Rikke Luther
Moving Landscape, Tidal Flat, Svalbard, 2023 (Image courtesy Rikke Luther)
In my mind, the trip first started when I arrived in Kiruna. The flattened landscape, the negative mountains, piles of small stones and goods wagons. I wondered whether Svalbard would present itself as a commodity? Negative whale oil. Coal, cruise ships, and deep-seabed mining. The train passed through Lapland. Then Svalbard is here. A demilitarized island but the kind of place where the internet cables could be cut in a split second. The Cold War never really died here. Just slept, and reawakening now like a giant monster from its long sleep as the ice thaws. Above the zone of human activity, white powder mountains bring rain down silence.
Mud is everywhere. It’s why I am here. The glaciers are melting – here accelerating like a car with kickdown gearing. A regiment of soggy permafrost troops behind it. A sticky, muddy, floating landscape is all around me. Its bubbles rise from underground, forming a soundtrack that resembles early Japanese electronica. Methane-Carbon Dioxide-Methane-Methane-Carbon dioxide ... Scanning the landscape, I no longer see in colour – everything has been filmed in black and white. Coal and snow.
Daniel Kammen is on a panel at the university. He resigned his position under Obama. He’s here to discuss the future of the ocean and the seabed – and all that sci-fi rhetoric pumped in the public sphere by the money men behind the nascent ‘deep-sea mining industry’. The Earth System reduced to the speculators story board. The old Norwegian dogs of the North Sea oil industry have some new tricks. Space-age dredgers scrape the ocean floor, chased by terrified scientists and activists – ‘free’ minerals are the ‘new frontier’ of extraction capitalism. The chemical changes to a delicately balanced ecosystem affect the behaviour of essential oxygen-creating bacteria leaving a soup of nitrous oxide. It’s nothing much. Just that life depends on it.
Do we understand what we are doing? Nature manipulated, a melting landscape. This afternoon, new kinds of mud – muds we know nothing about – full of long frozen chemicals and bacteria locked solid for millennia by a stable climate, washes from the land and into the ocean. The bio-chemical effects? No idea. Nothing. Zilch. Nada. Doesn’t matter. It would only be a problem if it was illegal, right?
Colours start showing up to the party. Meltwaters now bring lead, mercury, and cadmium – with a dash of DDT – to the psychedelic party. At the university, I ask about the sediment situation. Geir Johnsen talks about the satellite NTNU use to map the colour flows from the melting glaciers. The freaked-out mess humanity’s ‘investments in the future’ are making, results in colourful images which can be seen from space. They track the developing geology of Svalbard.
Out in tundra – at least it was a tundra until recently - sixty-million-year-old fossils lay around me. A perfect leaf, embraced by ancient mud, secured now as stone, stares back at me. A glimpse of the life long gone, yet nearly identical to leaves fluttering across my parents’ garden – as far as I can see. What kind of biotopes will grow here in 20 years’ time?
… More mud …
I brought my work with me: Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System. Day after day here, I take the trip into the fjord, filming the new formations. Blob. Ooze. Brown tears. Up on the mountain, I film the route the muds take – landslides slip, then creep, every downward. A dribble, then suddenly an ocean falls at speed. Form – once reliably solid – becomes movement. On Svalbard, average temperatures are rising six times the global average. Reading the science papers given to me by colleagues … here, we are already in the year 2103.
The first day of June, skiing from the last open coal mine, past reindeer to the northern light observatory, and on through a forest of science and research antennas … the North Pole is still 1313 kilometres away. Night time is just a dream.
Recommended readings: I pick my way through a pre-publication chapter by oceanographer Katherine Richardson and geo-biologist Minik Rosing. Time scales in the Biosphere and Geosphere and their interactions: Importance for Establishing Earth System State. It’s as complex as the Earth. To a non-scientist the representation is as difficult as the thing it represents. I re-read. Every time, it forms another story in my mind. First, I understood it from the perspective of Greenland. A series of intersecting cycles. Out of sync. The slow ‘geological transportation of carbon into the Earth’s mantle’ verses ‘the anthropogenic release of carbon into the atmosphere’, which occurs two hundred times faster. Or is Katherine and Minik’s text a topographical grid – an orderly method of some kind – that is going to help me understand other stories? Then, sediments presenting themselves as muds. Could that new drifting, from ice-flows to ocean, help new life-forms to blossom and expand. Could it even capture more CO2?
Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night looks back at me from the desk. Written in 1937 – as old as my father. I found it on Artica’s bookshelf. The kind of book best read on site! Then, literally an overview: Svalbard from Above; then Geoscience Atlas of Svalbard. How little we understand. Solidity, it turns out, is becoming as transitory as knowledge.
Rikke Luther is a Danish artist based in Copenhagen. She was nominated for the residency by the Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action (NAARCA).
Her current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to the Earth System. Those relation compass themes related to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology, geology and economy, that expressed in drawn images, photography and film. In 2021 Luther defended her praxis based artistic PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy . It will be published in 2023 with extended texts by Esther Leslie and Jaime Stapleton.
Luther is a GRASS Fellow at the GRASS Fellow Programme, Uppsala Universitet / Campus Gotland and Baltic Art Center (2022-2024) and is currently conducting field studies for the research project: More Mud. The project is commissioned by Art Hub and Nordic Alliance of Artists’ Residencies on Climate Action (NAARCA). More Mud is part of Luther’s postdoctoral The Ocean-Lands: Mud Within the Earth System at Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir´s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society (ROCS), Center for Macroecology, Evolution and Climate (CMEC), The Globe Institute, Copenhagen University (2023-2024).