Mette Sandbye

4
mis-succeeded French balloon expedition to the Northpole in the late 19 th Century, this time
also with no text reflecting on the images.
From my point of view Koester’s conceptual projects is in danger of confirming our
visual image of the Arctic experience instead of making us reflect critically on it.
In a both similar and different way the photographer Pia Arke investigates almost the same
story as Koester does in Canada and Greenland, namely the story of the Danish
colonialization of Greenland and its consequences today. As half-native Greenlander who has
lived in Denmark since the age of twelve, she at the same time works with her own
background as a form of self therapy or auto-biography. The art of balancing between the
different identities and backgrounds is the subject of her art. Compared to Koester she has
followed the same themes and issues in all her career as an artist, and she has more and more
combined her photographs with other sorts of collected material and with text. One could call
her collected works a kind of mapping of the post-colonial, Greenlandish experience. She
shows how the colonial past creates a culturally fragmented subject and how the actual act of
remembrance can create new positions for being a subject. A lot of her work consist of
montages of appropriated photographs, both private family photographs and images from for
example books by Arctic explorers.
She also seeks out places outside Greenland that contain knowledge, such as for
example Danish museums and archives, in order to unfold the story that was told by the
colonizers and other outsiders.
Pia Arke uses inspiration from anthropological methods. In 2003 she published a
book project about her native town Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoormit. It is Denmark’s most
northern post and populated by 600 people. The town is totally isolated and only twice a year
food and material is brought there by ship. Similarly to Koester’s story about Resolute this
town was artificially constructed in 1925 where 87 Inuits were transported 1000 kilometers
north to form a Danish post in the northeastern Greenland before the Norwegians claimed the
area. They didn’t know where they were going and why. The official story is that the Danish
government moved the people to prevent an over-population in Angmassalik, where they
came from. Today this isolated town suffers from heavy problems with alcohol,
unemployment, suicide, even murder. This story is more or less unknown both to the Danes
and to the local people of today. They don’t speak about it as they don’t speak about the
suicides. It is a town with no collective memory. She got the idea to make the book after
having read an article in a Greenlandish paper saying “Close the town with no future”.