One element of “Arctic Auditories” involves reconsidering the way that Europe’s northern latitudes have previously been represented. As a contribution to this part of the project, Angus Carlyle has been listening to the works of writers and artists to hear how they depict the sounds of the environment. More of Angus’ listening texts can be found here.
- by acarlyle1968Elin Anna Labba’s The Rocks Will Echo Our Sorrow can be heard to reverberate with some of the places and people who dwell in Linnea Axelsson’s Ædnan (and resonate, too, of course, with what has been sounded out in earlier notes posted on this blog). An elegantly-designed publication, Sorrow is substantially illustrated with both archive and recent images, both integral to […]
- by acarlyle1968The title of Linnea Axelsson’s 2018 poem – Ædnan – derives from an old Northern Sámi word whose meaning lies somewhere between “the land,” “the ground,” and “the earth.” The title is shared by the name of the poem’s first part, with the second and third parts “Aedno” (the river) and “Aedni” (the mother), an almost homophonic […]
- by acarlyle1968First published in German in 1938 and first translated into English in 1954, Christiane Ritter’s A Woman in the Polar Night recounts the painter’s experiences in Svalbard / Spitsbergen, centring on several seasons in the hut built by trapper Hilmar Nøis that he called Kapp Hvile, a name that a website featuring navigable photopanoramas hut translates as “point of […]
- by acarlyle1968Himali Singh Soin’s We Are Opposite Like That is a stunning five year cycle of “interdisciplinary works that that comprises mythologies for the poles, told from the non-human perspective of an elder that has witnessed deep time: the ice. It beckons the ghosts hidden in landscapes and turns them into echoes, listening in on the resonances of […]
- by acarlyle1968Earlier posts have referred to the sound of the aurora borealis: the review of Ann-Helén Laestadius “Stolen”, a diaristic account of borealis hunting with Britta and a report from the deck of the French ship La Recherche that Himali Singh Soin quoted. I was in the library earlier today and was happy to find a […]
- by acarlyle1968Recovering from a snakebite, the sixteen year old Togolese Tété-Michel Kpomassie discovers Robert Gessain’s book The Eskimos from Greenland to Alaska lying face up on a shelf of an evangelical bookstore in Lomé: “was it the author’s praise of their hospitality that triggered a longing for adventure, or was it fear of returning to the sacred forest? […]
- by acarlyle1968It has taken me, I realised as I sat down at my computer, almost a year to get round to writing this. 320 days have passed since I visited the Venice Biennale with the express intention of spending time in the Sámi Pavilion, a historic reconfiguration of the building that had been known as the […]
- by acarlyle1968To the John Marchant Gallery in town to see Grace Ndiritu’s “Pole to Pole,” screened as part of the “Light Years Ahead” exhibition curated by Alison McKenna. The film by the Kenya-British artist presents two kinds of images shown side by side and shifting from left to right: short simply-rendered sentences and sequences of black […]
- by acarlyle1968Liberating Sápmi is Gabriel Kuhn’s 2020 collection of 12 interviews with activists, scholars and artists who have been chosen for their contributions to a theme announced in the book’s subtitle: “Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North”. The interviews are accompanied by poems, manifestos and transcripts of speeches, by many illustrations and by the contextualising essay “A […]
- by acarlyle1968“Underfoot” can be read as a single poem that tracks its way across a whole book. Its verses appear as clusters of lines that are pressed together towards the foot of the publication, occasionally joined by another cluster across the gutter, each cluster often separated by an interval of several wordless pages. In the 2022 […]