(After) Coal I
Art of Interference
Season 3 Episode 8
Transcript
Lutz Koepnick
Coal is a dark, combustible rock, made mostly of carbon—the sixth element in the periodic table. It is surprisingly light, yet it has carried an enormous weight in human history. Formed from ancient plant matter buried, compressed, and transformed over millions of years, coal stores the work of the Earth’s deep past. To extract it, people have long faced extraordinary dangers. To use it, as we still do today, we burn millions of years of planetary time in a matter of seconds.
In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons declared that “Coal stands entirely above all other commodities.” And he continued: “With coal almost any feat is possible or easy; without it we are thrown back into the laborious poverty of earlier times.”
For Jevons, coal was more than a fuel. It was a time machine. It propelled the present toward an ever more prosperous future while leaving unwanted pasts behind. Coal accelerated history. It promised abundance.
Today, that promise has worn thin. While some continue to defend fossil-fuel consumption, most recognize the urgency of moving beyond it.
Coal as an energy source may no longer have the allure it once had. And yet coal’s history is far from over. But even if we switched to renewable energy production by tomorrow, coal will remain with us—in the atmosphere, in polluted bodies of water, beneath our feet, and in the infrastructures that continue to shape everyday life. It also leaves us with difficult questions. How might we develop less extractive relationships with the Earth? And how might we become more attentive to the deep timescales on which our planet exists?
In today’s and the next episode of Art of Interference, I invite you to travel with me to Svalbard, the Norwegian archipelago well above the Arctic Circle, home to some of the purest coal deposits on Earth.
Svalbard is a remarkable place. It has served as a launching point for expeditions to the North Pole. It is home to internationally renowned climate research and to the Global Seed Vault, where millions of crop seeds are preserved for an uncertain future. And for more than a century, despite its harsh environment, it has also been a place where coal mining shaped everyday life. That era is now coming to an end. Sort of. In July 2025, the Norwegian government closed the archipelago’s last active coal mine, marking the end of industrial coal extraction on Svalbard.
Last summer, I had the opportunity to travel to Svalbard with my friend, filmmaker Jonathan Rattner, and my partner, visual artist Jana Harper, as part of a research project on art, resilience, and adaptation in the Polar North. I watched them at work doing their things, we had long daily conversations about their practice and the North, and I spoke with other artists, curators, researchers, and residents in Longyearbyen about what draws artists to the Arctic—and about the role art can play in helping us imagine life after coal.
Svalbard, we often heard when planning this trip, is on many people’s bucket list. It’s one of the most affordable and accessible places to get awfully close to the North Pole. Many tourists come here on cruises to get a glimpse at what Earth might have looked like without us. Others come to witness a damaged world in decline: the sad view of melting glaciers, of polar bears dying. International artists frequent the archipelago year in and year out, attracted by the light or its absence, by the island’s wildlife, by pursuing unique collaborations with scientists working on Svalbard. Though its landscapes take an enormous toll because of planetary overheating, it still offers tremendous wonders.
Here’s what you get when you step into the island’s only movie theater and watch an introductory documentary about the archipelago:
For this speaker, Svalbard is much more than a fascinating place, worth being pictured by artists in different media. It is a piece of art, an ever-changing artwork in its own right.
There is a rich history of depicting Svalbard as a place of such natural wonders. Of artists depicting the Arctic as a place that almost seems to beat art at its own game. Jonathan and Jana were more than aware when setting out for our journey:
Jonathan Rattner
One thing that attracted me to Svalbard was the history of it being a place of wonder, a destination for explorers. Today, it’s still kind of seen in this romantic way, uh, that if you go, you’re not just putting a flag on it saying, “I was there.” It’s also a place of discovery, of seeing things in new, fresh ways.
Lutz Koepnick
And Jana had this to say about the Arctic’s iconography, its dominant depiction of a landscape of the sublime:
Jana Harper
Representations of the Arctic landscape in art history, in photography, in the media. You know, how is the Arctic represented? It’s beautiful. It’s easy to romanticize. It’s easy to get kind of sucked into the wondrousness of it.
Lutz Koepnick
Once you leave Longyearbyen, Svalbard’s main settlement, it’s surprisingly easy to imagine what the Earth may have looked like before us—or what it might look like long after we’re gone. Water, ice, rock, mud, sky: an elemental landscape in the fullest sense of the word, art without the signature of human hands.
But there’s one thing these images of the Arctic often leave out: coal. The geological history that made it possible. The century-long history of mining that shaped the archipelago.
In this, the first of three episodes on Svalbard, you’ll hear filmmaker Jonathan Rattner reflect on what it means to film in the Arctic without reproducing the extractive gaze that has so often defined its representation. We’ll also hear from people who know Svalbard intimately about the way in which climate change and the history of coal mining affect the fabric of life on the archipelago as it undergoes dramatic planetary warming.
In the coming episodes, we’ll return to Svalbard twice more.
We’ll speak with Jana Harper about the collages, color studies, and videos she created in the Arctic—and about her experiments with making art in ways that leave as few traces as possible.
We’ll visit some of Svalbard’s remarkable art institutions and residency centers, and ask why this remote place continues to have such a powerful pull on artists.
And we’ll hear from geologists and historians about what Svalbard’s rocks and geological formations can teach us about elemental time, and how such engagement with deep time might help us think beyond a culture of extraction.
Across these three episodes, we encounter Svalbard as a unique place for thinking through big questions of life and art on our damaged planet. What does it mean to live with—and beyond—the age of coal, and with all the things it has left behind? And how might the arts cultivate practices, ideas, and ways of seeing that respect the natural world, rather than simply treating it—mining it—as another resource for creative intervention?
PART ONE
Lutz Koepnick
Jonathan Rattner is an award-winning filmmaker and artist known for his distinctive approach to experimental nonfiction. His work draws on the rich history of the documentary genre—found footage, interviews, and historical research—and combines it with a more lyrical and poetic style of filmmaking. Through soft-focus imagery, collage, unexpected cuts, immersive sound, and long, patient shots, Jonathan creates films that invite us to slow down, look closely, and experience the world in new and surprising ways. And this world, for him, is often one that’s quite elemental, far off the beaten track. He’s made films about dog mushers in Alaska and the challenges of having 24-hour daylight in Iceland. Svalbard is therefore right up the alley of his observational practice.
Lutz Koepnick
Jonathan, as a filmmaker, what is it about these places that gets you going?
Jonathan Rattner
I look at myself as a poetic filmmaker, and so I am drawn to observing places, objects, things that resist meaning-making. I’m drawn to landscapes, or to ecology and animals, or geology and rock formations, because when I can be with them for a longer period of time, it allows me to change my perception and challenge meaning-making.
I think that in our society now, we’re just obsessed with trying to understand everything. We use these computers, ChatGPT or AI, because we have a question, and then we want an answer.
Lutz Koepnick
And poetry derails this kind of understanding—
Jonathan Rattner:
Yeah. And I think going to places like Svalbard, or to places like Alaska, where there are objects you can photograph or be with that don’t immediately say what they are, allows me to be with objects and allow them to become many different things.
Lutz Koepnick
These remote places probably come with both physical challenges but also, let’s say, technological challenges, as far as your process of filming is concerned. Let’s talk about the physical challenges. I mean, Svalbard’s cold. It’s not really a very hospitable place.
Jonathan Rattner
Yeah.
Lutz Koepnick
Is that important for your work when you engage with the elemental, that there’s a certain kind of physical challenge as well?
Jonathan Rattner
I want myself to be challenged, physically challenged, in the sense that I want my senses to be heightened. So I’m looking for that when I’m observing things and taking images of them, or witnessing them. The way I understand things will change; how I’m paying attention changes. And then when I’m in a place like a cold place, I’m physically more present when I’m photographing, or when I’m getting sound. So I feel my body in a different way. I use my art as a way to be more connected to myself, to challenge how I interact with the world—it’s like a shock to my system a bit.
It’s helpful to go to these places, to force you to be a bit slower, to move a little slower.
Lutz Koepnick
And move your camera slower.
Jonathan Rattner:
Move the camera definitely slower. But basically, my eyes, how I’m paying attention. There’s a selfish part of that, right? It reawakens me and my body a bit.
But then there’s a part of why I’m drawn to places like Svalbard that has to do with this idea, for people now and definitely for artists, of us witnessing things. That, to me, is an important social act, to pay attention. I feel like there’s a loss of connection to our environment.
There’s a loss of connection to each other as people.
When I’m making these kinds of films, and it could be days, it could be weeks, it could be even months, I feel just a little more connected, a little bit more at peace, and therefore I’m a little more open to the people around me.
And my hope is that the people who see my artwork—because it’s poetry, in a way—I’m trying to share a feeling with those viewers.
Lutz Koepnick
After we talked a bit about the physical challenges of filming on Svalbard, I wanted to push Jonathan a little further—to think about the technical challenges the Arctic itself poses. I reminded him of a conversation we had on a boat in Svalbard, while he was trying to film the imposing edge of the Borebreen. It’s a glacier—22 kilometers long—that drops, spectacularly, into a fjord north of Longyearbyen.
Lutz Koepnick
Looking back to that day, Jonathan had this to say about the experience.
Jonathan Rattner
We use the term experimental filmmaker, and that term for some is not considered the appropriate term anymore. I do like the term still, because I like the idea of thinking of it as experimenting, and so I really like experimenting with cameras.
I like experimenting with technology. I like using technology to be in conversation with these harsh environments. It’s very easy to take photographs now, right? And get a good result. But if I take these machines to places that are new to me, fresh to me, or places that I don’t fully understand—looking at ice for a long period of time—I know how to take that image right away.
But if I’m there for a long time staring at it, I begin to not understand. And so I’m pushing the camera to have a conversation with that ice formation that I’m looking at.
Lutz Koepnick
And a different kind of camera will allow you to have a different kind of conversation?
Jonathan Rattner
Yeah, because I’ll put the camera down and then I can pick up another camera that maybe has a different focal length, or a different film speed. Or, in the case of using analog cameras, like 16 millimeter, you have to physically load it and rewind it, and when you’re in a really cold environment, the camera might break down, or you might not get the results that you planned for. And that is exciting to me. It’s exciting to come back after filming on a project and get results that you didn’t expect, that you’re surprised by. So again, perception was challenged when I was there, but then perception’s challenged once again when I’m in the editing room.
I film with long-duration shots. So I’ll shoot for a minute, three minutes; it’s a meditative kind of experience. I don’t know everyone’s experience with meditation, but when I meditate, I both lose myself with breath, and then I’m back to thinking about myself and my narcissistic ways.
And so it’s the same when I’m filming. I’m both like, oh, I’m filming ice, I’m in Svalbard—and then there’s a moment where I’m completely forgetting it. And then there’s a moment where I’m thinking about the camera itself: is it working? Is it shooting in the correct way?
So mixing camera technologies allows me to challenge perfection, to challenge the idea of expectation, because I don’t know what I’m going to get.
Lutz Koepnick
So when the camera malfunctions or the footage comes out not the way one would have expected it, you recognize that as a possibility rather than, let’s say, a botched process.
Jonathan Rattner
Yes.
I’m hungry for receiving images, looking at images a month or two months later after filming them, and having them not match my expectations.
To me, that’s art. To me, the unexpected is the art, especially now, when many people are driven to having technology that just mirrors what’s in front of us. The mistakes, or what we would call mistakes, or the surprises, the unexpected—to me, that is what challenges how I’m going to work with the images, how I’m thinking about time, how I’m thinking about life.
Lutz Koepnick
That sort of hunger for the unexpected, the kind of joy that comes from it—is it also a joy about moments where you’re actually not in charge? Where you’ve not been in control over the very images that you then want to work with?
Jonathan Rattner
Yes.
Lutz Koepnick
What’s that joy of not being the author of the very film that you go out there to author?
Jonathan Rattner
It’s a good question. It’s more like a conversation with the environment around me.
Lutz Koepnick
Is that a collaboration?
Jonathan Rattner
A collaboration with the environment around me. That’s what excites me. So I have my initial concept or ideas or goals, but then, when I’m filming elemental things and surprises happen, then I’m really more in conversation, and there’s definitely a feeling of exhilaration that happens. I feel exhilarated; it feels like I’m awakened in a way. And to me, nothing beats that.
Lutz Koepnick
You talk about your filmmaking as a form of witnessing—witnessing even a kind of disintegrating or damaged world that’s all around us,
and that in this act of witnessing, something new, something surprising can emerge. One of the themes that accompanied us when we did our trip to Svalbard was this thinking about extractivism, going to this place so known for its history of extraction, of coal extraction. I’m curious: what does non-extractivist, or less extractivist, filmmaking mean for you? How does it inform your practice?
Jonathan Rattner
Yeah. I think about it a lot. I don’t know if I’ve always used the word extraction, but I think I’m going to begin to use that word a little bit more when I talk about my practice.
Filmmaking could mean, to many, capturing. We use the word capturing, grabbing.
Lutz Koepnick
Taking.
Jonathan Rattner
Taking. One could say that essentially filmmaking is extracting, is a form of art that’s extracting.
I don’t know if there’s a way to totally avoid it. I think there’s something dangerous, in a way, when we use a camera, taking someone’s image and using it for consumption. What I’m striving to do is—I’ll use the word observe, and I use the word witness. When I shoot long-duration shots, it allows me to do that, because the long takes allow me not to grab something quickly and then put it in the editing room that evening and make sense of it, and then sell it.
Lutz Koepnick
The long take is giving up a certain sense of control as well, right? Where you allow the world out there to happen to you rather than you capturing or grasping it.
Jonathan Rattner
Yes. I’m interested in the world happening to me rather than me just capturing it.
PART TWO
Lutz Koepnick
When the Michigan businessman John Munro Longyear first saw the islands of Svalbard—then generally known as Spitsbergen—from a tourist cruise on July 14, 1901, he described the landscape in his journal this way: “It was a grandly desolate, sublime, weird landscape, utterly barren and unlike anything I had ever seen.”
But Longyear wasn’t content to simply let this strange landscape act on him. Within a few years, he had founded the Arctic Coal Company and helped establish the mining settlement that would eventually bear his name: Longyearbyen, on Spitsbergen, the largest island in the Svalbard archipelago. Soon, high-quality coal was being extracted from its mountains and shipped south.
Over the next century, thousands of miners carved tunnels ever deeper into those mountains, often working under extremely harsh conditions. And coal didn’t just transform the landscape. It shaped Svalbard’s communities, its economy, and its unusual political history.
When the Svalbard Treaty came into force in 1925, Norway gained sovereignty over the archipelago, while citizens and companies from other signatory countries retained certain rights to live, work, and pursue economic activities there. That unusual arrangement helped turn this remote Arctic outpost into a remarkably international place. Today, people from more than fifty countries call Svalbard home.
To begin unpacking this complicated history—and to understand what is happening to Svalbard as the age of coal comes to an end—I spoke with social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková, author of a widely discussed book about life on the archipelago. Her research follows people living through extraordinarily rapid environmental and social change, and asks what happens to a community caught between a warming Arctic, the legacy of coal, and competing visions of what Svalbard should become next.
Zdenka Sokolíčková
My name is Zdenka Sokolíčková and I’m a social anthropologist. From 2019 until 2021, I was a guest researcher at the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Oslo, and I conducted ethnographic fieldwork in the town of Longyearbyen. I was working on how people live with accelerated change.
Lutz Koepnick
Svalbard lies less than a thousand kilometers from the North Pole. For roughly three months of the year, the sun never sets; for another three, it never rises. As we heard from Jonathan Rattner already, being and working here takes a certain physical resilience, but also an ability to adjust mentally to these extremes of light, darkness, and climate.
So I asked Zdenka what drew her to Svalbard in the first place—and what made her decide to spend several years doing research here. After all, it’s not exactly the easiest place to choose for an academic fieldwork project.
Zdenka Sokolíčková:
It was a mixture of both professional and private reasons. On the professional side, I was working as a lecturer at the Czech university and I was feeling burnt out because I had a heavy workload and no time for research.
And since 2015, I was in touch with a Norwegian social anthropologist, Thomas Hylland Eriksen, who also wrote the foreword to my book and was my mentor. I visited him in 2015 and liked how he thought about things. He was super smart but still eager to listen to others. I think we clicked intellectually.
My life in Prague was not optimal. So my husband and I decided that we needed to move away for some years. Thomas was in Norway, and my husband, a polar ecologist, used to work in Longyearbyen earlier.
We knew the place. He was telling me stories about the town changing so fast, and it fitted nicely with Thomas’s project about accelerated change. On multiple levels, I felt like Longyearbyen was a perfect place where I could go on fieldwork to study overheating. So that’s how this happened. And my husband supported me in this crazy plan. We had three kids by then who were quite little, so it was a demanding move.
Lutz Koepnick
About 3,000 people live in Longyearbyen. At first glance, Longyearbyen can look like a small—and, frankly, not particularly pretty—company town. A remote settlement at the edge of the world. But spend a little time here, and that impression begins to shift. You hear different languages in the cafés, shops, and streets. People have arrived from all over, often for very different reasons. For a town this small and this remote, Longyearbyen feels remarkably cosmopolitan.
Zdenka Sokolíčková:
I think I was a bit naive, thinking that English would be enough work-wise. After maybe interview number three with a Norwegian person, I realized Norwegians are good at English, but that doesn’t mean you can recall powerful memories in a foreign language.
Or I could feel that there was much more to share if I only knew the language. So the first year I invested a lot of time and energy into learning it. This was a big challenge, but I took it seriously. I was interested in people who lived through the rapid changes themselves, the ones who’ve spent many years there, and many of them—I would say the majority—are Norwegian. The times when anthropologists would consider themselves distant and neutral and objective are long over, and that’s a good thing. So I always considered myself an engaged visitor. Maybe we can say I was active, fully on, emotionally engaged.
Lutz Koepnick
What many people imagine, before they arrive, as a timeless and almost unchanging landscape turns out to be anything but static. Change is everywhere. And that includes the people who live here.
Longyearbyen has an unusually transient population. People arrive, stay for a few years, and then move on. Which raises a nagging question: When do you actually know a place? How long do you need to live somewhere before you can claim to understand it—or speak about it with any kind of authority? And what happens when you try to represent that place in an image, a film, or a work of art?
Zdenka lived and conducted research on Svalbard for several years. But the longer she stayed, the more she found herself grappling with precisely these questions:
Zdenka Sokolíčková
I don’t think there is a set amount of time that you need to spend there to be able to say I’m familiar with the place. At the same time, given the turnover, it seems the entrance ticket is cheap: you have arrived one plane later than me, so I can tell you what this place is like—almost, with a little bit of hyperbole. So speaking for the place, that’s extremely tricky. The fact that so many people shared their life stories with me makes it maybe worth consulting, but I would never claim that I’m an expert. It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience that definitely shaped the way I think about the world and how I work. It taught me so much about how to engage in relationships, how to cultivate them with participants.
Lots about ethics and ethical doubts you might encounter. The ethics of being at all in such places—living in Svalbard, having that terrible carbon footprint. Is the work that I do worth the carbon footprint? Those are still questions that are haunting me in a way.
Lutz Koepnick
Svalbard is warming roughly six times faster than the global average. Glaciers are retreating, permafrost is thawing, and planetary overheating is reshaping not only the landscape but also the geopolitics of the Arctic.
Like us, Zdenka came to Svalbard wanting to understand how people experience and make sense of the dramatic effects of climate change in the Arctic—and what those changes mean for a community whose history, for more than a century, has been deeply intertwined with the extraction and export of coal.
Zdenka Sokolíčková
I was coming with this idea that this research was really going to be a lot about the perception of climate change. Then, maybe with the third person, we shook hands and the participant would say, ‘I hope you’re not going to ask me about climate change.’
I was like, what is going on? I must have missed something important. You cannot impose your topic upon participants. Climate change, at the end of the day, did feature a lot. But it was not the only story; it felt interwoven into other stories people shared.
And this black-and-white portraying of the vulnerable Arctic melting and the fossil fuel industry that is like the devil—and then you meet all these miners and listen to their stories of fathers and grandfathers who invested their whole lives into this business. They were seen as something to be proud of, and suddenly they’re being looked down on, as someone who is participating in this dirty thing. You’re witnessing a climate change discourse alienating people from their own life stories.
So then you just start digging in and seeing that it’s much more gray than black and white. It’s just less clear-cut compared to how the government or the media present it.
Lutz Koepnick
That grayness Zdenka speaks about: We got a sense of that ourselves. One day during our stay on Svalbard, Jana and I took a tour of Mine 3. It’s now a popular tourist attraction, but we went because we wanted a closer look at something Zdenka’s research had brought into focus for us: the complicated legacy—the afterlife—of coal mining on Svalbard.
Not far from Longyearbyen’s airport, Mine 3 produced coal from 1971 until 1996. Its coal seam was unusually narrow, which meant miners often had to work lying down or on their knees, under extremely difficult conditions.
We weren’t alone down there. Our group included tourists from around the world, among them a large group from a Chinese cruise ship. There was something striking about that: a place once devoted to extracting coal from the ground has now become part of Svalbard’s growing tourist economy.
Toward the end of the tour, I caught up with our guide, Camilla, and asked her how she felt about the closure of Svalbard’s last active coal mine.
Camilla is referring to something that made us shake our heads as well: after closing its mines, Longyearbyen began relying partly on imported coal and diesel for energy.
It’s supposed to be a temporary solution until more sustainable alternatives are in place. But the irony is hard to miss: Svalbard has ended local coal mining in the name of a post-coal future, while still bringing fossil fuels in from somewhere else.
Lutz Koepnick
You don’t have to be a climate denier—or a believer in so-called “clean coal”—to understand Camilla’s frustration. What her reaction brings into focus is the gap that can open up between political visions formulated far away and the messy realities of living through those decisions on the ground.
And that brings us back to Zdenka, because much of her work is about resisting easy answers. Her research, including a film she made about Svalbard, asks how you tell a complicated story about climate change, coal, and the people caught up in both when audiences often want things to be much more black and white.
Her book is widely available on Svalbard itself. But on the Norwegian mainland, where debates about the archipelago’s future can look rather different, the response to her work has sometimes been more divided:
Zdenka Sokolíčková
Usually the feedback I’m getting is from people who feel inspired or react positively to the work I present. I had a very unpleasant Q&A after the screening at the embassy in Oslo, which was more for the political aspect of the movie—slash also the book, basically, or all the work. It was for this criticism of using the green discourse to cover up less cool political agendas, like getting rid of the foreigners, and of neo-nationalist discourse; for blurring, or for claiming that it’s more complicated than just saying shut down the coal mines; for acknowledging the value of the stories of the people who actually lived there.
Lutz Koepnick
For decades, Svalbard has been remarkably diverse. People from Thailand and the Philippines, in particular, have become essential to its post-coal economy. Their children attend the local school, learn Norwegian, and for many years, non-Norwegian residents also had broad voting rights in local elections.
But that diversity is coming under pressure. As a warming Arctic opens new shipping routes and intensifies competition over resources and territory, Norway has become more determined to assert its sovereignty and reinforce Svalbard’s Norwegian identity.
There’s a paradox here: the more geopolitically important the Arctic becomes, the more pressure there is to tighten Norwegian control—and potentially unsettle the unusually international community that has taken root in Longyearbyen.
Zdenka Sokolíčková
There are good reasons to be concerned, but I find the answers being given to these threats are just counterproductive. This kind of stubborn claim that Svalbard is Norwegian and Longyearbyen is a stable Norwegian family community is just not the truth.
If you look at the texture of the population, it makes all the people start feeling unwelcome—angry, sad, and alienated. This is unbearable as a lived reality, when you have neighbors who are clearly being chased away with all possible new regulations and measures.
Lutz Koepnick
Zdenka is referring here to a series of regulations that have significantly restricted voting rights for non-Norwegian residents of Svalbard.
Zdenka Sokolíčková
The geopolitical tension is there, and Norway is just stubborn with this political realism, this kind of nation-state-centered approach. What can we do? We can write about it. People try to speak up. Many non-Norwegians have contacted their embassies when all these new regulations came in, saying it just feels…
You’re acting out of fear and weakness, actually, when you’re doing this to us—to this Thai kid who has grown up in Longyearbyen and is now considered a complete foreigner.
And they have no assistance from the state when they turn 18. Or the voting right is being taken away from them.
And how do you cultivate a democratic atmosphere at the school when one third of the kids will never be able to vote, in a place that they consider their home?
This discourse of ethnic hegemony is just so not matching with the lived reality, where you always have work colleagues, folks around you in cafés and restaurants, kids that are with you in the classroom, people you meet in the sports hall.
Lutz Koepnick
Few people stay on Svalbard for very long. Many leave after just a few years, because of limited housing and employment, the long polar night, or, more recently, the end of coal mining.
Eco-tourism has become one way of sustaining Svalbard’s post-coal economy. But it brings its own problems. As Zdenka argues, it does little to address the concerns of either Longyearbyen’s remaining mining community or its increasingly disenfranchised international population.
There are good reasons to celebrate the end of coal. But what comes after isn’t necessarily simple—or more just. The question is not only how to end an extractive economy, but what kind of society takes its place.
Zdenka Sokolíčková
Many post-extraction places reinvent their identity. Tourism is the obvious thing, so it was not very creative to come up with this idea: let’s make tourism the next pillar of the economy. With the unforeseen consequences—that tourism is going to generate jobs that Norwegians are not going to apply for. Once this boomed and seemed out of hand, authorities realized this is not what we wanted. So they started to reintroduce stricter regulations, many good for the environment and wilderness. So it went steeply up, and then COVID was like a pause. Tourism everywhere, and tourism in Svalbard, was really hard hit.
I don’t think the numbers ever came back to the levels of 2019. With the heavy fuel ban and the limitation of 500 passengers on these big vessels, I think we’re going to see a decrease.
Is tourism going to keep booming? I don’t think so. There is no housing for people who could work in tourism—how could they grow?
But then, again, talking about scale: if you look at the multinational company that just sells thousands of trips, it earns probably a lot of money, and a lot of that profit doesn’t stay locally but goes somewhere to the headquarters in London or wherever. I think there are questions to be asked.
I think some tourism will always be there. But Norway will do everything they could for this not to be just a tourist destination.
I think people involved in the mining industry are also those who are the most critical. But again, there you need to see the context. It’s not only that they’re seeing the real disadvantages of tourism, but also that they feel personally offended, basically.
PART THREE
Lutz Koepnick
Coal has a long history on film. For more than a century, filmmakers have taken their cameras into mines, mining towns, and landscapes transformed by extraction. They’ve documented dangerous working conditions, political struggles, and the communities and cultures that coal helped create.
Some of these films have become landmarks of documentary cinema. Harlan County, USA captured the violence and solidarity of a miners’ strike in Appalachia. More recently, Elaine McMillion Sheldon’s King Coal explored the hold coal still has on Appalachian identity and imagination, even as the industry declines. Other filmmakers have focused on the environmental costs of extraction and the landscapes left behind when mines close.
In many of these films, the camera sets out to reveal coal: the labor that produces it, the damage it causes, the conflicts that surround it. The filmmaker becomes a witness to extraction and its consequences.
But what happens when filmmakers begin to question their own position? When entering a place, capturing its images, and carrying them away starts to look uncomfortably like another form of extraction?
That question became central to how experimental filmmaker Jonathan Rattner approached Svalbard and its legacy of coal. Rather than simply documenting extraction, he began to ask whether filmmaking itself could become part of the problem.
Lutz Koepnick
Having done all these extended-duration shots on Svalbard, you came back with a ton of footage—lots of hours of material shot with different cameras. You ended up making a 30-minute film with this material, called Northward.
It’s maybe only the first step, the first chapter in a possible trilogy of films. Northward is mostly about the trip going up there. In the end, I think little footage of your filming on Svalbard made it into that film. Talk to us about that film: what motivated you to do it, what’s in it, how it looks and feels, but also why it focuses so much on the journey rather than the place itself.
Jonathan Rattner
One thing that attracted me to Svalbard was the history of it being a place of wonder, a destination for explorers. Today it’s still seen in this romantic way—that if you go, you’re not just putting a flag on it saying, “I was there.” It’s also a place of discovery, of seeing things in new, fresh ways. I think one thing that attracted people to Svalbard in the past and attracts us now is that it is a place that can still spark that idea that maybe we don’t understand everything.
And—
Lutz Koepnick
We don’t need to understand everything.
Jonathan Rattner
Exactly, and we don’t need to understand everything. So the movie is about that idea, that feeling of going to a place: the tension, the excitement, and also the acceptance that I don’t entirely know what I’m witnessing right now.
So the movie begins with some titles that talk about how Svalbard is a place where you can witness glaciers melting, falling into the water, and when they fall into the water, our global sea levels rise. In 2024, the amount of glaciers that fell and melted raised our sea levels by a fingernail. We have that image maybe in our head, but when we really think about it, we don’t know entirely what that means—
Lutz Koepnick
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Rattner
or what that feels like. So this movie is striving to mirror that feeling I have, that I don’t entirely know what it feels like, or totally understand what it means, for the ice in our world to be melting, and how that’s changing the world around us. So the film really is about that experience of the romance, but then again challenging the romance: the sea is also a scary place, a frightening place, a confusing place. So when you see my images, most of them start off with this beautiful ocean or beautiful landscape.
But midway through these images, that meaning changes, and they’re not beautiful anymore. It’s maybe a little threatening.
Lutz Koepnick
With all these variations that you describe, with all these undulations between different modalities of showing the landscapes, you pull the rug out from underneath the viewer’s feet a little bit, right? And it becomes progressively difficult to read those images. What you resist is that these images are put into any kind of box.
Is that right?
Jonathan Rattner:
Yes. Yes.
Lutz Koepnick:
And one should add, there is no voiceover that would give us a framework to tell us what we’re actually seeing.
Jonathan Rattner
No, all we get is these titles in the beginning that state the ice is melting—which we know already. We’ve seen many movies about this. We’ve read books about that. We all know this. I feel like I don’t need to make another movie about that, because it’s not doing anything. But could you make a movie about witnessing, about just being present with it, respecting that the ice is melting? And will that respect make us maybe treat that environment a little bit differently?
Lutz Koepnick
Is it a project that wants to lead us into a place where we can unsee and unlearn the things that we seem to know and have seen—
Jonathan Rattner
Definitely.
Lutz Koepnick
about places like this?
Jonathan Rattner
Yes. I’m very much driven by unlearning, and so those long-duration shots allow me to exist in that space and, again, force my viewers maybe to be in that space with me. I think I’m attracted to music because, in many ways, with the art form of music we understand as humans that sounds cannot be grabbed onto and held onto, right? It’s impossible to do that.
Lutz Koepnick
You want your films to become music in a different key?
Jonathan Rattner
Definitely, yeah. And I think that’s why I’m attracted to using organic material to make my sounds with.
Lutz Koepnick
What do you think would happen if you attached one of your microphones to a piece of coal?
Jonathan Rattner
I don’t know. It’s exciting. What you would get is the sound around it, how sound is bouncing off the piece of coal. The coal is not making the sounds; it’s actually the world around it that’s bouncing off it.
Lutz Koepnick
The coal becomes the—
Jonathan Rattner
microphone. The coal becomes the—
Lutz Koepnick
medium.
Jonathan Rattner
Yeah, exactly, and that’s quite exciting. If I’m lucky enough to go back to Svalbard and I can make the third film, which is inside the mountains, a work about coal, that would be a fantastic direction to go: to use the coal as a microphone.
Lutz Koepnick
Looking at your artistic practice, it’s very hard at this point to imagine what might actually happen to your camera, what might happen to you, once you’re underground in these horizontal shafts rather than vertical shafts, for which Svalbard is so famous. If you were with your camera inside the mines, what do you think might happen? What will you discover?
Jonathan Rattner
When I think about coal mining, the feeling I get is of pain.
Pain, suffering, being forced to do something that’s harming your body, breathing in this poison. But also you’re doing it to help society, right? But maybe you’re forced to do it.
I’ve been to coal mines in the past, but I haven’t been there long enough to figure out how to find images that would express that, or challenge how I’m seeing it.
Lutz Koepnick
There’s a lot of anger, of course, in the community about the closing of the coal mines. There’s a whole way of life that has been lost. Generations of coal miners, some of them still living there, feel betrayed by a state, a state economy that wants to emphasize and showcase its dedication to sustainability, but can only do so in part due to the profits they’re making with the drilling and selling of oil to non-Norwegian nations.
How could your camera capture that sense of—
Jonathan Rattner
I might see it a little differently. I know people are angry, and people are angry that this is changing, but I feel that anger then becomes a badge of understanding who they are as people. And I think that the closing of these mines actually allows people to highlight this existence, maybe even in a more powerful way than if the coal mine still existed. Now, I’m not saying that people shouldn’t be angry.
When horrible things happen to us as people, I think it helps define who we are as well, and I think we should allow ourselves to have that conversation, to be honest about that. If I make a movie about coal, it would be honoring that history, honoring that past. I would really want to try to capture the feeling of pain that exists with it, and the suffering, and then the place of honor that people who did suffer receive later—
Lutz Koepnick
Mm-hmm.
Jonathan Rattner
From that pain, from that suffering—and how that helps define who they are. And then how in Svalbard specifically it’s changing from a place of coal mining to now tourism.
So years ago, I went to this place in Colorado that had all of these former coal mines, and I was struck by the tourism that was happening. All these coal mines, they had tours you can go on, and you can go down and experience it, and then you can meet an actual coal miner. I was glad that that former coal miner had a job, and I’m glad that they’re holding onto this, because it’s important for us to remember. But to me, going on that tour was not enough to understand or experience what coal is, or has been, to our world—the beauty that it’s created, but also the pain and suffering that it’s created. And I think if I made a movie about coal, I would at least strive to capture all of that.
Epilogue
Lutz Koepnick
During our stay, we never saw the sun rise or set. Sleep was sometimes hard to come by, so we had plenty of time to listen to the stories people tell about this place they call home. Let me end with two of them.
Traditionally, in early March, residents of Longyearbyen gather at the steps of the old hospital to celebrate the first rays of sunlight after the polar night. The hospital itself has long since moved, but its wooden staircase remains, sitting alone on a hillside—a staircase to nowhere, perhaps, but also a monument to return and renewal.
The tradition continues, but the timing has become less certain. As planetary warming changes the snow and ice on the surrounding mountains—mountains that also hold Svalbard’s coal—the exact moment when sunlight reaches those steps has become harder to predict. Spring itself is shifting. Climate change is altering one of the clocks by which people here have learned to measure time.
People also like to say that no one can be born or die on Svalbard. Pregnant women generally travel to the mainland to give birth, while the permafrost makes burial difficult. The frozen ground, we were told, can push coffins back toward the surface. Here, the past quite literally refuses to stay buried.
These seem like fitting images for Svalbard today: the returning sun no longer arriving quite when expected, the frozen ground giving up what was buried in it. The coal mines are closing, but coal itself hasn’t disappeared. It remains in the mountains, in people’s memories, and in the infrastructures and ways of life built around it.
Make sure to join us for our next episode, when we return to Svalbard with Jana Harper to discuss her take on art after coal and hear more from Svalbard residents about why this place continues to attract so many artists to work in the Arctic.