Dramaturgical notes about ice and the slow accretion of the past in Alexis Destoop’s Northern Drift
by Peter Eckersall
The word Arctic comes from the ancient Greek for ‘near the bear’(arktikos), in reference to the constellations of the Great and Little Bear when seen from the northern night sky. Extremely cold, windy, desolate and painfully beautiful, the Arctic has always been a testing space of precarious human habitation. A vast place to hide and make things invisible, with a wide frozen landscape running into the icy sea to explore and exploit, its lumbering history is etched into the rocky landscapes, snowy ruins, industrial cities, ice breaker shipping ports and military encampments. As Alexis Destoop’s Northern Drift, a 57-minute screen-based work shows, the past never goes away in the Arctic North. It is a place to live in carefully.
Northern Drift was filmed in around places at the borders shared by Finland, Norway and Russia. Midway through the film there is a frigid blue-white landscape, moving laterally in a vast patina of shifting snow forever drifting across the surface of the Arctic permafrost. There are no edges to this image and no lines; there is no horizon, the landscape and sky drift into a cloudy whiteness. The human eye struggles to make sense of the view and the sensorium of one’s body is unbalanced because the ground keeps shifting. The accompanying narration tells of a mythic story of a gateway to hell. “devils spread across the earth”. We hear the astonishing roar of the wind and can almost feel the painful biting sting of the granular particles of ice, the devils are on their way to do their work.
Destoop’s filmic journey explores the places and people, stories from the past and the present day and reflects on the landscapes, global warming and geo-politics that he witnessed over the seven years that he has been visiting there from his home in Brussels and Sydney. To make Northern Drift, he interviewed people, gathered stories and, with the help of local advisors, he filmed the cities, barren hills, icy fissures, borders, industrial and military compounds and the many abandoned places between the towns of Kirkenes, Nikel and Murmansk and out into the dismal wonderment of the Barents Sea. A photographer by training and an artist who is drawn to explore places that are undergoing ecological change, Destoop is a film essayist. He travels without a film crew and works with the help of local guides, finding himself drawn to images, stories, situations, ideas and sensations. An attention to local knowledge and recording stories in situ, not to mention the recurrent sense of mystery and strangeness – the sense that Destoop’s welcome could end at any time or that the weather could close-in and take him.
Towards the end of the film, Sami people are shown gathering to count their reindeer herds. Women and men briefly grasp the animals by their sharp angular horns, wrestling them to be still before one of the herders marks an ear and records the ownership of each animal. The reindeer run wildly in circles, their heaving breath blowing white mist until they are finally freed and run off into the darkness of the tundra.
Northern Drift shows how animals, flora and humans all live precariously in the endless sunshine of the brief summers and in the grey otherworldly darkness of the long winters. It shows what it feels like to have one’s senses always extended into an awareness of changes in the weather and to listen to the cracks and shifts in the ice flow as ominous signs. To be always attenuated to small hints of something changing. To be ready for the ghosts from the past to unfreeze and come forth once more into the present. In the Arctic, we already live after the Anthropocene.
Process - dispatches from the north
I began working on Northern Drift because Destoop had initially thought to dramatize some scenes in the film using the texts of interviews he had gathered and wanted performed by actors. My role would be to work with Destoop to help develop these texts and to direct the actors and work on their performances. When this idea was discarded, I remained on the project to work on writing, structuring and placing the combination of elements that Destoop was gathering. He returned from his field trips with many images, sounds and stories and gradually we focused in on those that seemed to be most important, the ones that stayed in our minds and spoke to the contemporary world. We played with ideas about the trips that Destoop was doing as a stranger and a solo traveler in these lands. A range of new characters appeared in our thinking sometimes based on the people he met: the topographer, the biologist, the son of the engineer, the company director, the commander, they began to speak in the film through a narrator. Their stories became reports, statements and memories – an accretion of pasts, of histories, abandoned dreams and ruins; more half-pasts than final for the persistent ways that they didn’t go away and continued to resurface. In Northern Drift everything is recounted as something that had already happened but was not forgotten and remained in play in the present.
We discussed the ordering and placement of images, narratives, atmosphere, sounds, and the stories and events behind these, (something similar happened in post-production with the editor Laurence Vaes). Not having been in the Arctic North of Destoop’s travels, my work was an exercise in imagination and dramaturgy through the lens of his accounts of his visits and the stories and film footage that he brought back to the studio. This was also aided by my own trip to the Arctic Circle on the Canadian Northwest in the summer of 2017, when I drove along the Dempster Highway to the town of Inuvik, the northernmost road one can drive: not the same, but certainly something memories and sensibilities to work with. And we had a lot of images and stories.
Destoop described a meeting with an artistic colleague in an empty dining room of a hotel in the north, the only hotel in this isolated town, to where he had arrived after 24-hours of travel. Usually the guests were miners and engineers, or another group were working in intelligence – the “well-trained birdwatchers” described in the film. I imagine the modern architecture that Destoop described and the conversation around wanting to access locations and meet people. The anxious waitstaff were probably wanting to go home as it was already late but Destoop was excited and he could not wait for the project to begin. He ignored the visible cues and the small sensitivities of isolation that would otherwise require a polite response and might deter him. He described the view through the windows onto an Arctic landscape and empty city. More than looking out, the image was a reflection of the dining room and their own faces were shown back at them as it is already nearly always dark outside in the early winter. I immediately think of Chris Marker’s 1983 film Sans Soleil (Sunless) and its evocation of a world constructed from memory, narration, politics and change.
With the excitement of an adventure, Destoop described driving to a location on the Russian side called the Kola Superdeep Borehole, a geological research centre, now an industrial ruin. In Soviet times, scientists and engineers drilled the deepest bore hole into the earth’s core that we know about. At the end of USSR, the drill site was capped-off and eventually, in 2008 as the building was decommissioned, it fell into disrepair and ruin. Northern Drift shows the scientific papers and equipment strewn around the empty rooms of the abandoned installation, these are memories of strangelovian machines and ideas of domination. Destoop’s story involved him getting stuck in the snow at the superdeep and his local guides insisting on making a rapid departure least they be caught in a blizzard. Destoop remains unaware of the danger until it is actually upon them and they have to drive frantically to get back to the safety of a main road.
Actually though, there is a nagging question about what the Russians were doing with this hole in the earth and how ominous it seems. Destoop’s guide was the son a former engineer at the Geological Centre. He has assiduously collected a mass of engineering drawings, reports and letters that were left behind when the place was abandoned. Obviously, a symbol of Russia’s post-communist decline, the images of the documents and interview with Destoop’s informant speak to a renewed desire for Russia’s prestige and domination to return. Destoop doesn’t impose a commentary of containment on this. But, later, he felt a distinct cooling of relations across the border with Norway. Are they connected? I keep thinking about the superdeep hole as a sign of imperial adventurism and worry about the cap. It is effective? What things might leak from this piercing of the fragile earth?
Later, Destoop returned from a trip to the north and was actually afraid. One of the things about going to a place only occasionally is that one is sensitized to how dramatically things change. The atmosphere of the north became conspiratorial and this infected the mood of Destoop’s work. Whereas before, local people had been generous to an extreme in helping Destoop gather material and showing him places, now he sensed a reluctance to join and share. Paranoia as a product of the new authoritarianism; the locals may have wondered why did this person keep coming back? What was he doing filming in all these abandoned cold war installations? For Destoop, the question of borders became more acute, giving rise to exclusions, dark histories, suspicion. There was nothing overt, just a feeling, an atmosphere of the past in the present.
We continually discussed Destoop’s own presence in the project as a participant-observer, an ethnographer and documentary artist. How was his role to be made discernable and how was his artistic process to be shown? After all, Destoop was selecting and ordering things that he was ultimately not a part of. In contemporary art, it is not enough to have the artist standing apart from their topic or theme. We need to have a sense of how the process of making something is crucially an aspect of its complexity and that we can see this when we experience the work as a spectator. This is also vital to our understanding of the work being connected to issues of the environment and global warming. Such a dramaturgical approach to making Northern Drift recognizes the importance of networks and collaboration as means of artistic production and this labor and these ecological linkages and effects should not be hidden.
‘The landscape was impinging on them now’
‘The landscape was impinging on them now’ (2014: 109) is a line from Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach Trilogy (2014) that we read in our research for Northern Drift. In the first book called Annihilation, a biologist, an anthropologist, a psychologist and a surveyor, all women - are sent on an expedition into a mysterious, Edenic-biosphere/border zone on behalf of a government agency called the Southern Reach (a fifth member, a linguist, backs-out before the mission begins). They are following other expeditioners who had either disappeared or died. Called Area X, the place is an enigma and changes the expeditioners who cross its slowly-moving threshold. They become suspicious of each other’s motives and one by one they disappear or try and kill each other. The changes that take place in them are as much mental as they are physical or the result of external forces. Only the biologist survives in a changed form.
The Southern Reach Trilogy was not meant to be a representation of the Arctic North but we did learn from its unsettling descriptions of a transforming world. The novels are apocalyptic, people who enter the landscape change, eerie feelings and biological mutations gradually transform the society at large. How disturbances in the elemental world will haunt us, occupy our minds, change our social and political reality and make for dark times were all themes in the books that we connected with in the creative development of Northern Drift.
Like the trilogy, Northern Drift is an example of ecocritical storytelling and is a personal response to global warning. In 2014, when we began the dramaturgical work for Northern Drift, Destoop had already undertaken several trips to the Arctic. Due to global warming, the summer ice-melt allowed commercial shipping to navigate the northern passage for the first time in human history. Reportedly, four container ships completed this route in the summer of 2014 and now, in a brief six years, the number of ships sailing this route are in their hundreds. This is an old frontier for capitalism’s domination and signs of geopolitical conflict, now very much intensified by global warming, scar the northern landscape, as the images in the film show. We can read Northern Drift as a sign of this expansion: of an icy world with its deep blue hard ice mass and northern remoteness; with a stoic quietude on the cusp of rapid and unsettling change.
What does the end of ice flows look like? Where is a border that keeps moving when the river water no longer freezes over and the permafrost melts? And when post-cold war détente blurs into profound unease and paranoia, what happens next? For one, speeding-up climate change is now everywhere protected by monocratic political regimes backed-up by billionaires and extraction industries. Destoop filmed in a place that is filled with the broken machines and stories from the cold war, recently reawakened and returning as shimmers and zones of spectral ecological contact. The landscape overcomes the presence of geopolitics even while it is defeated by this haunted realty.
Weirdly ethnographic
Destoop’s project follows an outsiders’ perspective and the awareness of being on somebody else’s land. Like a Scandinavian noir, Northern Drift shows how landscapes of the past are uncovered as harbingers of our unease and our posthuman condition. It is weirdly ethnographic in the sense of how the word is used by the philosopher Timothy Morton in his writing on dark ecology. Morton describes the state of climate change we are living in as being ‘weird’ and ‘dark-sweet’. It is a shapeshifting looping way of understanding the world: ‘like knowing, but more like letting-be-known. It is something like coexisting’ and it a ‘weird’ way of knowing (Morton 2016: 32). Morton feels the sway of ‘hyperobjects’ (Morton (2013). These are entities that are widely distributed and have their own sense of stickiness (viscosity) and non-locality (see Morton 2013). Water and ice - and global warming itself - are examples of hyperobjects. The existence of hyperobjects makes for a condition of coexistence with human society and refutes or prevents our assumed domination over the elements. These objects have considerable vitality, we can experience them but we don’t own them and they are not part of human creation, of society.
Coincidently, Destoop’s early visits to the north overlapped with the Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project (Belina 2016) that took its name from Morton’s term. The project involved artists and theorists in curating site-responsive art works based on their visit to the very same landscapes that feature in Northern Drift. Organized by the arts-activist group Sonic Act, the project included a contribution from Morton that places his ideas in the philosophical mindscape of the north.
While the implications of Morton’s ideas are profound, what we take from him here is how dark ecology and hyperobjects decenter human experience and foster other ways of being. How to find a way for knowing the world in which human activity (our concern for the environment, but also how we think and speak about the world in which we live) is corelated and weirdly about the world, but also coexisting with other systems and lifeforces. In other words, to think about the function of greater things in a way that displaces our centrality and ownership of ideas. The answer to these questions lies in Morton’s weird way of knowing, in this instance, in creative practices that lead with and to new kinds of thinking. Artistic works and the imagination become important to how we can respond to ecological and political crises and think different. They very often have a weird way of expressing things about the work and foster in us a sense of coexisting and political imagination. As Morton put it: ‘The Anthropocene enables us to think at Earth magnitude’ (Morton 2016: 36).
Northern Drift is a made from a sensitivity to this kind of coexistence and, dramaturgically, it is a weird way of knowing. It gives us another perspective. Not only as a thing of beauty and disturbance, but as a way of knowing that we sorely need. Near the end of the film there is a scene in a gymnasium in the town of Nikel. The well-appointed bright space for basketball and other sports has been converted from an underground nuclear bomb shelter. The narrative portion of the film gradually disperses into atmosphere and uncanny movements. An old man named Willy mimes the act of wrestling, first shaking hands and then pushing back and forward against an invisible foe. He dances with a memory of himself as a younger man. The scene has a light touch and the man wants to show that he will be ready for what is to come but he is already old. It is as if he is shaking hands with ghosts – between past and present and they are no less real for that. The slow dance in the radiation cellar, an accretion of time, a dark ecology in the shifting ice.
References cited
Belina, Mirna. (ed.), 2016, Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project, Amsterdam: Sonic Arts Press.
Morton, Timothy, 2016, ‘What is Dark Ecology?’ in Belina (ed.) Living Earth: Field Notes from the Dark Ecology Project, Amsterdam: Sonic Arts Press, pp. 29-57.
Morton, Timothy, 2013, Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology at the End of the World, Minneapolis and London: Minnesota University Press.
VanderMeer, Jeff. 2014, Southern Reach Trilogy, New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.