Encounters in the Landscape
video essay

An hourly diary recorded during a 27 hour stay in isolation in the uninhabited and “remote” location of Niaqornaq, Greenland, conducted as an auto-ethnographic experiment on encounters with qivittut, the Greenlandic mythological beings linked to the country’s remote areas.

More about the project︎︎︎

The voice recordings conducted as an hourly dairy or an hourly field recording from an auto-ethnographical experiment are combined with imagery of the landscapes of Niaqornaq and the surroundings of Ilulissat. The stay in isolation in a “remote” Greenlandic area was an attempts to meet a qivittoq. The former humans who left the society as a result of an irresolvable rupture with their community ventured into the country’s unpopulated inland areas where they underwent a transformation. Now, they are unhuman, undead, immortal vengeful beings one can meet in the open landscapes. Prior knowledge of the beings is not a prerequistie for such encounters. The eerie feelings of presence accompanied with specific details on the beings’ appearance, smell and superantural powers are common in accounts of both Greenlanders and foreigners. Being alone in the surroundings of an abandoned settlement, thus ment exposition to encounters with qivittut.

Following Pia Arke’s notion of the third place withtin the discourse on Greenland and its culture, the video essay attempts to always be conscious of the position of the its author within the subject of qivittut - mythological beings that are encountered both by Greenlanders and foreigners without any prior knowledge of the beings. In this way, being an artist is the specific position from which it is possible to speak of the phenomena, just as Pia Arke formulates it in her Ethno-Aesthetics (1995). Yet, the approach to making of the video essays is always conscious of the stereotypes at the core of the Western gaze on the North including othering, temperate normativity, phenomenological remoteness, the logics of extraction, colonialism etc. Video-essaying, constantly conscious of the medium and the person putting the essay together presents itself as an appropriate medium. The audience constantly reminded of the specific position, which is just one of many, is always questioning what they witness.

Developped in collaboration with Arctic Culture Lab and Ilulissat Museum.