Siri Veland (geographer), Skade Henriksen (artist), Anna Lindal (artist), and Marie Stougaard Østertorn (student and activist) explain the concept behind the Ilulissat Art and Science Hub. We open the doors to this anchor point, which marks the end of our series in this Greenlandic town.
We’re wrapping up our series of encounters in Ilulissat with a colorful description of the ILLU Science and Art Center. The Climate Narrative project from the University of Bergen welcomed us into this carrot-orange wooden house with a black roof, where snowballs sometimes bounce off the roof from kids playing in the park next door. The place was set up with Norwegian funding from the Research Council of Norway to ensure that scientists and artists are not just passing through. Upon arrival, one must remember the code for the key box, which opens other doors in addition to the entrance, especially if one is a regular visitor and follows the many conversations that take place between the occupants and local people.
Siri Veland – In search of solutions
Originally from Bergen and Bodø, geographer Siri Veland has conducted field campaigns in Australia, working with the Yorta Yorta people of the Murray–Darling Valley and California’s First Nations, describing traditional knowledge for dealing with wildfires. By spending days burning controlled fires on firebreaks in California and Norway, she has improved scientific knowledge about megafires and informed managers about this growing risk. This is also an issue in the Arctic, where Siri Veland is looking for signs of solutions to the many challenges posed by climate change that could be applied in Ilulissat, Iqualit, or Longyearbyen.
In Svalbard, she is studying the opening up of new areas to shipping and new shipping seasons, tourism, infrastructure development, and the energy transition. Perhaps solutions to some of these issues can be found in Disko Bay in Greenland? In Ilulissat, she’s looking to understand how people adapt and how ILLU connects visitors and the community. “I’m often alone when I start studying a new area,” she told us at ILLU, emphasizing that this place has made it easier for her to meet people and understand the city. With an open ear, Siri Veland has immersed herself in local issues and approached local figures such as Karl Sandgreen, director of the Icefjord Center. She jots down her observations on a handwritten tablet and keeps an eye out for anything that might interest her students in California.
Skade Henriksen – Beyond the concept of nature
Skade Henriksen crosses matter and its uses, like when she explores the underground galleries of a graphite mine in photographs, or extracting a rock from the landscape to display it. Originally from Finnmark, the Norwegian artist has no trouble shaking up naturalistic perceptions of the world. Skade Henriksen does not offer us the role of spectator of the spectacular. She invites us to look at underwater reliefs and mountain peaks after they have been transformed by an oceanographic ship’s echo sounder or an illustrative drawing, each view of “nature” becoming the subject of variation. She is deeply immersed in Sami culture, in which the concept of nature is not very meaningful, if not meaningless. A variety of words exist to situate human beings in their environment, depending on geography and the relationships that develop between creatures, elements, and phenomena. She therefore invites us to position ourselves at the intersections of relationships that inhabit the single word “nature.”
Skade Henriksen’s artistic prototype has already proven itself in art museums across Norway, from Kristiansand to Alta, and internationally. It is set to evolve further thanks to a PhD thesis. Currently under study in the workshops of the Art Academy and the University of Bergen, her repertoire of expression draws on scientific methods, architecture, and sculpture, and questions the traces that humans leave behind. Skade Henriksen is exploring the possibilities that Sami culture offers her for working with materials; if she succeeds, the artist should gain conceptual strength and establish herself in the art world as a new reference point.
Anna Lindal – From home to exploration
With 27 solo exhibitions, 80 group exhibitions, and 14 residencies under her belt, Anna Líndal’s path is already well mapped out. The work of this contemporary Icelandic artist extends far beyond the coastline of her volcanic island home. A graduate of several art schools, from Reykjavik to Berlin via London, she uses everyday objects to create installations, while also incorporating drawing and photography. Some of her works borrow tools from a garage, such as a crowbar, while others exploit the colors of threads from a sewing kit. The artist questions society from her home, but does not shy away from exploring the outside world.
From the start of her art career, she joined scientific expeditions with glaciologists from the Vatnajökull glacier and others in Greenland. She borrowed scientific instruments. Her body served as her tool, as if to check whether science was on the right track by freeing itself from subjective sensations. Global warming and the coolness of the Arctic: she combined the two subjects by donning a wetsuit to immerse herself in a lake of melting glacier water after an avalanche. She used the results of various measurements to draw maps. Her approach has caught the attention of scientists preoccupied with their research objectives, as well as an international audience. She gives us a sense of the weight of time, changes in light, and the impact of mapping a place on the imagination.
Marie Stougaard Østertorn – Climate adaptation
By demonstrating for climate action in Copenhagen, she is able to highlight one of the greatest paradoxes Denmark faces: a country sinking beneath rising sea levels, while overseas territories are rising due to melting glaciers, as she likes to explain. Marie Stougaard Østertorn is a Danish citizen who firmly believes that we need to start thinking about climate adaptation now. Her trip to Kalaallit Nunaat is not only fieldwork for her master’s thesis on Climate and Adaptation at the University of Southern Denmark, but also a more personal reflection on Denmark’s place in Greenland and the principle of decolonization. She considers realistic options and questions the ethics of short-, medium- and long-term solutions.
The ILLU Center for Science and Art offers her the opportunity to experiment with the principle of disseminating scientific and artistic knowledge through exhibitions, meetings, and events. She observes the initiative with a view to improving it and positions this venue on the local political scene by visiting municipal departments, where she learns about the city’s development projects: the airport, waste management, water treatment, etc. She welcomes children from the neighborhood to ILLU, which is already well established in their lives. They come to draw, play with Rubik’s Cubes, and challenge each other to games of tic-tac-toe before eating waffles. Like a weaver bird, Marie Stougaard Østertorn brings the ILLU Center for Science and Art closer to the Greenlandic word illu, meaning home, i.e., an anchor point in a local network of relationships. C.L