Nastassja Simensky
Photo: Nastassja Simensky
Forty-two tabs and counting. I’m a fan of the tab. I use my browser like a notepad, right-clicking and pinning ideas, references, images and articles – anything that piques my interest that I might return to later. But, like most avid ‘tabbers’, I leave most of these windows dormant, in anticipation of re-opening, at least until the browser crashes and clears the cache, forcing a desktop reset. The tabbed events, places and people remain distant, remote.
For a long time, Svalbard, and the mountains and valleys around Longyearbyen seemed completely inaccessible. From the studio, dining table and bed, I would scan the treeless terrain through Google Earth and images from the NOAA satellites that collect global environmental data as they orbit Earth. From this distance, Svalbard appeared stitched together from fragments and images across multiple orbits. Unnervingly detailed, but clumsy, out of time and out of sync, these images do not give anything away to the untrained eye about what conditions and life are like on the ground.
Regardless of how you get to Longyearbyen, the many mountains, peaks and plateaus that stretch in every direction are a striking introduction. Whilst their heights vary across the archipelago, around Longyearbyen they are comparable. On a clear day, the effect from the top of Trollsteinen (a great hike from Nybyen via Sarkofagen and Lars Hiertafjellet before October) or Breinosa (accessible by car before it gets too icy, from which you also get a glimpse of Mine 7 and the Eiscat Radar) is one of endless mountains as far as your human eye can see.
Upon arriving in Svalbard, I realised with some irony that, although I might have been physically closer to some of the places I’d read about, much of the archipelago remains inaccessible. This is partly due to the nature of the landscape; how far you might be physically able to hike in a day; the time of year, because unless you have your own boat you are unlikely to be crossing Adventalen’s marshes and streams by foot in Spring and Summer; your budget for going out with a guide or boat trip to explore further afield; whether or not you are in a position to undertake the Polar training at UNIS, and go through the process of applying for a rifle licence to hike independently. Beyond the logistics of the Svalbard landscape, high security research centres like KSAT, the Seed Vault, and Eiscat remain pretty much inaccessible to the public, including artists; many researchers you might want to meet are very busy and their time in Longyearbyen may not coincide with your residency. Ultimately, I found these constraints and challenges a humbling experience, one that required some deeper planning and consideration about how I wanted to spend my time and eek out resources.
What you can’t anticipate from webcam streams and satellite images is the need to be nimble with your schedule. Most of the time, the best laid plans won’t happen – the weather will change, people can’t make it, someone’s rifle will be out of action, a landslide might change the route. Equally, you will meet incredibly kind and generous people you never expected: last-minute invitations will come; creatures will appear unannounced in the harbour or valley; there will be spontaneous beach bonfires and saunas; chunks of 5000-year-old Greenland ice in whisky; keen-eyed friends might spot the very small and special dandelions or maybe an arctic fox padding across the moraine. My best recommendation is always to say ‘yes’, and always bring snacks and coffee!
The tab habit didn’t stop in Svalbard. Two important sites or apps I would visit so often to the point became habitual are the contour map toposvalbard.npolar.no and the weather forecast on yr.no. I check the weather in Nottingham where I live, then I check what the wind is doing at the top Nordenskiöldfjellet, 11m/s (not too severe), the temperature, -22° (feels like -36°), whether it’s snowing (not currently…). Then I move onto Longyearbreen and Larsbreen and little Tenoren. When planning hiking routes you will need both of these. There is also an offline app version of toposvalbard if you don’t have roaming data.
One of the things I wasn’t expecting about Longyearbyen when I arrived in August, aside from walking around in a thin jumper during the hottest week on record, was just how dusty it is. You will get thirsty and if you ignore it the dehydration headache starts to gnaw at your skull. With the combination of wind and the coal trucks, the dust was unavoidable. Dust gets into your eyes and mouth. It gets caught in your camera equipment, your bed, your socks. It flows into your hair and your lungs, entering your body, and the bodies of the creatures that live here – the glaucous gulls, the skuas. Within this visible dust made of silica and black carbon, there is an invisible ‘dust’, or at least invisible to the human eye. This is made up of undesirable compounds and heavy metals. I became interested how this was increasingly being released from the glaciers and how this toxicity might be transmitted. I’d brought more books than I could ever get through, and Artica and Longyearbyen both have brilliant libraries, so you really don’t need to bring many books. That said, three from my suitcase that really resonated with my experience in Svalbard were:
Elvia Wilk’s collection of essays, ‘Death by Landscape’ published by Soft Skull in 2022. It is a collection that brings together references from literary fiction and cinema to weave reflections on the strange and sometimes toxic relationship people have with landscape, obsession, love, death and plants. While thinking about the transmission of toxicity in the Arctic landscape, as well as people’s almost familial connection to, and affection for, Svalbard’s shifting landscape, this book was an excellent read.
I arrived in mid-to late summer, when the sun was high and un-setting and unsettling. The light appeared to bleach all colour from the moraines and the glaciers were white and grey and black rather than the blue hue of the autumn. It reminded me of Italo Calvino’s fantastical evolution of the universe in the ‘Cosmicomics’, particularly the short story ‘Without Colours’. The narrative follows two protagonists as they pass through an ultraviolet landscape of grey arches, mountains, caves and crevasses in the moment when the atmosphere is first forming and colours begin to appear.
A book I often return to is Annie Dillard’s collection of short essays in ‘Teaching a Stone To Talk’. At times the stories are moving, while at others they are funny or absurd: vivid reflections on attempts by humans to hear nature ‘speak’, or to see big things in the minutiae of cyanobacteria, or to struggle with language and silence. In a landscape that sometimes feels like the end of the world and sometimes the centre, in a place that gets into your lungs and your dreams, it seemed like the right moment to re-visit this little book.
Nastassja Simensky is an artist based in Nottingham, UK. She uses fieldwork to explore and understand how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and the geopolitics of extraction are crystallised in specific geographies. Nastassja often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists, including archaeologists, powerplant workers, musicians, and ham radio enthusiasts, to make authored and co-authored artworks. Previously, these have included: place-specific performances on boats, in quarries, and inside a 7th century chapel; amateur radio broadcasts to transmit and publish text and image; sound work for radio and installation; films; and poetic texts. Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network. By engaging with the politics, methods, and processes of archaeology Nastassja reflects on the discipline of archaeology itself, as one of a range of modes of knowledge production that can inform embedded place-specific, experimental, and collaborative art practices.