Sketch for a series addressing the Arctic imaginary of being alone-ness

By Risa Horowitz

A fellow artist admonished me for capturing her on camera during a 2017 residency in Svalbard aboard the tall ship Antigua. On a Zodiac cruise one morning in yet another stunning fjord, with my camera already recording, I saw her gently reach over the side of the boat, pick up a small piece of brash ice, and bring it into her mouth. I turned the camera to document this touching moment, intending to share it with her as a keepsake, but when I approached her later in the day to offer the file she tore into me for invading her privacy. After storming away, demanding I destroy the file, as I tried to understand this attack on my actions when I thought they were tender and caring, I turned to another artist and said something like I’m not a particularly obsequious person. And I am not. I mistrust the fawning type.

I do see that it was too familiar an act between two people who had only just met. But up there, a Zodiac is the equivalent of a city tourist bus. With about thirty artists and scientists participating in the residency, we felt on top of each other, whether on Antigua, a Zodiac, or a glacial moraine. I wondered how anyone could imagine privacy in such an environment. I will never use the file, but it is still on my hard drive, the episode too puzzling for me to even look for, let alone move to the trash bin. I don’t know how to solve a puzzle with mismatching pieces.

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Seven years later—in August 2024—I joined close to one hundred artists and scientists for an alumni residency, this time circumnavigating the archipelago aboard an icebreaker called Ortelius. One of the harshest rules of the residency, to protect the privacy of both people and their works in progress, was to never photograph others without explicit permission. Wanting to respect this rule, I rarely engaged people with a camera in August, but regretted losing what I felt would have been a way for me to connect with shipmates. Separately, time after time, people ambled into my art-making frame as they wandered through one beautiful landing after another, entranced by the environment but often oblivious to or in disregard of their closer surroundings. As if anticipating a transformative or mystical internal observation.

Already anxious to misstep in the way I did in 2017—unintentionally and with people—I have been trying to make sense of what is public and private in the high Arctic. I arrive, each iteration, on the contradictory transference of a collective yearning to feel a part of the planet by visiting its farthest reaches, to connect and belong with it—as people—onto the so many images we make there—as artists—that intentionally depict a human-less landscape.

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During that visit to Svalbard in 2017, a fellow on the ship whose art was focused on the Romantic sublime landscape fell into a depressive funk. Just a handful of days into sailing, with frequent discussion of the impacts of global warming on the polar north but little about our real-time contributions to it, he confessed to the group his realization that his camera gear was likely made with components mined by enslaved children in the Global South. This realization, coupled with his yearning to experience and understand his place on Earth while in this distant part of the planet, became too much for him.

Me… the only prop I took on that residency was a magnifying glass with which I intended to melt a glacier. No surprises here for me, having flown from Regina to Toronto to Reykjavik to Oslo to Tromsø to Longyearbyen to get on a tall ship powered by diesel. That’s almost three metric tonnes of emissions not including the diesel. And then I went back. Three times.

On a residency that promotes itself as a “nexus where art intersects science, architecture, education, and activism,” so much of the work on board aims to protect the environment. One justification, for the artists at least, for travelling so far while also ostensibly caring about the planet, is through the continued belief in art’s capacity to change the world.

My shipmate’s depression lasted for many months following the residency. He was moved by his implication in global injustices, but not enough, it seems to me, for it to have charged his artworks with even a hint of awareness of the problems that elevating the sublime landscape in art has wrought for centuries. The Romantic sublime in art places individuals in unique relation to the cosmos; it is a solitary affair. Such representations, however, continue to operate in service of the entitlements that emerge from, say, Manifest Destiny or the Doctrine of Discovery, to start, or through the special genres of travel and expeditionary photography. Up north, visitors leap out of the armchair while carrying on a long tradition of discovering places new to us.

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One spring and summer, the year I wrote and defended my PhD, I spent many hours at rest clicking images on Penguin Watch, a Zooniverse research project made possible by tens of thousands of people like me helping to analyze images from field cameras, to learn about penguin populations in Antarctica.

The training was brief, helping the crowd of volunteers recognize species of penguin, eggs, chicks, and fledglings. The training also asked us to identify and click on other animals in images, including evidence of humans. I say us, but you should picture me alone in bed with my laptop keeping me warm trying not to think about Pierre Bourdieu, Jacques Derrida, or the instrumentalization of art for the objectives of business and international diplomacy.

Penguin Watch turned me on to the circumpolar. I began wondering if I would ever have a chance to visit such astoundingly unfamiliar and beautiful places. Just now, I did a web search for “penguin watch 2012 images” to find an example. The algorithm turned up a 2013 image of several dozen Gentoo penguins on a raw umber rocky slope towards shore, with Ortelius anchored amid blue and white icebergs calved from a glacier in the background of a fjord way down there in Antarctica. I find it fascinating that there are things called fjords in Antarctica; that a Nordic word can find its way so far from its origin; and that Norwegians were the first people to reach the South Pole, some 17,000 km from Norway.

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Ortelius sails north and south, north and south, year after year.

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A Svalbardian friend described visitors as if playing a variant of pin-the-tail-on-the-donkey. Anyone blindfolded and holding a camera could spin around and take beautiful photographs of anything anywhere at any time in such a place. He warned me about the 2024 alumni residency concept. An expedition with one hundred participants will crowd each landing; it will be impossible to get images without people in them.

Here’s the thing: even a local is subject to the desire for Arctic solitude, or, maybe more accurately, the reasonable assumption of this desire in visiting artists and other tourists. I’m told that itineraries for sailing around Svalbard are pre-planned and approved precisely to keep ships out of sight of one another: to give those aboard the impression of solitude and untouched nature. To serve up an experience that fulfills an Arctic imaginary of being-aloneness.

So, we, generally, as both people with human desires, and as artists who feel a higher calling, tried to avoid photographing others. We asked others to walk around our cameras or waited patiently for them to pass. We asked for silence to make sound recordings of melting icebergs releasing ancient air into the sea. We set up somewhere else, hopeful not to repeat these negotiations. Each person’s creative and professional goals often demanded the silence and invisibility of their companions.

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It is three days since disembarking at the coal harbour in Longyearbyen. I am in Toronto making my way back to the University in Regina, where I try to disavow art students of creating merely expressive or beautiful images because I want us to be critically vigilant. To find some way to be capable of feeling awed by our planet without repressing our own culpability in its problems. To find good ways, hopeful ways, to make art that is about the world as it is, the one humans have shaped. It is 5:30 am, and I have set up at a coffee shop to steal time for a first look at the materials I amassed over the past two weeks. I refrain from looking at materials from my planned projects. Not just yet: I don’t want to rush through it with only one week before classes begin.

I look at all the other images I made that are not tied to a specific art project. The ones made because I was in the most beautiful places on Earth and could not not do what people with cameras do in those places, in the tradition of travel and expeditionary photography.

At first, I do what users so often do in Photoshop: I work with tools called clone, remove, and heal. Isn’t it something, that such repeated gestures of desire for an untouched planet demand the elimination of humans from it? I begin methodically removing people from my images even as I feel, unfairly and hypocritically, contempt for those who hushed others, or who rushed people out of their frames to make landscape works that in effect pretend a solitary and untouched wilderness. I practice the put-on of making people disappear and then I catch myself. I think about the time when Leonard Cohen tried to teach us how to speak poetry. Speak the Words. Convey the data. Step aside. Be by yourself. Be in your own room. Do not put yourself on. But, then, he admonished his younger self for having been so cruel.

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How to break a trance.

One dark night driving on a Saskatchewan highway with my friend Todd, a deer got trapped in our headlights. What did he do, this friend of mine who grew up not in the Toronto suburbs but in a small town on the Great Plains? He turned off the headlights. I froze, terrified, blinded, waiting for the deer to hit the windshield.

Todd knew those roads.

When he turned the lights back on the deer was gone.

Risa Horowitz is a Canadian visual artist based in Saskatchewan, where she is a professor in the department of visual arts at the University of Regina.