What can an artist do in the face of Arctic climate change?

What can an artist actually do in the face of climate change? Ruth Maclennan is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher affiliated with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. She has spen many years trying to answer that question through her own practice, from the Russian taiga to the glaciers of Svalbard.

In this episode, recorded during the fifth Arctic Art Forum symposium in Norway, Ruth talks about making work in places where climate change is most acutely felt and least visible from the outside. She discusses her collaborative film A Forest Tale, shot in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and her more recent film All the Tears in the Sea, made during a residency in Svalbard. The film weaves together encounters with glaciologists, conservationists, reindeer, mining towns, and the strange hum of wind through Longyearbyen's lampposts.

The conversation moves between the personal and the geopolitical: how art can hold complexity without simplifying it, why Arctic decision-makers need to listen to the people and species who actually live there, and how showing agency rather than helplessness might be the most important thing a film can do. As Ruth puts it: geopolitics is not a game of chess, it's a symphony.

Find more of Ruth's work at ruthmaclennan.com and on Instagram @maclennanruth.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:01

What can an artist actually do in the face of Arctic climate change? Welcome to the Turk and Polar Podcast. My name is Dorophim Mondreva and I'm your host. Today we are very lucky to have a guest about not only geopolitics, but the intersection of j between geopolitics, art, environment, the human dimension also in it. Ruth McLennan, an artist and a researcher affiliated with the Scott Polar Research Institute at uh Cambridge. You've been working with these intersections for a long time, and I'm very glad to have you here. Welcome.

SPEAKER_01 0:38

Thank you very much, Serafima. It's very nice to be here.

SPEAKER_00 0:40

You're visiting here in Norway in in relation to an Arctic, uh the Arctic Art Forum, which has had its fifth symposium just now and it is ongoing. And uh it's titled Climate Microchanges and addressing how we talk about climate changes when the key transformations are the least visible. And hence I wanted to ask you, as this interdisciplinary practitioner in many ways, what is your experience with answering these questions?

SPEAKER_01 1:10

So thank you, it's a good question. So, I mean, I'm invited here as an artist to show my work that addresses experiences of climate change in the far north. So I think the Arctic Art Forum is just exactly what it says, actually. It's got Arctic Art and Forum in there. Um, and it brought together and is bringing together artists and other kinds of um practitioners, researchers, curators from the north to discuss, to show what they're doing and to to kind of discuss what it feels like from the north, because so often the Arctic is viewed from afar and is described from afar. I mean, even actually using the word the Arctic is suggest is from afar. Um, you know, it's not uh a kind of generalized space. I didn't see everything, but I what I did see um included researcher working on the mosquito yoik and on the sounds of mosquitoes and how important they are as well for so it's an interdisciplinary project between uh an artist and a Sami researcher and an ether musicologist. So bringing science, social sciences, and lived knowledge and heritage and history and yorking together. So I was invited because I have worked before on um a film in the Russian Arctic called A Forest Tale, and it was a collaborative project with Film and Video Umbrella and the Arctic Art Institute. So I first went to the Russian Arctic because I was, as a maker, artist filmmaker, felt that you know climate change was happening, and this was the context in which I was operating as an artist, and I could no longer just touch on it tangentially, but I needed to think about an existential question. What can you do as an artist? What can an artist do in the face of climate change? And I can't answer that question for everybody, but I can answer it through my own practice. Um, obviously, this is an ongoing process, someone asks this question all the time, and I still ask this question, and I'm certainly not alone in asking this question, but this, you know, this was like 15 years ago or something. That's a long time ago. And I felt, okay, where is climate change happening fastest? It's happening fastest in the Arctic. And I I think being a Russian speaker, I lived in the Soviet Union, and I felt, okay, I have this is the part of the Arctic that I have some kind of an access to in a sense, possibly, because I can speak Russian. And it's very little understood in the West. The Russian Arctic, as you say, 15 years ago, was really, really very um remote. So, I mean, for me it was remote too. Anyway, so I met Yeka Sirina. She was work had been working there, and we didn't know what we might do, but we thought actually we should at some point maybe we could work together. And then very soon I actually had this opportunity to put in a proposal for uh a project on climate in Russia and how um, you know, actions on climate change. Um at the time I was working on a film with which is also about climate, called, which was called Tree Line, with Film and Video Umbrella and Forestry England. It was all about forests around the world. I invited, I put out an open call for artists, well not artists, but anybody, to send me footage of trees and forests around the world. And I created this collective film made of hundreds of clips of forests, a sort of continuous panning shot that covers all the continents of the world that have trees. So everywhere except for Antarctica. So having made this or being in the process of making this film, I was thinking about trees and um importance to ecosystems, and I wanted to kind of dive in and look at the Boreal forest in the Arctic, the Tega in the Russian Arctic, and explore what that forest meant for both the culture and economically, and the relationships between humans and trees, and the entire environment that and the environmental history that is um that comes out of this particular landscape. So you Katerina and I together put together this proposal and we've got funding, and we ended up making this, I made I made this film. But it wasn't only about making a film, it was also about bringing together artists. So we had mini residencies with artists who were also working on trees from other parts of Russia and in a village with artisans who worked with wood and a botanist working on the nature reserve in Galobina. And we went to Ken Nazirya, which is an also a nature reserve. It was very much about bringing together these different perspectives and also using the money for a kind of an opportunity to bring people together to enable something to happen there in situ. And I also made this film recording all these things happening, and the film shows all this. And actually, that's quite sort of important for my work, that it's not about just sort of going somewhere and using it as a kind of backdrop to say something, that the stories in my films come out of being in a particular place. I'm just visiting, as I like to quote Donna Harraway, she talks about just visiting. So I'm really reliant on hospitality as well. I'm relying on on like that encounter, and it might come to nothing. Sometimes, you know, certain encounters don't come to anything. So I'm in a way I'm very much present in the films as well. So that film A Forest Tale, which I shot in December 2021, was completed just before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine. And we could feel it, the build-up happening at that time. You know, it was December, it was, you know, very dark around the Arctic Circle and all these amazing people coming together. And we didn't talk about it directly, but there was a sense of this looming something. And at the same time we felt like there was a certain urgency to making this making this work, making our gathering really meaningful and exchanging our experiences, stories, song, craft. So, you know, some of the artisans ended up helping artists with their work. Some of the artists made work in situ. It was and it was artists at very different stages of their careers. And we created something really wonderful together at that time. And I finished editing the film literally just before the full-scale invasion. And people have asked me whether I felt like I should revisit it, whether I thought of revisiting it, but I felt that I couldn't actually, and that it I owed it to the occasion and to the people that I was working with to just leave it as it was, to kind of document that moment and and not try to sort of, you know, re-configure it and reinterpret it after the fact. So it sits there as a kind of testament to what happened. Yeah. So that of course stopped me going to the Arctic and to the Russian Arctic. So I I wasn't gonna go after that. My focus shifted very much towards Ukraine. I made work in Ukraine and have friends in Ukraine. So I worked for the next many, many months and years on projects that sort of were sort well, not even projects, just like individually helping people and trying to do what I could, like very many other people have done. But I was invited uh to go to Svalbard by um uh Katigarcia Anton and the of the Nord North Kunst Museum at that time. I was invited to do a residency at Artica in Svalbard in 2023, and I decided to go. It was a great uh opportunity, and um I went there for five weeks uh in September, October 2023, and I had some ideas of what I might do, but I was particularly interested in going there, and I think I was invited to go there because of the kind of mix of both environmental multi-species perspectives in my work and also my attention to sort of geopolitical tensions and how geopolitics are experienced on the ground. I made films on the Northern Sea route, which are uh, you know, in Tigirka, working with people who are, you know, who live there in this village. So I also went there with little bits of stories of ideas that I might pursue. There's a there's a book by call by Margaret Cavendish called The Blazing World. And so I had this idea of like this kind of which is about fictional Arctic journey by by this woman. In the end I didn't really pursue that, but it was in my mind, this this kind of feminist view of the exploration narratives. Because Svalbard, although Swobad, you know, is very much in the present, obviously, it has this long history of a place where explorers come and put their mark on it, both Norwegian and Russian Pamor, for example. I mean, even the name, you know, Spitsbergen was um Barents, William Barents naming it Spitsbergen because of the pointy, pointy mountain sticking out. Anyway, so when I went there, I very soon figured that I really needed to go to Barentsburg and Pyramiden, the Russian mining towns. Pyramiden is now more of a museum than a that it's not an active mine anymore. And Barrentsburg is still the now it's the only active mine. But in Longybien there was still an act mine seven was still open when I was there. And so I uh I went to to both places and uh interviewed people, but I also just recorded and filmed a kind of a sort of kind of a sort of hunter-gatherer kind of way of working. Somebody called it that. I don't highly agree with that as a n as a as a way of describing it, but I do felt work quite intuitively, paying attention to what what is uh what interests me or what I what I notice and just following up every possible possible contact or encounter that I might make. Sometimes it's just meeting somebody in the street and chatting and then seeing where it goes. Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 10:55

And that's what's uh brought the all tears in the sea. Moving to life, essentially. For our listeners, this has also been uh shown during the Arctic Art uh Forum, you could say days. So one thing that is uh I mean after watching this movie, one thing I think is very fascinating is how you essentially illustrate the dynamics between symbiosis on one hand, between the humans living in in Svalbard and either the nature or it's the birds or it's um just the systems around them. And on the another, on the other hand, it's not always a symbiosis either. There are some tension points between also the environment and then the human, the natural and maybe the industrial, you could even say. So I was wondering which questions you wanted the watchers to sit with or to address or to, so to say, feel from watching that. What were your thoughts when making it?

SPEAKER_01 11:56

Okay, so I think I mean it's important to perhaps realize Xvalbad has no indigenous people there. So everybody who lives there has come from somewhere else, even people who've lived there for quite a long time. It is not hospitable for humans. You know, polar bears are at home there, reindeer are at home there, ptarmigan are at home there, purple sandpipers are at home there, and some people make their homes there. So there is a very strong sense of, you know, there's this wide nature that it's the main most of the archipelago is nature reserves, but humans are there for mining. And Longyearbyan and Barentsburg and Pyramidan have mining equipment that is there, even whether it's still being used or as in Longyearbyan, and in Pyramidan it's not being used, and it's there as cultural heritage and it's preserved, industrial, as you say. So there's uh the the presence of humans is very visible and very kind of and not only visible, it's really audible. It's very loud and dirty when you're in Longyearbyan and in in Barrett's burg. It's not, you know, it's not this kind of peaceful lime landscape. There are landscapes which, you know, conjured the sublime, and um the the Arctic has been depicted, as we said earlier, you know, from afar, uh from since Romanticism and well, and earlier, but you know, it's sort of there's a sort of romantic vision, say Kaspar David Friedrich's image of what isn't actually the Arctic, it's the Elba River, but you know, it's an Arctic sort of ice landscape destroying a ship. We have this idea, we've kind of absorbed an idea of the Arctic from afar, which is this kind of sublime landscape. That life there is very, very different. And I guess what I wanted to show or that I was experiencing was this sense of like, what is it actually, what is it actually like to be here? So my film is very is quite sort of episodic in a way. It's not telling you a single story, it's a kind of collection of stories that interlink and that reflect on each other and bring to bear many different perspectives, points of view. Sometimes it's through uh a conversation with somebody, sometimes it's to do with just spending time with a particular animal and just watching what is happening. There's a scene with ptarmigan in Pyramidan on a slightly broken wooden walkway and a ptarmigan and its chicks and they're making ptarmigan noises which it might reflect however you like on that. And there are reindeer also in that same landscape coming through Pyramidan. And one of the opening scenes, early scenes in the film, is with uh a conservationist volunteer who is ringing purple sandpiper birds, and there's a nice little scene there which reflects a particular relationship with animals with birds, which at some level uh initially it's quite shocking because it feels quite violent what's actually happening to this poor little poor little third, and the bird looks you straight in the eye. But then of course you realize that it's not anything violent. It's a particular way of seeing the world, putting a ring on a bird. So there's I guess there are these sort of layers of different ways of seeing the place, all from the place, but different ways of seeing the world. And then there's a there's a scene towards the end where you're quite disoriented to start with, and you're surrounded by this place, and you don't know what it is, and you don't know where up and down are left and right. It's very much kind of caught in this sort of cave environment, and it's not quite clear where you're going. And it turns out that the camera's under a glacier. It's underneath a glacier, and you take this sort of journey through, and then there's an interview with a glaciologist at the end. Well, not an interview exactly, but a conversation with a French glaciologist reflecting on what's happening to the glacier, which is dying. So I wouldn't use the word symbiosis in a way. I think that I guess the the histories are entangled, the environment is very entangled. Maybe maybe it is symbiosis in the sense or but it's more parasitics. Yeah. Humans are pretty parasitic. Although now there are also people who are trying to care for that environment, say the bird, the woman who's working on the ringing ringing birds and the glaciologist and others. But there is also a sense that if you don't look after nature or don't leave it alone, stop burning fossil fuels, then nature isn't going to look after you.

SPEAKER_00 16:33

And also, I mean the impression I also have from this is this whether it's symbiotic or it's parasitic, it's still the humans setting the premises for what is asymbiosis, or right, or like what is uh extractivist or what is kind to nature. For example, putting a ring on a bird, it's very good for our monitoring and and for our understanding and keeping them safe and and those kinds of things. But it's still we as humans are the ones doing this. It's on our premises, even though we are not, as you say, native to the region. But we still create our systems, our rules, our way of living and enforcing them. So you are really fantastically putting this to light. That's essentially what's fascinating. But one thing that has been very fascinating to me, not only with this movie all uh Tears in the Sea, but also with your other projects, whether it's been what you told us about the Russian Arctic or the tree uh movie project you've had, and not only your movie project, but also photography, etc. Is that you've been kind of going into the core dynamics between the political, the very set structures, uh very physical in some senses also, and also the fluid nature or the fluid aspect of the natural, the climatic changes. They're also fluid even though they're rapid and maybe unpredictable to some degree. I m want to kind of ask you a bit, I think a broader question about the intersection between the political rigidness and also the uh climatic uh changes. How have you interpreted the you could say your role as an artist or or your work in the intersection between this grand changes happening at the same time and also affecting your field very specifically and very particular ways?

SPEAKER_01 18:31

Well, it's funny because when you describe when you describe this, it felt it it feels, you know, it's very complicated. I mean it is very complicated what's going on. And Svalbard is a very complicated place. It's both an international place, it's a nor it's got Norwegian sovereignty, it's got this Russian history of mining, and therefore that's continuing, and you know, and there's the war which is has its effects in Svalbard. You experienced that in the film. So it's very complicated. And at the same time, I just meet people and ask them those questions and ask them what do they do? What do they think about what they do, what's happening? So in a way it becomes quite a simple encounter. And and it's the same with the the sort of natural environment as well. Well the you go on a walk, you're there, you I film it, I record it, and I and I then later on bring all this material together and try to understand it. And I also try to understand it in situ as well. But also when you're filming in very cold weather and terrible weather and deep snow, you're pretty concentrated on making sure that you've actually recorded something. And I record a lot more material than I'm obviously going to use. And sometimes you record things you don't even realise you're gonna use, or you don't even remember that you filmed them. There was a funny sound in Sva in Long Yu Bien, I remember that I tried to record and I didn't manage to record it very well because the wind over it was sort of distorted it. But I had this kind of weird there was this weird humming that was quite sort of harmonic and interesting in the town because of the wind, the way it was going through the pipes and through lampposts and or telephone poles, and I wanted to kind of capture that. I guess where do I see my role? I think that perhaps I pay attention to things that other m other people might overlook, or many people aren't overlooking, but other people somewhere else may not know about. And by juxtaposing and not creating some sort of a hierarchy, I'm bringing these different aspects of a place, the sort of complexities, into some kind of a conversation. I don't think I'm celebrating anything. I don't think I'm paying homage exactly, although maybe there's an element of that. But I want to create a beautiful uh piece of music in a way. It's not music, but I think I compose my films like a composition, like where these different instruments that I'm not instrumentalizing, but these different sounds, different images evolve over time into a into a work that has diff has rhythms and harmonies and dissonances and discord and tensions that I leave there, that they coexist. They don't get resolved. I hope they get resolved somehow visually as a work, but they I'm not resolving, I'm not telling you what to think about what I'm showing you. And for me that's really important. So I feel that what the role of my film might be or my films is to propose something as an ad addressing a viewer, creating an opportunity for a conversation between viewers, between audiences, but also meditation, uh an encounter between the viewer and the film that is equal or is it equal? It's they're both in the same world and they are hopefully the films um take the viewer somehow into the world that I'm showing them and expand the world of the viewer. Both the viewer can also bring a lot of meaning to the films and they complete the the films.

SPEAKER_00 21:54

Let's say we collected all of the most critical Arctic um decision makers and I'm saying not only like those in geopolitics I'm also saying in local we'll create uh we'll collect them all in one movie theater and they sit and watch your films right and when they go out of this theater they have to go out with uh with something that they uh like a rec something that they should do or some call to action. The action can be anything, right? What would you ideally wish the call for action to be?

SPEAKER_01 22:28

It's quite interesting because that question or something around that question was there in a conversation between me and Stan Henigkson who also lives in Svalbard, he's an artist, performance artist, and he showed a film alongside my film yesterday and we had a conversation at the end and he was like I want you know I would like to have Norwegian decision makers in the room. I guess that the main message along which perhaps runs through all my works on the Arctic is that you need to consult, you need to listen to those who live there. Actually that's what's that's Dan's message too. But I don't do it by saying you must listen to people who live there. It's also I it's more about showing rather than than telling. So that might be a very strong message. And of course there are going to be lots of different views from people who live there not everyone's going to say the same thing. But the complexity of what it actually is like to be there and experiencing climate change. And perhaps also I'm also saying not just the people who live there but the people who I've brought into the film and who are telling us what's going on. So the glaciologist who's telling you in all the tears in the sea there is also a voice over my voiceover because I'm very much in the film you can feel me in the film through the way I'm filming but and then this this voice is also narrating both my own experiences and thoughts but also some other voices are kind of brought in. So it's a sort of polyphony of voices. And I would like these decision makers to hear that polyphony and realize that it's that geopolitics is not something where you should be playing with other people's lives. It should be you should understand that these are lives and that that you could be one of them but that you need to listen to those voices and to hear and to really try and understand the complexities of the problems and not oversimplify in order to fit it into some political agenda.

SPEAKER_00 24:27

So it's not a game of chess it's a symphony. Yeah that's a good way of putting it but and I love your musical parallels as well because it's essentially the these are the parents and dynamics and and there is a whole whole aspect of them.

SPEAKER_01 24:42

I think it's also about feeling and I would like them to come away with a feeling of care, love. The problem with climate change and the ecological disaster that we are facing is that often it can induce a feeling of helplessness. And I don't want to make films that just induce that feeling of helplessness and resignation, fatalism for uh writing it off and just saying okay we can't do anything. What I feel is that if you show, if the film can show these multiple voices, this symphony of voices, this choral, this polyphony of people doing things and doing things in the places that they know and who have this expertise about their own environment and who have ideas about how to repair or prevent conflict or transform or just keep things together. If you show agency in the in the natural world itself and in the people who are living there, that can give you can give the viewer a sense of agency as well. I don't want to sound like completely utopian that I think this is the way out and that we don't have to also study geopolitics and really campaign and understand politics and work with you know political analysis and and all the other things that we have to do, all the other disciplines. But one of the things I think that art can do is to appeal to the the the whole human, if you like both the emotional and intellectual and bodily experience of of of a place and and that that should inform one's intellectual analysis as well. One shouldn't leave out those feelings they're not they're not less important than than the intellect. It's not they're they're there too and that they need to be respected or listened to and decision makers need to listen to them as well.

SPEAKER_00 26:29

Fantastic thank you so much it's been um it's been great to have you. It's been great to listen to your perspectives and I truly hope that at least some involved in policy making right now have been listening and taking mental notes. It's been great to have you with thank you very much. It's been really a pleasure talking to you, Sorafima and thank you for listening.