Geo-aesthetical discontent : Svalbard, the guide and post-future essayism

Propelled by the acute ecological crisis this dissertation moves between artistic affinities and academic disciplines to craft an intervention into imaginaries of Svalbard as an Arctic place. Designed as an iterative set of artistic practice experiments with live editing, it seeks to demonstrate a Geo-Aesthetical Discontent – a dissatisfying lack in the representational discourse – upon terrains with colonial history for visual production. By subverting the historically monolithic and singular narrative of the Arctic, the artistic research unsettles the traditional exemplars of the artist and the scientist. Rather it mobilizes the Guide as an analytical figure and tool with which to propose a Post-Future Essayism: a precarious filmic methodology and epistemological strategy of the moving image; a fragmentary and momentary compositional effect that seeks to navigate and negotiate the role of film in relation to a historiographic concept of futurity. The dissertation, then, is a response to a discontentment with current portrayals of the Arctic that produce the region as an outside to the global west. At stake is to connect the production of an artistic practice – significantly described in relation to historical image-makers such as Jette Bang, Emilie Demant Hatt and Johan Turi, Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson – and the production of the Arctic. On the author Eva la Cour is a Danish visual artist educated from the Jutland Academy of Fine Arts (2010), also trained as a media and visual anthropologist (Freie Universität in Berlin, 2012). She primarily works with time-based and spatial forms of montage that alternately use analog film, video, text and display aesthetic elements. Over the past ten years, la Cour has exhibited internationally but also developed a consistent writing practice, as well as a role as educator and organizer.