Danish image-making of climate change and colonial fantasies of a disappearing Kalaallit Nunaat
The island of Kalaallit Nunaat was first colonised by the Danish Kingdom in 1721. In the following centuries, Danish rule monopolised trade and enforced relocations and sterilisation of the Inuit.
Today, Denmark continues its dominance over the land to ensure proximity to fishing and mining industries; access to a favourably positioned military base and a landscape that allows for open-air scientific experiments.
Danish artist Eva la Cour has been working in and with Inuit homelands and Arctic terrains for 15 years, and their overlap with colonial geopolitics, image-making and the sciences.
Explorers, scientists, artists, and ethnographers have long travelled to Kalaallit Nunaat and sent back paintings, objects, and sketches to the metropole of Copenhagen. The National Museum of Denmark was founded partly to host all things hoarded in the periphery of the Kingdom and stands as a shrine to this imperial urge. Danish specialists in mineralogy and geology surveyed the land with the purpose of identifying potential mining areas.
As of 2009, Kalaallit Nunaat has been a so-called autonomous territory, or a country within the Kingdom of Denmark. But Denmark still controls monetary policy, security policies and foreign affairs.
Danish researchers continue to have access to Kalaallit Nunaat as a place for scientific exploration. “The Arctic is often the center of climate change research. It holds a symbolic place in the visual language of loss. There is a sense of rush to capture the melting icebergs, polar bears and before-and-after imagery of glaciers,” la Cour says.
The melting ice accelerates the race to collect data and photograph Kalaallit Nunaat. Perhaps this urge is also driven by the slipping away of the perceived right to a territory. The hoarding compulsion happens at a time when it is increasingly difficult for the Danish state to justify its possession of the land. To the Danish state, the land is disappearing because of climate change but it is also disappearing because of a disrupted sense of ownership.
Read the full article on resilience.org
The article is written by CApE writer Semine Long-Callesen with artist and postdoc Eva la Cour, and is part of an article series published by the Centre for Applied Ecological Thinking at the University of Copenhagen with resilience.org.