time and space and the seismic movement specific to each wandering, ‘with the ultimate goal of encountering an entirely new and authentic experience’ – creating maps to ‘get lost’ by perhaps? In A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Solnit writes: Without noticing you have traversed a great distance; the strange has become familiar and the familiar if not strange at least awkward or uncomfortable, an outgrown garment. And some people travel far more than others. There are those who receive a birthright, an adequate or at least unquestioned sense of self and those who set out

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to reinvent themselves, for survival or for satisfaction, and travel far… 3 I had not travelled far geographically but felt I had ‘traversed a great distance’ artistically and emotionally. My personal expedition to creatively ‘get lost’ was accomplished; I returned back home, reconnected with my artistic practice and my sense of self. The desire to explore beyond the self and the boundaries of the everyday is an aspect of artistic practice also evidenced in the photographic work of Thomas Joshua Cooper. … Like the great adventurers Colombus or Magallanes, the artist’s curiosity for what is beyond the ocean and the borders of civilisation is expressed by the balance between the physical and the spiritual in his work, which, void of any human influence, has a sublime and mystic tone, making his artwork unique…4 On 9 July 1975, the Dutch-born artist, Bas Jan Ader, set sail in his small boat Ocean Wave on a ‘personal expedition’, as a work of art. He left his wife and home to make a voyage across the Atlantic back to his mother land as part of a three-part performance art piece In Search of the Miraculous: One Night in Los Angeles (part one), an estimated 60 days at sea, (part two) and One Night in Amsterdam (part three) – he never arrived, presumed ‘lost at sea’ somewhere off the coast of Cape Cod.

In Search of the Miraculous, Bas Jan Ader , 1975

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What was ‘the miraculous’ that Ader was searching for? Was he venturing on this personal expedition trying to attain the ‘great moments of “becoming”, of transition and of perception’ that Rogoff posits as a possibility? Or was it ‘the agonising, isolated duration spent adrift on the ocean that allows the mariner a unification with nature and self?’, that Samuel Taylor Coleridge explores in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798).5 Ader’s boat was eventually found the following April in 1976 by a Spanish fishing trawler approximately 150 miles off the coast of Ireland. Ocean Wave was subsequently stolen and Ader’s wife never saw it, or her husband again! She wondered where he was? In the DVD, Here is always somewhere else (2008)6, Rene Daalder was commissioned by Bas Jan Ader’s wife, Mary Sue Ader-Anderson to explore the myth of his ‘lost’ friend. Here, we are presented with the image of Mary Sue where she personifies the archetypal image of the woman ‘waiting’ (like Penelope) for her travelling man to return whilst symbolically being at home.

Mary Sue Ader-Anderson

Excerpt from a telephone conversation with Mary Sue Ader-Anderson in Los Angeles printed in Avalanche, 28 May 1976 7: m sa : I

was waiting there for him. I was positive he would show up there at that time, and then when he didn’t, I was convinced he would show up any time from then on through December. l b : How long did you stay in Holland? m sa : I stayed until one week into September… l b : When he didn’t arrive, what happened? m sa : I wasn’t discouraged by the time I left, I expected him any week. When he didn’t arrive within his

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set time period, we decided that he had grossly miscalculated the time it would take him on such a small boat, and a lot of experienced sailors said that he could make it but it would probably take him up to 150 days. So we waited… That was in 1976 and here she is in the video some thirty years later after her husband disappeared, surrounded by his art works and memorabilia – still waiting! An artist herself (you see her paintings in the background) she appears to have ‘lost’ all sense of herself. It seems she has invested her whole being into keeping Ader’s memory alive. I wonder why she is still waiting? I began to question Mary Sue Ader-Anderson’s passive acceptance of her lot, as the wife waiting at home for her artistic hero to return. In are we there yet?, Emma Cocker writes: Beckett draws attention to the contradictory nature of wait ing and to the sense of expectation therein; for it is a space of simultaneous hope and doubt, of both desire and disenchantment… The duration of waiting is equally ambig uous, for it is inevitably too long and yet somehow never enough. Think of those involuntary moments of indecision when the unfulfilled wait is finally abandoned. The nature of unresolved waiting, when an end or destination remains at a distance, creates the liminal experience of being notyet-there; a period of restlessness or temporal vacuum…8 The state of ‘unresolved waiting’ seems to be where Mary Sue Ader-Anderson finds herself. Even as recently as the twentieth century, it would seem that waiting at home was the order of the day for many women, particularly those whose husbands and sons were at sea, or at war. There are very few signs to be found of the lives – especially of the bravery, and achievements – of these women. My searches found that there are various monuments to the bravery of those who leave the safety of the shore (usually those male heroes who ‘failed’ to return) but none that celebrate those who were left behind. I found one memorial to all those men from the Rosses Point parish and the Sligo community who ‘lost’ their lives at sea, whilst also honouring the village women who watched and waited…

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Waiting on the Shore. On 10 August, 2002, this sculpture was officially unveiled by Captain Frank Devaney and Mrs Myra Bruen-Curley

The men sailed away and left mothers, wives, sisters and daughters, who in their turn and in their way, also became victims of the sea. In 1996, Tacita Dean began a series of artworks collectively entitled Disappearance at Sea, inspired by remarkable stories of male personal encounters with the sea. In the video Here is Always Somewhere Else about the disappearance of Bas Jan Ader, she talks of the type of person (these lone sailors) who undertake these voyages. Hers is a romantic notion of the male hero – she talks ‘of a test of their bravura…of their very soul’. She writes that Bas Jan Ader believed that setting sail alone in a small boat, surrendering himself up to the forces of the sea, was the highest form of pilgrimage. I wonder if he intentionally ‘got lost’?9 In his search for the miraculous was, Ader lured by the call of the sea, as the conquering artistic hero, or did he perhaps identify with the melancholic tragedy

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of The Strange Last Voyage of Donald Crowhurst? In the DVD, Here is always somewhere else, Dean implies that Ader knew of Crowhurst’s tragic voyage before he set sail (a copy of the book was allegedly found in his locker at the college where he taught). In her short film, Teignmouth Electron (2000), Dean again presents a ‘romantic’ version of the disappearance at sea of Donald Crowhurst in 1969. He was one of nine competitors who set out in the first single-handed, non-stop, around-the-world yacht race. He set sail from Teignmouth in his boat Teignmouth Electron.

Donald Crowhurst aboard Teignmouth Electron

From the onset, Crowhurst’s voyage was one dominated by worry and self-doubt, particularly about the safety of his boat. (It becomes evident he should never have set sail.) He did not have the opportunity to experience the ‘great moments of ‘becoming’, of transition and of perception’ that Rogoff presented as a possibility. Ultimately, did the sheer weight of his deception (the faking of his progress) eventually lead to him losing his mind and his life to the sea? Not a living being, not a speck of distant sail, appeared within the range of his vision; and, as if to escape from this solitude, he absorbed himself in his melancholy… But at the same time he felt no remorse. What should he regret?

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He had recognized no other virtue than intelligence, and had erected passions into duties. Both his intelligence and his passion were swallowed up easily in this great unbroken solitude of waiting…10 There have been several films, books and articles written about Crowhurst’s tragic story (another hero who failed to return) and very little about Clare, the wife who waited. She was known in the press as the ‘sea widow’ and she too became a victim of the sea. Was it to protect their children that she did not seek the spotlight or make the headlines? I wonder where she is?

Clare and Donald Crowhurst, prior to the launch of Teignmouth Electron

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It would seem that the restless desire for exploration has predominantly been the male preserve, that is Arctic/ Antarctic exploration has spawned a long history of success and failure. The prodigal sons who never returned – why do we know so much about these men? Recently, I attended various lectures on expe ditions both scientific and artistic, where I was struck by the absence of references to women except for the fact that their husbands and fiancés had named islands and glaciers after them! ‘One of the greatest powers that mapmakers have is their power to name’. Feminist language specialist Dale Spender thinks that the division of power in naming is so fundamen tal and universal that she describes the world as composed of ‘The Namers’ and ‘The Named’. 11 I asked, are there any women explorers? It would seem not! I wondered where they were? In the backdrop of nearly every polar explorer’s story is the classic tale of Penelope, the devoted wife in Homer’s The Odyssey who waited a decade for her husband to return from war. Like Homer’s Odysseus, the likes of Robert Falcon Scott, Ernest Shackleton and Fridtjof Nansen spent years away from home. But unlike Penelope, their wives did more than weave tapestries and ward off unwelcome suitors. Women such as Lady Jane Franklin, whose famous letter-writing campaign succeeded in dispatching 13 ships to the Arctic in 1850 in search of her husband’s lost expedition, or Jo Peary, who in 1891–92, was the first woman to accompany an expedition to the Far North… In conquering unknown territory, polar wives were as daring as the explorers they married. While they may not have made headlines or found immortality in the history books, the wives of polar explorers overcame adversity and broke barriers surrounding the accepted social spheres of their time. 12 Below is my homage to some of the amazing women explorers and travellers that undertook these varied and seemingly unacknowledged expeditions of their own:

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Liv Ragnheim Arnesen (1953– ), Arnesen led the first unsup ported women’s crossing of the Greenland Ice Cap in 1992. In 1994, she made international headlines becoming the first woman in the world to ski solo and unsupported to the South Pole – a 50-day expedition of 745 miles (1,200 km). Gertrude Bell (1868–1926) explored and mapped Greater Syria, Mesopotamia, Asia Minor and Arabia. Louise Arner Boyd (1887–1972), known as the ‘ice woman’, she was an American who repeatedly explored and photographed the Arctic Ocean; she was also the first woman to fly over the North Pole. Sophia Danenberg (1972– ), the first black woman to reach the summit of Everest. Laura Dekker (1995– ), the youngest person to sail around the world solo. Moira Dunbar (1918–1999), originally from Edinburgh, Dunbar emigrated to Canada in 1947, where she studied ice movement for the Joint Intelligence Bureau of Canada. She later moved to the Defense Research Board in 1952, where she fought notions that a woman couldn’t go to the Arctic on reconnaissance planes of the Royal Canadian Air Force. She co-authored Arctic Canada

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From the Air with Keith R. Greenaway in 1956. She logged over 600 flight hours and became the first woman to sail as part of a science crew on board a Royal Canadian Navy icebreaker. Amelia Earhart (1897–1937), the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic. Gertrude Ederle (1905–2003), the first woman to swim the English Channel. Lady Grace Hay Drummond-Hay (1895–1946), the first woman to go round world by air (in a Zeppelin).

Barbara Hillary (1931– ), was the first known AfricanAmerican woman to reach the North Pole, which she did at the age of 75 in 2007. She subsequently reached the South Pole in January 2011 at the age of 79, becoming the first African-American woman to reach both poles. Mae Jemison (1956– ), the first black woman in space. Gerlinde Kaltenbrunner (1970– ), the first woman to climb all 14 eight-thousander mountains without supplementary oxygen. Annie ‘Londonderry’ Kopchovsky (1870–1947), the first woman to bicycle around the world.

Annie Smith Peck (1850–1935), the first person to climb Mount Nevado Huascarán. Sally Ride (1951– 2012), the first American woman in space. Edith ‘Jackie’ Ronne (1919– 2009) was an American explorer of Antarctica and the first woman in the world to be a working member of an Antarctic expedition. She is also the namesake of the Ronne Ice Shelf. Namira Salim (1975– ), an explorer who is the first Pakistani to have reached the North and South Poles. She may also become the first Pakistani to travel into space on the world’s first commercial space liner, Virgin Galactic. Salim has said she hopes her achievements are an inspiration to Pakistani women. Hester Stanhope (1776–1839), the first modern archaeologist in the Holy Land; she travelled unveiled, dressed as a man. Valentina Tereshkova (1937– ), the first woman in space. Jessica Watson (1993– ), the youngest person to sail nonstop, unassisted around the world (but not meeting WSSRC criteria).

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Could it be the very success of these women’s achieve ments that renders them invisible to us? If we acknowledge, or dare I say celebrate, their endeavours, might that somehow devalue, or put into question, those feats of heroism that have become the embodi ment of the tragic male hero who failed to return, that we read so much about? These remarkable women did not make a decision to become intentionally lost, they were t/here all the time, just waiting to be found and to rightfully take their place in our histories.

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Lydit, A. (2003) Permission to Speak. London, Freud Museum, 8 October – 3 November 2003.

Solnit, R. A. (2006) Wanderlust: A History of Walking. London, Verso Books.

Solnit, R. A. (2005) Field Guide to Getting Lost. London, Penguin Books Ltd.

Rodés, A. (2004) Thomas Joshua Cooper: photography on the edge. Artfacts.net. [Internet blog]. Available from <www. artfacts.net/index.php/pageType/ newsInfo/newsID/2195/lang/1> [Accessed 03 September 2012].

Coleridge, S.T. (1798) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems. Bristol, Joseph Cottle.

Here is always somewhere else (2008) Directed by Rene Daalder. USA, Cult Epics and AgitPop Media. [DVD].

Bear, L. and Sharp, W., (1976) Bas Jan Ader: In Search of the Miraculous, a telephone conversation with Mary Sue Ader-Anderson. Avalanche (13), 28 May, pp.26–27.

Cocker, E. (2007) are we there yet? Bloc Projects Ltd [Internet blog]. Available from : <www.blocprojects.co.uk/ discourse/emma-cocker/> [Accessed 03 September 2012].

Royoux, J.C. Warner, M., Dean, T. and Greer, G. (2006) Tacita Dean. London, Phaidon.

Conrad, J. (1904) Nostromo: A Tale of the Seaboard. London and New York, Harper & Brothers.

Griffiths, J., (2006) Wild: An Elemental Journey. New York, Tarcher Penguin.

Madwar, S. (2012) Book Review of The Polar Wives. Canadian Geographic Magazine. [Internet]. Available from: <http://www.canadiangeographic.ca/ magazine/apr12/reviews.asp> [Accessed 12 September 2012].

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CONTRIBUTORS

Stevie Bezencenet Stevie Bezencenet has had a longstanding interest in photography and landscape. With photography, video and critical writing, Stevie has explored issues of place and identity, gender and power. Recently, moving to Suffolk has returned her to a previous interest of ‘reviewing’ our familiar surroundings, whilst a journey to the Arctic made her confront our tendency to impose what we know on what we don’t. Stevie worked in Higher Education in London for several decades in the areas of photo graphy, art, media and critical theory, which provided endless opportunities for debate, research and creative practice. Her writing has been published in Digital Desires: Language, Identity and the New Technologies, ed. Cutting Edge Research Group; in Shifting Horizons: Women and Landscape Photography and in Viewfindings, both edited by Liz Wells. Her work has been exhibited in the OVA Touring Exhibition at the Loading Bay Gallery in London and at the Impressions Gallery in York.

aging programmes of work from inception to delivery. Hannah has a science degree but began her career working at Arts Council England which fuelled a professional interest in bringing diverse groups of people together and nurturing unexpected rela tionships. Between 2007 and 2010, she worked at Cape Farewell managing expeditions to the High Arctic and the Peruvian Andes, visiting both areas with diverse groups of artists, scientists and colla borators, helping to facilitate knowledge exchange, develop ideas and ultimately produce artworks and events. Hannah is the Associate Editor on this Bright series publication. Her writing has been published in Natura: The Course of Events and she writes an occasional blog on sustain ability for international arts residency Floda31. www.hannahbird.net

Hannah Bird Hannah Bird is a freelance Project Manager, delivering projects for individuals and organisations in the creative

David Buckland David Buckland is an artist, film-maker, writer and curator. Buckland created and now directs the international Cape

industries, including the Southbank Centre, Ackroyd & Harvey, TippingPoint and the Cultural Learning Alliance. She enjoys developing col laborative projects and man

Farewell project, bringing artists, visionaries, scientists and educators together (www. capefarewell.com). Cape Farewell continues to build an international collective awareness and cultural response to climate disruption. Over 140 artists have created operas, films, artworks, pop music and novels, which address the climate challenge and through the process of making art, envision a sustainable and exciting cultural future. Buckland curates three new major exhibitions: the ‘Carbon 12’ exhibition recently opened in Paris in May 2012. ‘Carbon 13’ opens in Marfa, Texas in September 2012 and ‘Carbon 14’ is scheduled for the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto, in September 2013. All contain new artworks by international artists and cultural practitioners, each addressing climate dis ruption and the mechanics of a desired cultural shift. His work is included in the permanent collections of the National Portrait Gallery, London; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Michael Wilson Collection, London; and the Metropolitan Museum of New York. Buckland curated ‘eARTh’ for the Royal Academy, (London, 2009) and produced the films ‘Art from the Arctic’ (2006) for the BBC and ‘Burning

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Ice’ for Sundance (2010). Recent publications include ‘Climate is Culture’ for Nature, March 2012 and the catalogue Carbon 12, published by Somogy Editions d’Art. Dr David Dibosa Dr David Dibosa trained as a curator, after receiving his first degree from Girton College, University of Cambridge. He was awarded his PhD in Art History from Goldsmiths College, University of London. During the 1990s, he curated public art projects. He is currently Course Leader for MA Art Theory at Chelsea College of Art and Design in the University of the Arts, London. He is also a Researcher in the University of the Arts Research Centre for Transnational Art, Identity and Nation (TrAIN). David Dibosa’s research interests focus on spectatorship and contemporary visual culture. His publications include: ‘How to Speak Borders’ in the journal Toplumbilim (2007) and ‘Queer Appearances: Gilbert & George’s Visual Strategies’ in the journal Sexualities (2009). More recently, he has co-written a number of pieces with Andrew Dewdney and Victoria Walsh: ‘Tate Encounters: Nationalism and British Culture’ in Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity (2010); ‘Cultural Diversity: Politics, Policy, Practices’ in Museums, Equality and Social Justice (2012); and Post-Critical Museology: Theory

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and Practice in the Art Museum (forthcoming, 2012). Nick Edwards Nick Edwards was born in Bristol and grew up in Camberley, Surrey, before moving to London to work in the film industry. His first exhibition in 1987 at the Submarine Gallery in Kings Cross, consisted entirely of recycled material. Over the last 25 years, Nick Edwards has focused on understanding the meaning of landscape in con temporary art. He is a partici pating artist with Cape Farewell, an arts organisation focused on climate change. He has been on three expeditions to the Arctic aboard the 100-year old Dutch schooner, The Noorderlicht. For a Cape Farewell project, he produced a triptych of mov ing images, inspired by sketches of the Artic and his fascination with the mythology of explo ration. Most recently, he led an Arts Council- sponsored expedition to survey Eden. Ruth Little Ruth Little is a theatre and dance dramaturg, a teacher and writer. She lectured in English Literature at the University of Sydney, and was Artistic Associate at the Young Vic. She was Literary Manager at Out of Joint, Soho Theatre and the Royal Court. Ruth is currently Associate Director at Cape Farewell, where she is curating Sea Change, a 4-year programme of research across

the islands of Scotland. She is dramaturg with Akram Khan Company and David Pugh Ltd. Publications include The Young Vic Book (Methuen, 2004), The Royal Court Theatre Inside Out (Oberon, 2007), Royal Court Plays 2000–2010 (Methuen), ‘Art, Place, Climate’ (Springer, 2012). Her work considers the biological, cognitive and social realms in the creation and interpretation of performance works. Anne Lydiat Anne Lydiat lives and works in London as an artist. She taught Fine Art in various art schools in the UK and America for over twenty years. In 2008, she was appointed as Senior Advisor for Research and Publications at KHIB, Bergen, Norway, and from 2010–2011 was a Research Consultant at Columbia College, Chicago, USA. Recent group exhibitions include: filling in the blanks (performance reading lost for words…) at X Marks the Bokship, London, UK (2012); High Tide (drawings) in ‘THE DURATION OF SURFACE’, The Attic at Lines of Pinner, Middlesex, UK, (2012); Time and Tide (drawings) in ‘TIME PIECES’, Peter Scott Gallery, Lancaster Institute for Contemporary Arts, Lancaster, UK, (2011); Manual Setting (sketchbooks as ‘unfolding sculptural spaces’), Danielle Arnaud Contemporary Art, London, UK, (2011); Return Flight in ‘An Orchestra of

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Strings’, The Crypt Gallery, Euston Road, London, UK. (2010); Between Time and Space, video ‘Fly by Night’, Heijo Palace, Nara, Japan; Rising Tides (drawings) in ‘space(river) between’, International Gallery, Liverpool Biennale, Liverpool, UK, (2010); Performing the City (drawings) in Specula: Drawing Time, a Global Centre for Drawing Project shown at: RMIT Melbourne, Australia, Drawing Space, Dubai and Drawing Space, Hong Kong (2010); Moon Moth in ‘The Moons of Hagashiyama’, Night Garden Art Project at Kodai ji temple, Kyoto, Japan and Moon Moth in ‘Atmosphere’, Ginza Art Lab, Tokyo, Japan (2010). Solo exhibitions include Permission to Speak, installation at Freud Museum, London, UK (2002); WITHOUT, installation at Beguinage of Saint Elisabeth, Kortrijk, Belgium (1999). Time and Tide and Rising Tides are a series of drawings made in the hold of a ship. They are the residual traces of a dynamic relationship with the river, in particular the wash from passing vessels, the force of the winds, and the flow of the tides. The drawings are often made on significant dates and times; the most recent on 03/06/12 during the River Pageant to celebrate the Queen’s Jubilee. The artist lives on an English Medway Coaster moored on the River Thames at Hermitage Moorings (www. hcmoorings.org), downstream

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from Tower Bridge, London. This direct relationship with the river, in particular the tides and the seasons, has affected both her artworks and her sense of being. Dr Tyrone Martinsson Dr Tyrone Martinsson is a Senior Lecturer of Photography at the Valand Academy at University of Gothenberg, Sweden. Tyrone Martinsson is cur rently pursuing research on the history of photography and the photography of today in relation to environmental and landscape photography. His particular interest is in how photographic images can be used in human/ environment relationships – and how our view of nature and landscape changes over time. The point of departure for this research project is the connec tion that photographic history has to the development of mod ernity. During the last few years, Tyrone Martinsson has per formed research on the Arctic and the rephotographic methods for cross disciplinary studies that address climate, environ ment and historical descriptions of the polar landscape. In 2003, Tyrone Martinsson was awarded a PhD at the University of Westminster in London for his thesis entitled Photographic Archaeology and Nils Strindberg’s Photographs from the Andrée Polar Expedition 1896–1897. Photographs as documents and artistic representations served as the

point of departure for this thesis, which made visible how photo archives and collections can be brought to life. Dr Daro Montag Dr Daro Montag is an artist, lecturer and researcher at University College Falmouth, where he leads the RANE research group and the MA Art and Environment. His art practice has for many years been involved with environ mental and ecological issues – he is particularly interested in the inherent creativity of the organic world. In 2000, this resulted in the exhibition and publication Bioglyphs, for which he was awarded his PhD. Recent projects include: This Earth which looked closely at the importance of soil from a number of different perspec tives; Stalking Nature, in which he produced drawings in collab oration with toads, newts, insects and the elements of wind and rain; and RANE-CHAR, an action in which biochar was produced and distributed. His work has been exhibited in Europe, USA, and UAE and has received many awards, including the art and science foundation award in Tokyo. In 2009, he joined the Cape Farewell expedition to the Peruvian Andes and Amazon as part of a team engaged in developing a cultural response to climate change. It was during this expedition that he first encountered leafcutter ants.

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Michèle Noach Michèle Noach was born in Sydney, Australia to Hungarian/ Dutch parents and lived in The Netherlands and the US before her family settled in London in the last hours of the 1960s. She had pet mice, loved the Velvet Underground and wrote for the music press in London, the US and Australia for several years. Her interest in codebreaking led to her becoming a cryptic crossword compiler and to qualify in British Sign Language. She studied printmaking, specialises in lenticulars (optical 3D work) and has been with The Curwen Gallery in London since 1989, and exhibits throughout the UK and internationally. Her 2005 London show, Nø-âch’s Ârc-tìc reflected her expedition experiences with Cape Farewell, as does the glacier series Through The Ice, Darkly. Michèle was artist-inresidence for three years at The Eden Project studying the Arctic poppy, which in summer 2012 culminated in the show The Arctic Poppy Chronicles and the publication of Poppyflakes. Also in Cornwall in 2008 she showed her lenticular instal lation The Glasshouse Men in the ten greenhouses of The Lost Gardens of Heligan, to celebrate the lives of the gardenersturned-soldiers, 90 years after the end of WW1. Michèle exhibited her glacier series most recently at Studio Hugo Opdal in Flø,

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Norway in July 2012 and is still physically tracking glaciers for her ongoing project. She is currently working on three-dimensional images of cloud/glacier cycles in Northern Norway, and a series of new cartoon works based on imaginary adverts for wealthy insects. www.michelenoach.com Siôn Parkinson Siôn Parkinson is an artist and writer based in London and Edinburgh. He is curator of the Universities Programme for Cape Farewell, where he set up SHORTCOURSE/UK, a series of short, rural and urban expe ditions that brings emerging artists into dialogue with scientists and leading scientific research in order to stimulate a creative response. In May 2012, Siôn was appointed Associate Producer for Cape Farewell’s Sea Change (Tionndadh na Mara); a four-year programme of research and making across Scotland’s western and northern isles. Siôn’s practice combines objects, text and voice. His work has been exhibited interna tionally and he has received awards, public commissions and residencies. As a writer, he has been published widely, inclu ding recent commissions by the Chisenhale Gallery, the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) and New Contemporaries 2011. He is the co-organiser of the project, A Dying Artist, first

staged as a two-day symposium at the ICA, exploring notions of materiality and corporeality in art through their correspon dence with dying and dead bodies. Siôn was born in Dundee. He has a daughter. Chris Wainwright Chris Wainwright is an artist, Curator, Professor, Pro Vice Chancellor and Head of Chelsea, Camberwell and Wimbledon Colleges, at the University of the Arts London. He is currently a member of The Tate Britain Council and Chair of the Board of Trustees of Cape Farewell, an artist-run organisation that promotes a cultural response to climate change. His artistic practice is primarily in photography and video, and his recent exhibitions include: Futureland Now at the Laing Art Gallery, Newcastle, UK: Between Time and Space, Heijo Palace, Nara, Japan; The Moons of Higashiyama, Kodai-ji temple, Kyoto, Japan; Between Land and Sea at Box 38 Ostende, Belgium and Trauma at the Culturcentrum, Brugge in Belgium. His work is currently being shown as part of the UK touring exhibition Fleeting Arcadias – Thirty Years of British Landscape Photography from the Arts Council Collection. His time-based work, Capital has been shown at ‘File 2002’, and Channel 14 at ‘File 2005’ in Sao Paulo, Brazil, and video projections at the Champ

Contributors

Libre Festival of Electronic Arts, Montreal, in 2004 and 2005. Channel 14 was also selected for the Media and Architecture Biennial, Graz, Austria in 2005. He is currently co-curating a major international touring exhibition for Cape Farewell called U-n-f-o-l-d that profiles the work of 23 artists addressing the issues of climate change. The exhibition has been shown in Vienna, London, Newcastle, Newlyn, Liverpool, Chicago and New York. He is also currently curating a selection of work by UK artists to be shown in a major survey of art and science work at the National Museum of Art and Science in Beijing, and edit ing a forthcoming publication on expeditions. Chris Wainwright’s photo graphic work is held in many major collections including the Victoria and Albert Museum, London; The Arts Council of England; Bibliothèque Nationale, Paris: the Polaroid Corporation, Boston, USA: and Unilever, London.

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