In Spring this year, Florian Göttke and Rebecca Sakoun travelled to Iqaluit and Pangnirtung in Nunavut, Inuit communities in high arctic Canada. Over the past few generations, rapid and profound changes have taken place with regards to lifestyle, political and social organization, cosmology/world view, the local economy, education, child rearing, diet, land use, wildlife management, infrastructure, housing, and language; a few of the areas profoundly transformed by colonialization, capitalism, and modernity.
It became apparent that most inhabitants are actively engaged as both researcher and cultural mediator. There is an urgency and necessity to salvage all the fragments of traditional knowledge and cultural practice in order to reassemble the Inuit's disturbed identity, to carefully preserve these remnants and connect them to the modern media society.
In the framework of these topics the artists will present a selection of the abundant visual material the have gathered and will present an account of their experiences.
Travelling to Antarctica on RSS Ernest Shackleton from RAF Brize Norton via Ascension Island and theFalklands, Simon Faithfull recorded the displaced and disorienting world he encountered by filming the view from his cabin porthole and with daily Palm Pilot drawings, transmitted each day to email inboxes around the world. Combined with diary entries and notes, these drawings and films have been incorporated into a series of lectures presented in Edinburgh, Helsinki, Norwich, Berlin and London.
An Antarctic Essay is a dispatch from nowhere, exploring the Antarctic as a hole in the imagination by combining Antarctic myths and fictions, histories of colonial endeavour, lifecycles of icebergs and the real effects of global warming, with images of contested and uncharted territories.
Programme:
19.30 - 20.15 hrs Mermaid Hair in the Outboard Motor
Artist talk by Rebecca Sakoun & Florian Göttke
20.15 - 20.30 hrs break
20.30 - 21.30 hrs Ice Blink: An Antarctic Essay
Lecture / performance by Simon Faithfull
21.30 - 22.00 hrs Q & A