2020
Exhibition: Epic Failure / Before and After / True and False…………….ending in an unwanted conclusion
Toot Wave 2 Program, Toot Artspace, 13 February - 1 March 2020
As with all great adventures, things do not always go to plan.
The Arctic has always loomed large in my imagination. Its chiseled ice landscape is the polar opposite of the drought stricken continent I was raised in.
Doing a solstice flip on 21 June 2019, I flew from wintery Melbourne to the Archipelago of Svalbard, arriving there on their Summer Solstice. I hoped to see zillions of polar bears and capture fantastic photos of this glistening ice-crusted world.
Flying is one of the most carbon-intensive things you can do and as such greatly contributes to climate change.
The CO2 emissions resulting from a return flight from Oslo to Svalbard are enough to melt 1 m² of summer ice per passenger. I dread to think of how much ice was lost by my travelling to Svalbard. I failed in an epic way to protect what I held most sacred.
As I write this on 8th January 2020 over 107,000 square kilometres of Australian bush has recently been incinerated by bushfires. Twenty-eight people have lost their lives. Over a billion animals have perished, habitats have been irretrievably lost and species face extinction. Climate change is widely accepted as the cause of these catastrophic fires.
So as the Arctic melts away at an unprecedented rate and Australia burns to a cinder I feel the guilt of Flygskam/Flight Shame hit me. How can I ever board a plane again knowing what I now know?
Images of work by Lucia Rossi
BEFORE / Aim of Trip
To see zillions of polar bears.
Take fantastic photos of the Arctic & capture the magic of this glistening ice-crusted part of the world.
Make sound recordings of anything thing that moved, wind, ice melting, glaciers carving, whales breaching, polar bears growling
Magdalenefjord
79°35.485’N, 11°18.981’E
Smeerenburg (Blubber Town)
79°44.821’N, 1105.908’E
Billeford
78°28.702’N, 14°15.457’E
AFTER / Outcome
I saw 2 polar bears but quite possibly it was just the same polar bear twice, once in the morning and then again that afternoon. The closest I got to experience a polar bear in the wild was when I found some very, very, very fresh polar bear poo, waaaaaaaaaaay too fresh polar bear poo.
I failed to capture fantastic photos of the Arctic. I also neglected to change my camera’s time zone settings, consequently, all my photos have the Abu Dhabi time zone blazoned across them, which is both disconcerting and weird.
But I did manage to photograph from a great distance that one bear. It was not until I returned home and enlarged the photo that I realized how sickening thin it was. It was stealing birds’ eggs from nests. Polar bears normally feed on seals but due to the sea ice receding this has become difficult, consequently they have resorted to supplementing their diet with eggs. This is not only disastrous for the birds but also for the other animals such as Arctic foxes who now have to compete for the eggs with the bears.
As for the sound recordings, well, the only sounds I recorded were of the boat’s engine, people talking or the occasional squawks of birds. The Arctic can be a very silent place.
VIDEO SPOILER ALERT. NOTHING MUCH HAPPENS IN THIS VIDEO.
NO POLAR BEAR ENTERS STAGE LEFT. NO BLUE WHALE UPTURNS THE BOAT.
IT IS JUST FOOTAGE I TOOK ON MY IPHONE. IT IS THE ARCTIC AS IT IS.
Post production by Mark Walsh
TRUE and FALSE
Before visiting the Arctic I did paintings of polar bears navigating the anthropocene where ice frosted palms stood on rubbish littered beaches. Whilst tropical vegetation in the Artic still remains fantastical and false, unfortunately my depiction of the rubbish is not. On a desolate beach of what should have been pristine environment in Krossfjorden we collected over 2 large bags of rubbish in less than an hour.
