NORTHERN FINDINGS Arctic and Subarctic territories are undergoing unprecedented transformations. Climate changes, the melting ice, new trading routes, and resource exploitations contribute to a potent geopolitical situation that is radically reshaping the circumpolar area. Tense ecological, social, and political challenges are emerging in territories that have been traditionally marginal in landscape architecture discourses. Northern Findings has the ambition to study these territories and their changes as they happen and from the perspective of landscape architecture. Northern Findings is both a broad investigation of the most potent forces acting on Arctic and Subarctic territories today and a research on landscape mapping as a tool for reading and interpreting the agency of these forces on the landscape and its ecosystems. The studio takes the form of a large-scale cartographic project informed by a smallscale investigation of local biotopes, infrastructures, and settlements connected to both traditional industries and the expanding extraction industries. The course’s main ambition is to construct an interpretive cartography of parts of the Arctic and the Subartic that we like to define as a charged description of the territory: a cartography of territories that are under pressure and on which the future history of the North will be written. #1 WHERE DO YOU COME FROM? | We started by asking the students to make a map locating their place of origin. Thirteen students, eleven different nationalities and very different education backgrounds: an exhibition of posters was set up during our first workshop of lectures at UiT and each student presented him/herself in front of the map. #2 VISUAL FIELD NOTES | From 20.08 to 01.09 we embarked on a journey across the territory of North Troms and Finnmark, travelling by boat, by bus and covering stretches of the landscape also on foot. Some of the places we visited in our journey were new to all of us, and for some of us all the places were new. In this journey we met different people and have been engaged in lectures and conversations with experts and local informers. Everybody has been encouraged to keep a visual diary of the journey, hand-drawing maps, diagrams and sketches and complementing them with keywords and questions. This journey has been a key moment in the course. The projects’ research questions are inextricably bound to this live experience of the territory and to the people we met, and they have in large part originated in the reflections collected on the field. #3 QUALIFY YOUR FINDINGS | The reflections and questions formulated during the journey have opened the ground for investigations in different thematic fields. The weeks following the excursions have been dedicated to entering these fields and informing the journey’s findings with information from various sources. The work done in this phase has been presented first in a one-page instant presentation during the first symposium, then in a wallpaper exhibition in the studio, and finally in a digital and printed booklet. It is in this phase that most of the projects’ research questions have started to emerge. These research questions have been conceptualized in project ”passwords”: passwords into the next phase of the course, but also and especially, passwords into a new emerging cartography of the North. #4 NORTHERN FINDINGS : THE ATLAS | Spanning from WWII to Climate Change, the passwords have informed a wide field of personal investigations which have been articulated by each students in individual cartographic projects across scales. First, a cross-scale cartography addressing both large-scale territorial situations and small-scale studies of local biotopes, infrastructures, activities and settlements. But also, a cross-disciplinary cartography informed by multiple discourses. The sum of the individual cartographic projects composes the Northern Findings Atlas, which is exhibited in the form of printed booklets in the Academy’s first-floor hall. This Atlas will constitute a base for the students and the Landscape Academy’s future work and will be fed with new layers of information and insights in the coming semesters. # 5 THE ATLAS LABORATORY | In this phase the studio has become a joint laboratory structured on three levels. One: to crisscross the world of passwords and crossbreed the individual projects into a conceptual whole, each influenced by the others. Two: to exhibit the Northern Findings Atlas through a common curatorial and design concept. design. Three: to deepen the singular researches inside the collectively created framework and develop them into an higher level of conceptualization and personal interpretation. Through this crisscrossing exercise and the threefold laboratory, the studio has been transformed into a collaborative enterprise which has revealed itself as both funny and eager, supporting the individual works with positive energy and ambition. The video and the map act in this respect as a display of how the thirteen different passwords and researches generate overlaps that are highly interesting and critical in relation to the territory’s future. The outcome of this final phase is this exhibition, which has the title The New Map of the North is a Global Map. The exhibition is composed of three group artifacts – a map, both in print and in a physical model, a sound installation and a video – and thirteen individual posters.
NORTHERN FINDINGS is the Tromsø Academy of Landscape and Territorial Studies’s first Master studio, run during the autumn term 2013 by Kjerstin Uhre, Alice Labadini, Knut Eirik Dahl and Janike Kampevold Larsen. http://northernfindings.blogspot.no/
#1
V J A Y V R K A M M B S E
WORKSHOP UIT 19-20.08.2013 Sørøya Hammerfest
Hamningberg
Ifjordfjellet
Spildra
#2
Vardø
Alta Neiden
Tromsø
Kirkenes
Bjørnevatn Kautokeino
LECTURE Climate Change and Design 02.09.2013 SYMPOSIUM #1 People to People 04.09.2013
#3
SYMPOSIUM #2 The Policies of Mapping 23.09.2013 URBAN DEVELOPMENT
NORTHERN SEA ROUTE CLIMATE CHANGE
LAND USE CONFLICTS AQUACULTURE
FRAGMENTATION
#4
FUTURE ARCHIVES
TOURISM
ART
STORIES
MINING TOWNS MINES
LECTURE Mapping the Seascape 11.10.2013
WWII
CARTOGRAPHY WORKSHOP 14-16.10.2013 VISUALIZE YOUR SCIENCE 17-20.10.2013
LECTURE Stakeholders Mapping 28.10.2013
economies
sescapes
food
networks
overlaps
terminology
abstactions
SYMPOSIUM #3 Northern Seascapes 06.11.2013
narratives
#5
proximities strategies
media
readings infrastructures
conflicts
questions
timelines
VISITING LECTURER Sonja Duempelmann 21-22.11.2013
speculations
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4 OPEN LECTURES 27-29.11.2013
CHRISTMAS LECTURE 18.12.2013
THE NEW MAP OF THE NORTH IS A GLOBAL MAP