Abstract
AbstractAs a collaborative production, the exhibition New Arctic aspired to explore postcolonial versions of the Arctic. For this purpose, the exhibition included, among others, an installation called a map machine, seeking to display the Arctic as a site of ongoing ontological politics. To our audiences, the map machine visualised how an inhabited Arctic continues to become a periphery, open to new resource exploitation, a Dreamland “out of space and time.” In this text, I mimic the work of this map machine by describing a series of outside interventions on the Varanger Peninsula, in the Sámi core areas of Norway. The case that initiates the set of actions described in this text is a proposed expansion of a quartzite mine in the small village of Austertana. I illustrate how maps and bureaucratic processes as working political technologies introduce new cartographic visions of this land–water interface, counteracting other existing versions of the same landscape. The case illustrates how exactly such new visions impose urgently meaningful single-action landscapes, or how the Tanafjord was literally reworked from a landscape of endangered species to a landscape defined by an issue of maritime security.
Highlights
As a collaborative production, the exhibition New Arctic aspired to explore postcolonial versions of the Arctic
The exhibition NewArctic recently opened in its third location, at RiddoDuottarMuseat in Karasjok in Northern Norway, en route from one Sámi museum to the
As seen in the picture above, the map machine is a stainless-steel frame holding nine sheets of Plexiglas that can be moved along rails, almost like curtains
Summary
The map machine: Salmon, Sámi, sand eels, sand, water and reindeer. Resource extraction in the High North and collateral landscapes.
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