Lacuna

• Main Authors: Jensen, Vera S, Gísladótti, Ingibjörg, Materlik, Frauke, Stokes, Andrea
• Format: Text
• Language: English
• Published: 2022
• Subjects: Art and design; Greenland; Upernavik
• Online Access: https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/51634/; https://eprints.kingston.ac.uk/id/eprint/51634/1/Stokes-A-51634.pdf; https://vimeo.com/586213525

Lacuna is an audio-visual story formed by fragmented layers of observing, thinking, shaping and interacting. The work gives a ‘voice’ to environments in Western Greenland, and conveys forceful encounters with ‘progress’. Lacuna explores discursive, poetic and descriptive forms of narration. The top of a mountain was removed to make an airport on the small island of Upernavik. An act of 'modernisation' appears as brutal force, yet at the same time enables new encounters. This is the place where the collaborators of Lacuna first met. We are an international and intergenerational group of four women: Upernavik resident, video artist, story-teller, air traffic controller, performance artist, administrator, landscape researcher, tourist operator, academic. We draw on New Materialism and Post-Humanism to acknowledge the complexities of thinking and creating in our contemporary moment. We adopt a speculative practice based approach and use a methodology where one insight is read through another, allowing productive difference to manifest. We implement collective thinking and making to enable global conversations on Nordic issues to flourish and ask; how can one take a critical position yet at the same time benefit from a violent act?