drifting in earth’s eco
TYPE : artistic arctic expedition, ecopoetical archive, painting, poetry, photography, textiles, in situ installation, exhibition
MEDIUMS : field trip (sailboat and glaciers), art installation, painting, poetry, analog and digital photography, video, writing workshops
DATE : 2024
PLACES :
- Expedition : Svalbard, Arctic, NOR, 78° NORTH. Reaching Svalbard on the Antigua sailboat from the Netherlands (aprx. 17 days at sea) - based then in Longyearbyen (aprx. 2 months) - then joining the Tilvera sailboat with Ocean Missions in the Fjords of Svalbard (one week).
- Exhibition of this project : Collective exhibition, ‘Polar regions and high mountains in the anthropocene’ at the 29th International Polar Conference, september 2024, Rauris, Austria, with the Austrian Polar Research Institute and the Deutsche Gesellschaft für Polarforschung
- Exhibition of this project : Solo exhibition, Maison de la Montagne, Grenoble, France, 2025
THE STORY:
“In the spring of 2024, I spent two months in the Arctic in Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago located between 74° and 81° North latitude. The project was to reach the glaciers of the far north, victims and symbols of ecological disaster, making ecopoetics a committed gesture between art and expedition.
The project is as follows: to address human domination and possession of the Earth, to denounce the ecological disaster, to translate the melting and its violence, to transgress what must be transgressed, to signify the agony, to honour what is dying and the entirety of living things, to become an ecosystem, to experience the thousand lives of these teeming lands, to emerge from Western heroism and conquest, to emerge from mental freeze. Redefining our relationship with living things means redefining and exploring our humanity, bringing a new ecological empathy to life, being nature. It's about redefining a new mental, environmental and artistic ecology, individually and together. It's through this large ecopoetical archive of ice, wind and water that I'm exploring these ideas. The archive is a multidisciplinary body of work that brings together site- specific installations, photographs, texts, paintings and works on paper, textiles, sound, video and performance. The archive is a cosmos of research and works created before, during and after the expedition. The expedition, the artistic creation and the archive together form an ecopoetic gesture that becomes a spell to exile from domination, and that becomes incantations of protection and regeneration.
The expedition is an autonomous and independent project. For the expedition, I wanted to keep air travel to a minimum. For obvious ecological reasons, but also to experience time and space, fuelled by my taste for challenge, adventure and the conscious experience of a certain slowness. As simple as it may seem: I'm going far, and that should also take time, erasing the teleporting action of the plane, embracing a sensitive and temporal form of travel. During the preparation, I was inspired by Léonie D'Aunet's novel 'Voyage d'une femme au Spitzberg'. In 1839, Léonie D'Aunet, aged 19, travelled to Spitzbergen, now known as Svalbard, following the Northern Scientific Commission, of which her husband, the painter François Biard, was a member. I was struck by the rich narrative of the journey to and from Spitsbergen. I then contacted a lot of sailors and dedicated websites to find a boat that would take me to Svalbard in early spring, a period when sailboat passages to Svalbard are rare, as it's still early in the season and the ice is still too present. The Tallship Company responded, and their sailing boat Antigua, a sublime three-masted ship built in 1957, set sail from the Netherlands on my dates, without passengers and with crew only. They supported my project and invited me aboard for the trip. After reaching the port of Harlingen in the Netherlands by train and bus from Grenoble in the French Alps, I met up with the crew of the Antigua. We crossed the North Sea first, then sailed north along Norway, taking shelter in the fjords as much as possible, as the weather was bad. We then take a break in Tromsø, waiting for a weather window to cross the Arctic Ocean to Svalbard, sailing between the ice. The whole trip lasts just over two weeks in total. I arrived in Longyearbyen in Svalbard without a plane, after an extraordinary adventure at sea. I reached the ice of the Far North.
I settled in Longyearbyen for a few weeks. I lived and worked there, between the library and outings on land and between glaciers, mainly accompanied by a new friend, Mareike. She's a guide in Svalbard, so she's armed, and she was taking me along, as it's not allowed to leave Longyearbyen without a weapon, for protection against polar bears. I then joined the sailing boat Tilvera, with the Ocean Missions association. I set out to sea with Belén Garcia Ovide (a marine biologist and founder of Ocean Missions), Captain Heimir Hardarson and other scientists and storytellers. At sea and in the fjords north of Longyearbyen, we consciously explore the flora and fauna, observe walruses, listen to seals underwater, meet a polar bear, fulmars... We also collect samples in the water to study the quantity of microplastics, and we all work on our personal projects. During the expedition, I hoist on board on water, on lands, on ice and on snow, flags representing a fulmar. Flags claiming : "Earth doesn't belong to humans".”
THE JOURNEY, ANALOG PHOTOGRAPHY:
Invitée par le podcast ‘Le Camp de Base’, pour raconter son expédition et son projet en Arctique, à échanger sur sa pratique artistique et quelques réflexions sur l’empathie écologique et la place de l’art ...
Au programme ->
Épisode 71 : La traversée. À découvrir
Épisode 72 : Drapeaux sans conquête, coexister avec la nature. À découvrir
Pour ce projet spécifique, vous pouvez également lire l’article ‘De l’art en expé: la poésie au coeur des galciers du Svalbard’
OTHER FRAGMENTS OF THE ECOPOETICAL ARCHIVE:
ROCKS OF SVALBARD