Malte Jochmann came to Svalbard as a geology student at the University Centre in 2001, the same year that local democracy was introduced. In the beginning, he was not active in the local council but enjoyed “the good bachelor life” with long hikes and explorations of the archipelago. For someone coming from Munich in Germany, the wild nature was captivating. The community in Longyearbyen was also easy to become part of.

After a strenuous car trip from the Netherlands to Nordkapp, in a Fiat with a flat battery, Marina van Dijk arrived in Finnmark at the beginning of the 1990s. She was a newly graduated goldsmith and visited Juhls’ Silver Gallery in Kautokeino. From the moment she set foot there, it was clear to her that she wanted to work in the workshop. Eventually, she wanted to start her own business. Some friends had gone even further north, to Svalbard, and van Dijk followed.

Before coming to Svalbard, Vernon Alvez had been to Norway many times. Every year since 2008, he would travel from Cebu City in the Philippines to Frosta municipality in Trøndelag to work as a seasonal farmhand. His aunt had married a Norwegian man who knew a local farmer. During harvest season, Vernon would come with several cousins to pull up potatoes and carrots — a way to make ends meet when his job selling encyclopedias didn’t stretch far enough. He hadn’t planned on going even farther north.

Mia Ekeblad grew up in Longyearbyen. She has both Norwegian and Swedish citizenship, but she doesn’t see Norway or Sweden as home. For her, home is Svalbard.

– “I feel just as little connection to Norway as I do to most other countries. It’s a bit strange, but also nice, because I feel like I can choose the whole world,” she says.

It was a friendly agreement that led the Australian Jason Roberts to move so far north. Along the beaches of Australia, he taught a Norwegian exchange student how to surf. In return, he was supposed to learn how to ski in Norway—if he ever made it there for a visit. And he did. After earning a degree in economics and working on the stock exchange in Australia, he traveled north. After spending a few years on the mainland, specifically in Kautokeino in Finnmark, he arrived in Svalbard in 1990.

Just before the pandemic shut down one place after another, Valeriya Burlachenko Mikhalskaya took the last scheduled flight from Moscow to Svalbard. She was going to work as a guide for tourists in the Russian mining town of Barentsburg. Valeriya had been hired by the state-owned company Trust Arktikugol to help develop its tourism operations. However, when COVID-19 spread and international travel halted, most tourists were unable to come.

"One always imagines Spitsbergen as a barren and silent frozen world—but that is a grave mistake," wrote the French traveller Léonie d’Audet in 1839. She was likely the first woman to visit the archipelago and believed she would also be the last. When d’Audet travelled to the Arctic with a research expedition, she encountered no other people. The noise she heard and described was the sound of breaking ice during the spring thaw. Even today, the archipelago is far from silent. But now, the sounds also include voices—voices from Longyearbyen’s diverse community. In this series, some of those voices are heard.