Ingrid Wildi Merino

The view from one of the Artica Svalbard resident apartments, Photo by Ingrid Wildi Merino

In March 2022 we are pleased to share the below essay written by artist Ingrid Wildi Merino, who joined us from Santiago de Chile. During her stay Ingrid was researching the historical parallels between cultural memory and geological memory, examining the copper industry in the North of Chile and the coal industry on Svalbard, and the reflection on populations in non-places from a historical, cultural, political, economic and social point of view.

Solids retain their shape and persist over time: they last.
Liquids, in turn, are shapeless and transform constantly: they flow.
Like deregulation to markets’ flexibility or liberalization.
Zygmunt Bauman

"Snow is white" is true if and only if snow is white. This logical-semantic tautological expression is directed exclusively at the development of a "meaningsense" theory (with the claim of intelligibility), which seeks to answer the question: What does it mean to understand a proposition? According to Tarski, Carnap, Quine, Ayer, and other similar theorists, knowing these facts [such as "snow is white"] is the key for understanding the words “this is true”. In short, to understand that P “is true”, where P is a sentence between quotation marks, one only has to “unquote” P – remove the quotation marks (and delete “is true”).

Human life in community is the “mode of reality” of human beings and, therefore, at the same time, it is the criterion of theoretical and “practical truth”. Every statement, judgment, or “speech-act” (Sprechsakt?') has human life as its ultimate “reference”. Liberation ethics claims to be based just on descriptive, indeed empirical, judgments - and not merely of value. We must then situate ourselves at the level of descriptive statements or judgments, factual judgments, but being aware that there are also abstract formal ones and concrete or practical material ones.
Enrique Dussel

Starting from the historical horizon of Western modernity and the critical questioning of conductivity and conduct based on raw materials, in my work I explore how the behavior of different "Global North and South societies" is affected by the use of the natural properties contained in raw materials; its application in the production of technology, and finally, the development of capitalist modernity as a whole. Assuming, in turn, that the progress of modernity is based on the usufruct of colonialism and coloniality at a global level, my work problematizes the capitalist modes of production, the subsumption of neoliberal working time, the acceleration of our perception of time, the forms of surplus value production, the havoc generated by extractivism in the global periphery; the issues with the heterarchy of power, structural racism and gender criticism based upon decolonial feminisms. Given the multiplicity of material and subjective resonances offered by the topic of modernity/coloniality in contemporary times, in the following research I have decided to approach, through the interview as an aesthetic practice, part of the population of Longyearbyen, with the collaboration of Tom Warner (camera) and the Artica team (residence center).

In our explorations with Tom Warner, we visited Barentsburg in Svalbard, a mining town that currently exploits its coal mines. Its communal social architecture, evoking the Bauhaus school, is striking. The majority of Barentsburg’s population is very open and friendly, mostly Ukrainians who are currently going though the repercussions of the war and the sanctions applied against Russia, especially due to labor issues, since the money coming from the coal mines ends in Russian banks. Currently, no foreign currency is coming in and they believe that the Barentsburg mines will be temporarily closed. This geopolitical conflict will face the population with migration, adding more problems to the Ukrainian people. We hope this will not be the case.

My previous research on modernity and its colonial counterpart gives visibility to the fact that extraction and the use of raw materials are foundational elements of modern technological development, affecting the behavior of both human beings in their social habitus and that of various terrestrial ecosystems. One of the main dislocations created in this context is the reduction of raw materials to their ideological conception of mere “things”. With a status of "thing" or "object", they are stripped of multiple meanings or "ways of being" that other cultures, like for example ancestral ones, have developed throughout their history. Under this theoretical vantage point, in my work Transfer Architecture. Art, politics and technology, I started a dialogue with the decolonial theoretical work of the Puerto Rican sociologist from the University of Berkeley, Ramón Grosfoguel. His argument aims at the extractivism of raw materials understood as a broader panorama, both historically and geopolitically, referring to epistemic and ontological extractivism as deeper forms of operating against the being-knowing-producing-in-the-world of different cultures on the planet.

Based on this approach to the phenomena of Western modernity, my work focuses on the other side of contemporary Western European "progress", in relation to the use of applied technologies, fed on human life forms subsumed in the era of technological networks and biopolitical control. Deterritorialization processes and extractivist behaviors play a decisive role in problematizing and naming the existence of new "non-places" [1] in the contemporary global world. These are spaces defined by the absence of common ties or communal sociality, due to a system of values and ideals based both on individualism and economic-political liberalism, as well as the absence of collective memory and identity, given the lack of a real sense of belonging to a rooted historical context or a space of vital experiences inherited by oral and experiential family and community traditions.

The dead end to which the civilizing project of Western modernity has led us exhibits a very precise characterization under the figure of dystopia. In general, it deals with ways of being and living in the world, in which, based on objective (conductivity) and intersubjective (conduct) relationships, a dehumanization of social relationships takes place, as a result of an advanced state of collapse and decomposition of its founding principles, especially in its relation to the ecological environment and its anti-collectivist or individualistic ways of life. This is observed in Svalbard, in the fundamental fact that people cannot be born or die (be buried) in these territories, creating a transitory society that remains here only as long as its productive capacity, its utilitarian performance, lasts. This phenomenon creates a lack of geo-cultural roots and an absence of collective memories and stories. The present work, from a point of view that has incorporated the Global North/South conflicts, focuses on the emergence of "dystopias of modernity" related to its extractivist historical experience, in connection to coal production as a model of economic development, and its current geopolitical situation as a strategic archipelago, as well as the many vested interests for its survival in the North Pole.

When I arrived in Longyearbyen in March, everything was covered in snow. I was captivated by this visual shock: the majestic snowy mountains and the silence surrounding the entire town. At the same time, I had never experienced before the cold weather I felt upon arrival. It was a truly borderline sensation. That day I watched the ice melting in the sea and reflected on the general transformation of life: how a solid and tangible substance like ice could be swiftly transmuted into something liquid, fluid, elusive, dissolving and acquiring a new state of evolution. From the window of my apartment the landscape looked like a postcard, like a scene from a Nordic fiction film. An unreal image, a fiction or a model for a movie scene. Every time I got up in the morning and looked out from my window at the landscape, I couldn't believe that the majestic mountains were there all the time, imposing themselves on my gaze. It may seem ridiculous for hectic modern urban life, but the presence of the great snow-capped mountains of Longyearbyen made me observe every single movement I did inside the apartment with much more calm. A context of such calm and absolute silence changes our perception of ourselves. One sees oneself looking out and the landscape returns the gaze in turn. The change of country, climate, mountains and auditory sensations stimulated a feeling of peace. There is a great difference between downtown Santiago in Chile where I live, with a population of over eight million people, and Longyearbyen with a population of only two thousand three hundred. The sound density of places affects the body, soul and spirit in a physical and sensory way. Over time I got used to the pace of life in this Nordic region, although at first I could only stay indoors due to the intense cold and dangerous ice. In the first days I began to carry out different interviews with the inhabitants of Longyearbyen. At first with people from the Latino community who have been living here for the last nine years. Then researchers, a miner and an anthropologist who is also doing research on the memory of Svalbard. I started working with Artica cameraman Tom Warner, shooting outdoors in Longyearbyen and Barentsburg, portraying the mines, the city, the mountains and the idyllic landscapes of this polar area. This experience has been a wonderful artistic collaboration due to the synergy promoted by Artica, enabling me to work with Tom Warner and thus enriching my film work.

As I write these lines, it is June, three months have passed, and the snow has disappeared. Everything has changed, the climate is now much more bearable. The mountains no longer have that colossal presence, the cold is tolerable, and the lack of snow no longer isolates the sounds coming from the street. Now people can be heard passing through. Everything changed abruptly. Under this new geographical panorama, as a resident one is no longer a distinctive object of attention, but rather one blends with more ease into the social landscape. Something that is completely unprecedented for me is the absence of night. There is no darkness here in June, there is no sunset. I look out from my window and there are changes in the daylight, at times sunny or cloudy but always daytime. It has been like this since the end of March. In one of the interviews, they told me that this time of year was more benign, April, May and June, because during the winter months everything becomes dark; there is no day, no light, no sun, just an eternal night. Due to this climatological situation, people work a lot, since there is no biological limit of light, as there is no dawn. This circumstances are certainly disturbing for those of us who are not used to living in extreme regions. In these summer days, as it is always daytime, I forget to go to sleep and I work a lot. The entire sleep cycle is altered: I spend days going late to bed and days in which I have to sleep during the day to be able to regain some sleep.

I am ambivalent of my perception of my own interaction with Svalbard’s nature. I could define it as both sacred and desecrated. With the latter I’m referring to its non-stop coal extraction –although currently at a standstill–, this being one of the main raw materials of industrial modernity. The issue is that given the ecological damage of the current climate crisis, it is unsustainable to continue building civilizational development on the basis of coal extraction, as it is one of the most polluting minerals. It is very eloquent that what many European historians call "modernity proper" (Koselleck), that is, supported by the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution (18th and 19th centuries), or "second modernity", is based on the exploitation of minerals like coal, iron and copper, currently reaching increasingly unsustainable limits, having to close several mines that for centuries fuelled the accelerated pace of material development of Western modernity.

In Pyramiden: Portrait of an abandoned utopia, author Kjartan Fløgstad documents the number of miners killed by coal extraction in Svalbard. Before the age of oil, modern civilisation was sustained by coal production. A few years ago, coal reserves multiplied the oil resources that remained to be extracted in the world. Today there are fewer active coal mines but the damage caused by the use of fossil energy has left dramatic consequences in the environment. Today, it is already clear that capitalist Western civilisation is digging its own grave with coal mines and this is why there is only one active mine left in Svalbard, which will close in two more years. Against this backdrop, I filmed the outside of mine No. 3 where the Arctic World Archive (AWA) is located. It was not possible to conduct an interview with the Archive Director because he was not in Svalbard at the moment. The AWA is a place that seeks to preserve the data and knowledge of the "global digital memory" for centuries to come against potential climatic or nuclear threats. It is an ultra-secure data vault, located inside a decommissioned coal mine. It is buried deep beneath hundreds of meters of permafrost, which helps store film material at a constant temperature between -5 C and -7 C. The Svalbard Treaty of 1920, signed by 46 members including major world powers, establishes that Norway must respect and preserve the environment of this region. The archive meets all environmental requirements. It doesn’t need electricity for its storage capabilities, as the arctic climate with its permafrost is ideal for storing films for hundreds of years. Institutions and companies that have deposited data in the AWA include the National Archives of Brazil, the National Archives of Mexico and the Norwegian Inter-municipal Digital Archives, among many others. Since its foundation, institutions of various kinds have deposited data in its dependencies, like the European Space Agency (ESA), UNICEF and the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). This archive is an example of how important Disaster Recovery has become, especially at a large-scale level. This interesting, yet strange project reminds us of the importance of protecting data and knowledge in a constantly changing technological environment. But something that produces a certain dislocation is the fact that a project that preserves one of the most sophisticated milestones of Western modernity, such as its technological, media, computer and digital development, is located in an extreme place on the planet where only nature could potentially be found in its wildest and most uncontaminated state. It really is a dystopian image to see the existence of data and historical documents storage vaults in this type of geographical place at the end of the Earth such as the North Pole.

Among the interviews carried out, the one with the director of the Global Seed Vault stands out. The so-called “World Archive” project is housed in the “Svalbard Global Seed Vault”, opened in 2008 with the aim of preserving the “genetic material” of a wide variety of seeds from around the world. Once again, the figure of dystopia emerges to conceptualize the image of an apocalyptic future, in which it is necessary to protect the world's seeds so they can be reused in times of crisis. This project grants a fundamental significance to Longyearbyen in Svalbard, as the safest place in the world. In the event of a widespread electrical failure, the permafrost (permanently frozen soil layer) would act as a natural coolant. The issue is the possibility of sustaining it due to global warming and its consequent widespread melting. The Global Seed Vault is not a genetic bank that can be accessed by any researcher or other interested parties.

The Svalbard Global Seed Vault was created for gene banks around the world to store samples from their seed collections and replicate (copy) them in case they are lost as a result of war, terrorist acts or natural disasters. The Norwegian government built the seed vault with funds from the Microsoft Corporation, the Rockefeller Bank and the Monsanto Company. In the interview with the vault’s director, I asked him a series of questions that I would like to transcribe here: What are your thoughts on the cultural memory contained in these seeds and how that cultural memory could be subsequently reproduced when the seeds are planted in its place of origin or elsewhere? Do you think that due to global warming Europe will reconsider its place of privilege towards a greater economic equity between the Global North and South?

What kind of aid will there be from the Global North towards the countries of the Global South, producers of food sources for the Global North? And also, what interests do these multinational corporations have in financing the seed vault? Many of these questions were not answered. Both the Global Seed Vault and the Artic World Archive function as both genetic and historical-cultural information banks. They are projected to be active for thousands of years, but with the current forecasts of growth and decline, global eco-migrations and the increasing deterioration of agriculture in the countries of the global South, perhaps their use will come ahead of time. It is also possible to hypothetically project, that the supply of both seeds and historical cultural capital will be located in the Global North. What stands out primarily on this archival dystopia is that it seeks to preserve the genetic memory of seeds, the historical archives of the world, but human beings are not allowed the possibility of settling down and forming a society where they can “perpetuate” themselves, living there for generation after generation. A digital and genetic memory, but not a community and existential memory. The creation of a society based on geo-cultural aspects, on historically situated roots. This obviously would have its ecological disadvantages, but it must also be recognized that this damage is already taking place with the increasing amount of tourism and floating population currently passing through this region.

Longyearbyen has stark climate contrasts between “darkness or light”, “cold or sun”, “life or death”. Nature is the local ruler and human beings must necessarily seek refuge. It is a strange territory, where the harsh reality of its climate, the ice and its melting do not allow for compromises. Many interviewees are here working in hotels, local companies, doing scientific research or making important decisions about their lives. Many of them have lived here for about 4 to 15 years and then migrated somewhere else. Older people go to the mainland, either to Norway or to their hometowns. The main issue is that people cannot be buried in Longyearbyen because of the permafrost, since bodies cannot decompose. Longyearbyen is made up of a fluctuating society. Most people come to work, not to start a family or settle down. Since the historical independence of this archipelago (Svalbard Treaty 1920), the political and ideological inclination has been to feed the material and energy development of capitalist modernity, extracting and trading its raw materials such as oil and coal.

One of the strange things that strikes a foreign observer is the mismatch between a tragic reality, such as the impressive spectacle of melting ice in relation to global warming, and an increasingly prosperous industry based on the spectacle of tourism. The dystopian horizon is shown here with an obscene gaze, namely, one based not on the aesthesis of life, but on the apocalyptic reality of destruction, of the impotent and progressive environmental deterioration. "Modernity" is a civilizational model, created on the concealment of the indigenous other in 1492, on the eclipse of America (Dussel), with the aim of emancipating "humanity" and freeing it from religious childhood (Kant). However, this beautiful project of "maturity" and emancipation of the free and creative potentials of the human being hides a colonial counterpart that has always been systematically made invisible and nullified. The luminous face of modernity, that is, the one that promised the emancipation of humanity and the independence from the world of nature through the use of technique and technology, concealed that the first foundation of Western philosophical modernity, the famous “I think therefore I am” (cogito ergo sum by Descartes), was preceded by 150 years of overseas colonial experiences, thus configuring, from the American perspective, the “I conquer therefore I am” (Dussel’s ego conquiro).

Based on the point of view I have developed here, where the topos (utopia/dystopia) is essential for the different ways of being-in-the-world, what is most confusing about this place is that legally one cannot be born or die in it, because permafrost freezes the bodies and decomposition cannot take place. Corpses have to be shipped to the mainland. However, people are not born here either, because there are not enough hospitals for people to be born in, although some have been born in this land, whether secretly or by accident. That is why it is difficult to talk about memory in this territory, since it is very complex to develop any kind of memory or historical-affective emotional connection –in the sense of the collective memory of a people, with certain similar traits or cultural identity– in a merely transitional place such as the Svalbard Archipelago. People don't live their entire lives here.

From time to time, people leave, while others arrive. From the point of view of a "transitional territory", what strikes me the most is that one can live here as long as one is productive for this society. All the people I met in Longyearbyen work, whether in supermarkets, restaurants, university, tourist centers or as anthropologists, geologists, ethnologists, biologists and ecologists. From the configuration of the colonial matrix of power (Mignolo), the Western civilizing process was marked by an archetypal colonial difference, the separation between two zones: a zone of being and another of non-being (Fanon). These are the two faces of modernity, constituted by a highly asymmetric dependency, in which, in order for the zone of being to exist, with all its personal comfort and satisfaction devices, there must necessarily be a zone of non-being, which lives in permanent conditions of structural humiliation, abuse, dispossession and violence. The problem is that ultimately, the zone of being is an imaginary creation of the modern Western economic-political system, this privileged zone being a mere fiction, clearly evidencing its own crisis and with planetary dimensions. Capitalist modernity, as a global system of necrophilic relations of domination and exploitation, does not offer real solutions to the different crises of the Western modern system. There are no possible solutions to ecological, economic and cultural problems. We cannot have as an "ideal model" or "imaginary we can follow" an economic-political system that is basically a fiction, that is, a systematic concealment of the empirical supremacy of some over others, without actually leading us anywhere, only to a global civilizational and ecological disaster. Hence, while some live in permanent development, others are doomed to underdevelopment.

It is around this theoretical-practical context that I conceptualized the social experience of Longyearbyen in Svalbard as a non-place. According to the definition given by the anthropologist Marc Aug and Bauman's liquid modernity, "non-places" are understood as spaces stripped of the symbolic expressions of identity, memory, and lasting historical relationships. These are the arguments that made me reconceptualize these issues and propose the notion of an “extended non-place” as a topic for the Svalbard situation. With this concept I address a geographical space that at first sight hides a disturbing silence or "secret", which is only revealed the longer you stay in its territory. This is the only way to give visibility to complex situations related to its fluctuating population, most of which were not born here and will certainly not die here. To be in Svalbard is to stay in a frozen time; it is like being in a “vacuum”, where life is understood from a medical or experimental point of view. Time is confused with the work routine. This trait is seen in people's bodies and attitudes. Both work and money are the elements most valued by those who come to live in Longyearbyen. It is a terrible thing to put it in such terms, but if people cannot project their lives indefinitely in this place, they will only measure their stay by associating time and money.

"Fiction as reality" is the simulacrum used as a pharmakon in the Global North’s contemporary civilization. The greatest problem right now is how to tell the truth in reality or how to tell reality from the truth, in a global scenario marked by the fetishism of merchandise and computer simulations. The problem of deception and simulation is the alteration of the creator itself, who is convinced that his invention is true, and thus he naturalizes it as if it were the "true reality" of things, when it’s no other than the imaginary product of hegemonic thought. I had previously referred to liquid modernity as described by Bauman –that is, a sociological category–, as a figure of change and transience, of market deregulation and liberation. The metaphor of liquidity also aims at the precariousness of human ties in an individualistic and privatized society, marked by the transitory and volatile nature of its social relationships. Love becomes a floating thing, without responsibility towards the other, reduced to the faceless bond provided by the Internet. Surfing the waves of an ever-changing liquid society –uncertain, unstable and increasingly unpredictable– is the decline of the welfare state. Liquid modernity is a time without certainties, where the societies that fought for the emancipatory processes that emerged with the European enlightenment, demanding civil liberties and the dismantling of the monarchical tradition of the past, now find themselves with the obligation to be free assuming the existential fears and anguish that such freedom entails; the culture of labor flexibility ruining future prospects, a real possibility of settling down or establishing emotional ties in a given place. Thus, modernity as we know it –and its counterpart, the coloniality of power–, begins to free itself from its own initial history, constructing "non-places" emerging from the flight synergies of human beings in the face of contemporary global disaster. In Liquid Modernity, Zygmunt Bauman delves into the attributes of capitalist societies that have endured over time and the aspects that have changed over the years. The traces of capital accumulation in late modernity stand out. One of these characteristics is the individualism that makes our material realities precarious, transitory and volatile. Tensions today are not only social but existential. The "other", the "foreign", typified as strange because it is unknown (unheimlich), is an innate carrier of uncertainty, of potential danger, being perhaps its greatest threat to defy the preconceived classification of social order in which this small world is inscribed.

Longyearbyen in Svalbard was originally just a place for whalers. Extractivist practices came later and built the coal mines. Unis University also arrived in order to promote scientific research. Today, tourism is one of the most important economic sectors, transforming Longyearbyen into a highly valued tourist center. Although everything seems to work perfectly, people live an individualistic way of life that is strange for those of us who were brought up in cultures where family, neighbourhood, community, and nation are spaces of daily experiences and belonging. Society in Longyearbyen is atomized, revealing that the most significant thing here is work: gather as much money as possible while you’re here, and then migrate as soon as possible. People seem happy at first sight, but over time one can feel the sorrow in this place; a burden that is only sometimes lightened by the dazzling beauty of the snowy mountains, the sun and the eloquent silence.

Unlike Bauman's conceptualization of liquid modernity, we live in a time of tragic or radical uncertainty. Modernity, as the dominant civilizational system, no longer offers credible solutions from its scientific assumptions to the ecological, social, economic and political disaster it has created over 500 years of destructive and irrational activities on the various territories of the planet. "Until now, there has been no civilization that has left as many disasters as that of modernity today" (Ramón Grosfoguel). We have reached such a paradoxical situation that current modernity has a "surplus" of human beings, which means that people are superfluous and unnecessary in this economic model, because it requires a "structural reserve army" (Marx) , that is, a high rate of structurally unemployed within the system –those who don’t even have the "privilege" of being exploited, as Hinkelammert ironically comments– which keep wages low and enable an increasing appreciation of capital circulation in the financial markets. However, there is also the paradox that the unemployed function as a kind of pharmakon (remedy/disease), since they are both needed to keep wages low and discarded because they are subjects of social burden for the states.

The mirage of this model creates a new insensitivity and dehumanization that requires flexibility, fragmentation and compartmentalization of the interests and affections of individuals, so that they must always be ready to change tactics, abandoning assumed commitments and loyalties. Solidarity depends only on the benefit created by social relations. Economy and trade regulate all these connections, measured in terms of costs and benefits, of "liquidity" in the strict financial sense. Perhaps it would be preferable to think of ourselves as dense – instead of liquid or evanescent–, like the foam metaphor proposed by Sloterdijk to close his trilogy of the Spheres. They display the multifocal character of modern life, the expansion movements of subjects that travel and agglomerate until they create foams where complex and fragile interrelationships are established, such as the “expanded non-places”, lacking a center and in constant expansive mobility, either increasing or decreasing. One does not "reside", but rather "lives" or "survives" for a certain time. Such foam is what society is, and it is the interrelational space of the contemporary world.

According to Bauman, nuclear families in this modernity have become labile and fragile bonds, completely vulnerable to the ups and downs of individual interests. Affective uprooting is presented as a condition for success. Institutions are not anchors of personal existence. On the other hand, the value we give to our activities is of an exclusively economic nature, the reification of time has made our activities become elements of a merely instrumental system: as long as we reify our work we are ourselves reified by the system, we exist as long as we are useful objects. Hence, the decline of modernity and of the welfare state –lacking narratives and the collective memory that gives meaning to life– continues to be a matter of surfing the waves of capitalist society that are always changing, uncertain and increasingly unpredictable and dangerous. They cause our subjectivity to become distressing by not having a secure foundation on which to truly project our lives, from the substantive materiality of effective human needs. Today it is becoming more and more evident that the diverse communities of the planet are not willing to consider economic value as the only thing that matters and its enthronement through the sacrifice human life and nature as something necessary. We believe in the right of people to decide on their own lives. Community social movements can be an encouraging example for contemporary populations, especially in the Global North, by demonstrating that the dynamic life of the people is not completely subordinated to economic development, but equally to the flourishing of an ethic of good living, creating life and not death.

1. Not in Marc Augé’s sense, but as extended non-places, that is, extended onto extreme regions (and radical processes) where a series of essential, geopolitical, and civilizational interests are at stake, but which in turn maintain the distinctive condition of transit, of historical-community non-belonging to the territory. It is important to underline that the notion of “utopia” in turn means (non)-topia (place), that is, a non-place.

Ingrid Wildi Merino was nominated for a residency at Artica by our key partner Office for Contemporary Art Norway.