You can join the Zoom event through the Facebook event page: https://www.facebook.com/events/1031172810817838?active_tab=about
The event will have two talks followed by discussions:
Mette Sandbye (University of Copenhagen), “Negotiating Post-Colonial Identity: Photography as Archive, Participatory Aesthetics and Storytelling in Contemporary Greenland”
Throughout the 19th and most of the 20th Century, photography was a central tool for communicating knowledge about Greenland to the rest of the world, not least to the Danish public. But most photographs were taken by the Danes. Recently, however, new photo-based narratives and practices have begun emerging in order to re-negotiate the colonial archive or to develop new participatory strategies for using the medium of photography to re-negotiate post-colonial Greenland, to create alternative histories and to develop history and identity “from below”. Photographs are seen as performative, affective, place-making interlocutors between people, memory, lived experience and historical knowledge.Is it possible to create counter-archives and counter-memories in a visual culture still haunted by colonialist visual iconography and power positions? What makes a project activist rather than artistic and is it important to distinguish? Comparing Pia Arke’s book Stories from Scoresbysund (2010 [2003]) with more recent participatory and social citizenship photography projects initiated by Tina Enghoff and Peter Berliner (“Project Siunissaq”), I will discuss the differences as well as the similarities between art, activism and social projects and ask if it makes sense to distinguish between these three terms in today’s field of contemporary art and whether and how both strategies are productive uses of photography in a post-colonial Greenland of today.
Mindy Jewell Price (UC Berkeley), ”Wheat and Potatoes above the 60th Parallel? Agriculture Frontier Imaginaries in a Changing Arctic"
Agriculture imaginaries have long motivated settler frontier expansion. In Canada’s northern territories, the agriculture frontier has progressed as a series of expanding islands: settlers brought cattle and horses to fur trading outposts, farmers accompanied miners during the Klondike gold rush, missionaries formed agriculture settlements within the Mackenzie River drainage. The Canadian state assisted frontier expansion throughout the 19th and 20th centuries with explicitly assimilatory goals of converting Indigenous hunters and gatherers to settled husbandsmen and farmers, but by the post-World War II era, the northern agriculture frontier was a disappointing dream. Settlers encountered long and cold winters, poor soils, and scarce market opportunities. State-sponsored reindeer herding programs failed from lack of interest among Inuit hunters, and feasibility studies turned up poor results on soil fertility. By 1980, the agriculture imaginary had faded from popular magazines and state funding priorities. Climate change, this article argues, is reinvigorating settler imaginaries of agriculture above the 60th parallel. I examine 19th and early 20thcentury archives, including missionary journals, newspapers, and government logs depicting the agriculture imaginary in northern Canada, and I draw parallels to popular present-day descriptions of a climate-driven frontier for agriculture in the Arctic and Sub-Arctic. I demonstrate that the agriculture imaginary is relatively intact in its reincarnation, forwarding the promises of economic opportunity and food security in settled agriculture food systems. New features include an emphasis on technology, climate-smart agriculture, diversified crop and animal systems, and integrating crops with the traditional food systems. I argue that this climate-driven agriculture imaginary is enabling new forms of settler colonialism and capitalist expansion, and possibly new opportunities for resistance.