Art of Interference S3E9
(After) Coal II
INTRODUCTION
Lutz Koepnick
You have seen images like these over and over again. Rugged men with furry hoods. Other rugged men hauling sledges through impenetrable blizzards. More men, usually white, usually bearded, erecting flags to mark their presence for the record. Capsized ships, arrested amid towering icebergs and fragmented ice shelves. Tiny propeller airplanes in search of lost explorers. And yes, deranged penguins that, at least according to one rather unreliable observer, walk off into deserts of ice, warning men not to do the same.
The history of Western art, film, and photography is full of images depicting the Arctic and Antarctic as geographies of the sublime. Glacial landscapes here serve as backdrops to heroic gestures of bravery, endurance, and self-assertion. Or they showcase the folly and fragility of all human endeavors. But in all of them, polar landscapes basically represent what legal theorists call terra nullius: nobody’s land, land awaiting humans to conquer or occupy it, to make sense of it, to shape it according to their will and power. Like a blank canvas whose sole purpose is to be filled with controlled strokes of the human hand.
In our previous episode of Art of Interference, I took you on a journey to Svalbard, high up in the polar north, to hear from experimental filmmaker Jonathan Rattner about the challenges of filming in the Arctic and social anthropologist Zdenka Sokolíčková about the many paradoxes of contemporary Svalbard to move beyond its long history of coal extraction. This journey was part of a research project on art, resilience, and adaptation in the Polar North I was able to conduct with Jonathan and visual artist Jana Harper last summer in the Norwegian Archipelago. In this current episode, we return to Svalbard, this time with Jana, and hear more about how she in her work engaged with the island’s geological formations, its history of extraction; how she experimented with different formal strategies that would avoid treating the land as terra nullius, as an object readily awaiting a miner’s or, for that matter, an artist’s interventions.
Jana Harper
I’ve spent the last several years engaging with water, and Anishinaabe water in particular, traveling around North America following the Anishinaabe migration route, which was a water migration. Much of that work has been about developing ways of engaging with the landscape that are not extractive. So much of my brain space is taken up with: who gets to speak on behalf of the landscape?
Who gets to speak on behalf of the water? How do we develop relationships with land and water that are more reciprocal, where we ask for permission from the water, where we pray to the water or sing to the water, or just engage in practices that are more reciprocal? And when we traveled to the Arctic, I kept asking myself, how could I be in relation with that landscape and not simply taking something from it?
Lutz Koepnick
Jana is a multidisciplinary artist. Her work is grounded in extensive research, but it also insists on art’s fundamental right to play—to do the unexpected, to push against the limits of discourse and the demands of the art world, and to explore gestures of empathy, resonance, and reciprocity that can sometimes feel untimely in our polarized present, a present in which we know how to take but not how to ask for permission.
Lutz Koepnick
I guess no one asked coal for its permission to be mined.
Jana Harper
No one asked coal. No one asked those mountains. I felt, um, a tremendous amount of sadness looking at those mountains and empathizing with what it might feel like to have had your insides removed and to have these empty spaces in your belly. That is a devastating prospect to think about.
Lutz Koepnick
Jana’s work has addressed subjects ranging from the erosion of democracy and U.S. gun policy to Native American sovereignty and the Rights of Nature. But underneath all of this, I think, is a larger question about the place of the spiritual in a modern world shaped by disenchantment and strategic calculation. The world her work imagines is, by definition, nobody’s. And art’s role isn’t to claim that world as another object of extraction, but to approach it as a commons—a playground shared by many different entities and beings: human, nonhuman, and more-than-human.
Now, in the interest of full disclosure, I should probably mention upfront that Jana is also my partner, and this for almost two decades. We travel a lot together, we look at a lot of art together and discuss it, we don’t always agree about what’s good and what’s important, but we certainly share lots of ideas about why art of all sorts matters, or should matter, in our damaged world. So whatever you hear from me in this episode is unabashedly biased. But consider this less a conflict of interest than a very long-term form of participant observation.
In today’s episode, we’ll hear about the work Jana made in Svalbard, and how it pushes back against familiar representations of the Arctic as a sublime, empty landscape—a kind of terra nullius waiting to be discovered, imagined, or claimed. We’ll talk about how her work instead engages with the much messier material realities of Svalbard, including its long history of coal mining.
And we’ll also hear about some of the archipelago’s remarkable art institutions and programs, which will help us understand why this remote place continues to attract so many artists—and what, exactly, they’re looking for when they come to work in Svalbard amid its efforts to move beyond the age of coal.
PART ONE: COAL COLLAGES
Lutz Koepnick
You came back from Svalbard with a whole series of small collages. They combine some very idyllic Arctic postcards with fragments from other material from photographs that show some of the last coal miners on the archipelago. Tell me a bit about that kind of work.
Jana Harper
When we were traveling in Svalbard, the last coal mine was being closed, Mine 7, and there were a lot of activities surrounding the closure of that mine. The King and Queen came to visit. At the Spitsbergen Art Center, there was an exhibition there called The Last Miners of Longyearbyen by Sissel Rasmussen. Beautiful medium-format portraits. Black-and-white portraits of these miners in their mining attire.
Many of them looked like they had just emerged, maybe with sooted faces, and their hands were amazing. We were thinking a lot about the founding of that town being rooted in the mining industry, and to witness the closure of the last mine, you could feel that the town was experiencing a huge transition, and it was impossible to be there and not feel a little bit caught up in that transition.
Meanwhile, we had been looking at representations of the Arctic landscape in art history, in photography, in the media. You know, how is the Arctic represented? And it’s beautiful. It’s easy to romanticize. It’s easy to get kind of sucked into the wondrousness of it.
Lutz Koepnick
There’s a long tradition in the history of art to show the Arctic as this place of the sublime, as this place of adventure, of still almost timeless beauty.
Jana Harper
So anyway, at the Spitsbergen Art Center, I bought a series of photographs, beautiful photographs by an artist named Julia Hellner. And they exactly represent the Arctic in its sublime state. And then the Last Miners of Longyearbyen exhibition had a really nice little zine catalog, and I picked up a couple of them. While we were traveling, I had been questioning how I could make things that were, first of all, compact because we were traveling, and second of all, non-extractive, and one of the strategies that I came up with was to only use found materials. And to intervene on postcards, or to make collages on postcards, felt like a way to do that. And there’s a beautiful long history in art history of artists intervening in a postcard space.
Lutz Koepnick
So you cut up those zines in order to add those fragments to the postcards?
Jana Harper
Yes. There are these black-and-white images that were really rich in blacks and mostly very dark. I was conscious that I didn’t wanna represent any of the miners’ faces, so I was kind of cutting these organic shapes out of the representations.
They’re not quite circles or not quite ovals, but just these organic, roundish shapes.
I don’t even think that when I made them I was consciously thinking, “This is coal and I’m putting coal on this landscape.” It more was a shape that I happened to be drawn to and then intervening on these very light blue and white landscapes.
Lutz Koepnick
Some of Jana’s collage work was inspired by an exhibition about mining that we saw in Tromsø, during a brief stop on our way to Svalbard. The show, at Tromsø’s Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, was called Tidslag: Layers of Time.
At the center of the exhibition were historical photographs of everyday life on Svalbard, taken by Herta and Leif Grøndal from the mid-1950s through the late 1990s. Their daughter, the photographer Eva Grøndal, returned to some of the same places and motifs decades later, re-photographing them in the present. And a third generation entered the conversation as well: Eva’s daughter, the musician Aggie Grøndal Peterson, who performs as Aggie Frost, composed new music for the exhibition based on memories, interviews, and stories connected to Svalbard.
So the exhibition brought three generations of one family into conversation, but it also brought different moments in Svalbard’s history into contact with one another.
Eva spent part of her childhood in Vienna while her parents worked in Svalbard, in part because official policies made it difficult for children to grow up within the local mining community. Long before she eventually returned to Svalbard as an adult and opened a professional photography studio, photography became a way for her to connect with the world her parents had inhabited—and, later, a way to register just how much that world had changed, including that complicated and sometimes uneven transition away from coal we discussed in our previous episode:
Eva Grøndal
We are losing our identity. It’s so strange. And I’m also happy that I’m living here to experience it. It would be tragic, I think, if I left, so, um, so what do we do next?
I think that the day they shut down the power plant, they should have started the research on renewable energy. It’s so stupid. So why? Yeah, we don’t—well, we’ll need some coal, and Norway still imports coal. So this is, um, just a mask to tell that small bodies, uh, is taken care of. So this is, um, a political game.
Lutz Koepnick
Many of the images in Tidslag are gritty. In Herta and Leif Grøndal pictures, we see miners at work, or on their way to work, surrounded by equipment whose precise function can be difficult for an outsider to decipher. We see bodies exhausted by long shifts beneath the frozen ground. But the exhibition also shows something else: the intimate, ordinary textures of postwar mining life. Domestic spaces. Social gatherings. Miners and their families enjoying brief moments of leisure against the stark backdrop of the Svalbard settlements. People dancing at a wedding. People doing indoor gymnastics in the 1950s. Small moments that complicate any simple image of Svalbard as nothing more than an extreme landscape or a place of extraction.
Eva Grøndal
I was longing for my mother, and I was, um, I was very proud, uh, that she went to [unclear], and it was extraordinary. And, uh, this photography thing and living from it, uh, she—we’re not rich from that.
Lutz Koepnick
Eva’s own photographs take us back to some of these sites of work and leisure to see what remains—and what has taken their place. We see another wedding, this one in 2022. We see miners working in the last remaining mine. We see tourists arriving on cruise ships. And we see the aftermath of the massive avalanche that struck Longyearbyen in 2015, burying houses, taking lives, and coming frighteningly close to destroying Eva’s own home. Rephotographing her parents’ images allowed Eva not simply to step into their shows, but to reconnect past and present in new ways.
Eva Grøndal
Getting to know where they were. I’ve been, uh, on many snowmobile trips and, uh, circling in the snow, and, uh, sometimes it’s rather dangerous. Uh, and, um, and I can imagine they did the same thing, maybe experience unexpected weather and so on.
Lutz Koepnick
For Eva, re-photographing the world recorded by her parents was much more than an act of nostalgia. It creates a conversation between past and present. The earlier photographs change how we see Svalbard today, while the contemporary images make us look differently at the world captured by her parents decades ago.
Past and present don’t simply sit next to one another. Their textures begin to rub against each other—and, in the process, each makes the other newly visible.
What sticks, what do we take with us when some way of life nears its end, was one of the big questions that energized this show we saw in Tromsø.
Jana’s collage work on Svalbard resonates with similar questionss, even if it offers quite different answers. And it, of course, also relies on artistic languages and techniques quite different from those of a photographer.
Lutz Koepnick
So what was your process when making these collages?
Jana Harper
Sometimes when you’re making things, you create a rule for yourself. And the rule that I made for myself when we were traveling was that I would only use found materials, and I would figure out how to combine those found materials. And it seemed very natural to me to think about the subject matter of those last miners of Longyearbyen and those idealized landscapes, and try to figure out how to put those two things together, because the way that they are intricately connected is so complicated and yet overly simplified, um, that I just started cutting up the images of the miners from the zines and putting these kind of organic, coal-like shapes on top of these beautiful landscapes. I don’t even think that when I made them I was consciously thinking, “This is coal and I’m putting coal on this landscape.” It more was a shape that I happened to be drawn to and then intervening on these very light blue and white, um, landscapes.
Lutz Koepnick
The faces and bodies of these miners are barely visible.
Was that part of your strategy as well? One cannot really recognize, in many of those cutouts, that those are actually human bodies. Was that on purpose?
Jana Harper
That was—yeah, yeah, yeah, that was important to me.
Because they were these black-and-white images, and the coal from Longyearbyen is supposed to be some of the purest in the world, and it’s very, very black, dark, pure coal. I thought, “Oh, I can just pull the blackest part of those images out without showing—
The identity of the—
People in the photographs.
Lutz Koepnick
So here you have these romantic, these aestheticized Arctic landscapes as presented in the photographs, and you layer at times quite abstract, cut-up coal miner imagery on top of it. There’s a tension in this work between melancholy on the one hand, but also a kind of intervention that, as you say, wants to be non-extractive. Do you see this work as an elegy to the past mining tradition, as an effort to cover up the aestheticized way of looking at the Arctic, overriding it?
Jana Harper
I’m not sure it’s an elegy.
I think collage gives you the opportunity to produce a third thing. In this case, there you have, on the one hand, these idealized landscapes; on the other hand, you have these kind of formal medium-format portraits. When you put those two things together,
The landscapes are no longer landscapes, you know, because you’ve added this abstract element to them. The portraits are certainly no longer portraits. So then what the collages become are their own possibility. Of course, I’m thinking about art history. I was thinking about a whole host of different artists who have intervened on postcards.
Lutz Koepnick
There are a lot of people that are very angry in Svalbard about the process of bringing coal mining, to an end. Is your work secretly defending the history of coal mining?
Jana Harper
I think that my work is observational. I don’t think I’m commenting politically on coal mining. I respect that that industry is how that community started.
I respect that there are multiple generations who have engaged in that labor. And I respect their emotions, the complexity of their emotions with regard to the mines being closed. It’s, it’s ending a way of life.
Lutz Koepnick
Would it be right to say it’s really casting that history precisely not in kind of a scheme of black and white? There are gradations, there are complexities, there are ambiguities, there are things that are not easy to judge.
Jana Harper
Hopefully. Yeah, hopefully they’re not easy to judge. Hopefully it leaves the questions open.
I, I don’t want it to be dogmatic or prescriptive. I, I just wanna keep pointing towards the questions.
PART TWO: ARTICA
Lutz Koepnick
Only about 3,000 people live on Svalbard, most of them in Longyearbyen. That may sound tiny, but there’s a surprising amount going on here. At least during the long polar days, Longyearbyen feels remarkably cosmopolitan. And for a community of its size, it has an extraordinarily vibrant arts scene—one that many much larger cities would envy.
Artica Svalbard is one of several organizations supporting the arts on the archipelago. Some focus primarily on local cultural life, while others are dedicated to exhibitions or preservation. Artica is different.
Founded in 2016 with support from the Norwegian Ministry of Culture, the Fritt Ord Foundation, and the Queen Sonja Print Award, Artica is an international artist residency that welcomes practitioners working across a wide range of media. Its mission is to foster sustained, place-based artistic research rather than the kind of quick, fly-in artistic tourism that has become so common in places like Svalbard.
I sat down with Artica’s director, Charlotte “Lotte” Hetherington, in the residency’s impressive workshop to learn more about its work—and about the particular opportunities and challenges of making art in the High Arctic.
After many years working in the UK, Lotte moved to Svalbard in 2020 to lead Artica. Quite a few people wondered why she would take on such a daunting challenge. She told us she hasn’t regretted the decision for a single day.
Charlotte Hetherington
Everyone thought I’d gone crazy. It was very out of character, but it was during COVID, and I was working at Thomas Dean Gallery, and I absolutely loved my job. I loved working with the artists that I worked with, but I realized how much I missed an audience in a community.
Prior to moving to London, I worked for an organization called Spike Island, which is in Bristol. It’s in an old tea-packing factory building, and they have an amazing exhibition space. They support artists doing their first major solo shows, but you also had artist studios there.
You had offices for architects, graphic designers, uh, the university’s fine art department was there. So it was this real hub of activity and culture. And you could go to the cafe in the morning and you would have a chat with an artist from a studio and then, you know, meet with an architect for lunch.
And it was just great. So when I was in London, I was kind of thinking back to that and how much I, I missed being a part of that kind of place where you have all of these different people in one area. And when I read about Artica, I thought it sounds a little bit like that, matched with the fact that it’s in Svalbard. I was like, this is amazing. I thought, okay, why not? I’ll go for it and see what happens.
I was like, this is amazing. I thought, okay, why not? I’ll go for it and see what happens.
Lutz Koepnick
One of Lotte’s central ambitions as director of Artica has been to build these kinds of relationships: bringing together international artists, members of the local community, and the researchers and students at Longyearbyen’s Arctic research university, UNIS, around a shared engagement with the Arctic.
Charlotte Hetherington
I wanted there to be an exchange between the visiting artists and the community because people were living here and they, they wanted to know what the artists were interested in, what they were doing, but they also wanted to share their experiences. And so it felt natural to me to say, when you are a resident with us, you are a part of this community and you exchange, and then you build very fast friendships and you learn so much more about what’s going on.
When you Google Svalbard, you still get, you know, the very romanticized view of the Arctic, of this small community. But the reality is so different from that.
And that’s what I really wanted our residents to understand and learn. And the environment and the climate will always naturally come up. Because how can it not when you’re in a place like this? We work with seven other residencies in the Nordics and Scotland, and that’s all about an exchange of knowledge because we realize that residencies really are a test bed for arts and life kind of coming together.
And what can you test out? What can you try? What doesn’t work? How can you share this information with people? So it was really great to be a part of that collective. And then that’s also helped us to learn our own environmental goals and what is possible in a place like Svalbard, and all of that connects back to the artistic practice and research that’s coming here.
Lutz Koepnick
Many international artists have come to Artica over the years. We’ve spoken with some of them in earlier episodes of Art of Interference, including Susan Schuppli. Others have returned time and again, allowing projects that began during an initial residency to evolve and deepen over multiple visits.
Many artists come to Svalbard to engage with the realities of planetary warming and the archipelago’s long history of coal mining. At the same time, Lotte is keenly aware of the paradox this kind of artistic mobility creates. Bringing artists to one of the world’s most environmentally fragile regions inevitably raises difficult questions about travel, sustainability, and the environmental footprint of cultural exchange.
Charlotte Hetherington
This is a massive contradiction to kind of be in a place like Svalbard and to be flying people here, and for us to be even having a print studio here is crazy. So we have to be very honest about that. And that’s why we also started our action plan to try to understand what is our carbon footprint, what can we change, and how can we actually share that knowledge of what we’re doing so that other organizations might be able to, to benefit from it.
The writers and the artists that are coming here, they’re a huge part of that because they then take that knowledge to their communities. And so it’s, it’s just trying to be the ripple, be the stone, I guess.
Lutz Koepnick
We certainly came to Svalbard with our own romantic images of the Arctic. The light. The barrenness of the land. The quiet. The incredible challenges of living through the polar day or polar night, for that matter. It makes you wonder how long you need to stay before you can say “I know this place.” Or if anyone ever does. And how you coordinate this with the impressions of everyday life in Longyearbyen—a town whose functionalist infrastructure and architecture can hardly count as beautiful or romantic. Lotte has observed many residents over the years struggling with similar questionss. And inevitably going through unexpected, but often quite transformative processes of adaptation:
Charlotte Hetherington
That is actually one of the hardest moments, I think, mentally for the residents to go through. And it’s normally a couple of weeks after they’ve been here, they’ll suddenly kind of transition from what they thought Svalbard was going to be, which is the very romanticized version of the Arctic with the snow and this wilderness and this peace, to this reality of trash everywhere, pipes above the ground, shipping containers, cars, snowmobiles, all over the land. It really hits people. And so I think that is actually incredibly important for people to see, because then you do understand it, and then you can learn from that. And then maybe that will feed into your work, feed into your research, and then go back and, and you will help to communicate that.
I knew of Svalbard before I moved here, but I knew of it through fiction, through, uh, Philip Pullman’s stories and through, like, David Attenborough wildlife programs and things like that. So again, it’s this very kind of romanticized view, and I now feel very passionate about trying to get the reality of what Svalbard is beyond this place, because it’s, even within Norway, it’s still viewed as this very kind of, oh, it’s this lovely little island.
Lutz Koepnick
The Norwegian government supports Artica with significant financial resources. Norway’s Queen Sonja, in fact, was one of the supporters behind the original print workshop and recently returned to Svalbard for another visit.
That kind of institutional generosity is remarkable. But public support also comes with expectations: expectations of accountability, of relevance, of some visible contribution to the community and to the larger questions Svalbard is facing.
One way Artica demonstrates that relevance is through the lively exchange between its resident artists and researchers associated with Svalbard’s small university center, UNIS.
What interested me about these encounters is that the artists aren’t simply there to illustrate scientific findings or add some aesthetic ornament to research already completed. The exchange can work in both directions. Artists bring their own ways of observing, sensing, recording, and experimenting. They can help scientists frame different questions, challenge established categories, or notice things that conventional research methods might overlook.
In a place undergoing transformations as rapid and profound as Svalbard, that matters. Art becomes not simply a way of representing change after the fact, but another way of investigating it.
And perhaps another way of asking what a post-carbon future might actually look—and feel—like.
Charlotte Hetherington
The research side of things is a very important pin for Artica because we’re not this place of production. We are a place of research and knowledge and, that’s how I think we can continue to stay in Svalbard is to, to say, this is what we’re actually supporting and this is how we’re helping the community that’s here as well.
So I have to make sure that our funders understand that and that, in terms of the new white paper that’s come out of the government and what they’re hoping to support within the next five years of Svalbard, Artica is very much aligned with all of that.
If you want to have a stable Norwegian community, which is the language that they, that they use, then you need to be able to offer that community all kinds of different things to do and to want to stay here.
And at the moment, Artica is one of the only places that is consistently offering free workshops. We do film screenings, talks, all kinds of different cultural exchange, and that is a big part of people’s lives and what you do in your free time.
Lutz Koepnick
Free time is often hard to come by in Longyearbyen. You might think of it as the end of the world, but it’s a busy place. People are in and out, residents as much as community members. The traffic can be overwhelming. But it can also inspire.
Charlotte Hetherington
The transience here is a big thing. You get so many people coming, from filmmakers to scientists to anthropologists. It’s amazing, the people that come here, and everybody wants to, to chat and talk and to find out about Svalbard and, and what’s going on. And you would think that there would be fatigue and that people would just get sick of that. But they don’t; everyone’s, like, really happy to, to sit down and have a chat. And I think as long as it is an exchange of, of knowledge, and so it amazes me that, that the community is so welcoming. But I think it’s ’cause they care so much about Svalbard and they, they want people to know more about it and connect to it and have a good time and, and learn. And, and that feels very unique to me. It has to be about this place and, and the topics that are going on here.
PART THREE: COLOR STUDIES
Lutz Koepnick
“It has to be about this place.”
One of the most noted artists to have lived and worked on Svalbard was the Norwegian painter Kåre Tveter. Born in 1922, Tveter became known in particular for his paintings of the Arctic landscape—and for his extraordinary attention to light.
Light plays a central role in his paintings of Svalbard. Rather than simply describing the landscape, Tveter used subtle variations of luminosity, shadow, and muted color to evoke the archipelago’s vastness, silence, and constantly changing atmosphere.
His sparse compositions often hover somewhere between abstraction and representation. Mountains and horizons are still there, but they seem almost on the verge of disappearing. Light itself becomes the true subject of the painting.
Svalbard, in Tveter’s work, is not simply a place. It becomes an experience of luminosity, distance, and stillness.
What is largely absent, however, is coal.
The substance that shaped modern Svalbard for more than a century—the black, light-absorbing material extracted from beneath these luminous landscapes—plays virtually no role in Tveter’s paintings.
We visited Svalbard at the height of the polar day. The sun never disappeared behind the hills and mountains surrounding Longyearbyen. Even in the middle of the night, there was light.
So perhaps it’s no coincidence that Jana Harper was drawn to this place’s extraordinary luminosity as well. Throughout our visit, she carried out all kinds of color studies, paying close attention to what the Arctic light did to the landscape—and to our perception of it.
But Jana is not a painter, at least not in any traditional sense of the word.
And unlike Tveter, she never allowed the shadows—the blackness of coal—to slip from view.
For her, the colors above ground and the darkness below it belong to the same landscape.
Jana Harper
I brought a very small packet of Color Aid paper. They’re color samples. It’s a system that was originally devised by Josef Albers, um, to teach color theory. And so there’s every tint, every hue, you know, of color. I don’t know how many hundreds of samples are in the package, but one of the things that I was doing was trying to figure out what the palette of the landscape was, or just see the colors that were there.
When we got up close to the Borabreen glacial shelf, I was looking at this palette of pinks and holding those colors up just in a purely observational way to see what we were seeing. And I made photographs of just holding up the cards in relationship to the object in the landscape.
Lutz Koepnick
Here’s how Jana described her process, and its challenges, in great detail as we sailed along the Borabreen glacial shelf.
Lutz Koepnick
Jana, you seem to be continuing on board today the color experiments, holding up the color cards to the surrounding landscapes. What’s happening?)
Jana Harper
I’m super excited to do these color studies in the presence of the glacier.
The sea is really choppy today, so the boat is up and down a lot. It’s hard to get a still shot, so we’ll see how they turn out. I’m struggling with focus. My camera actually stopped. Uh, I think it froze, so I’ve had to go to my cellphone, which is not my preferred camera to use.
But I’m so interested in the colors of the glacier. There are, of course, a range of blues and whites, but there are also some lavenders and pinks and, um, and of course earth tones, uh, coming from the mountain. Um, so yeah, I’m just excited to see. Yeah.
Lutz Koepnick
And it looked as if halfway through you kind of switched the color palette.
You started with all the blues, but then all of a sudden you had to kind of reshuffle your cards in order to meet those, those other colors that maybe you hadn’t observed first.
Jana Harper
We have really limited amount of time in order to get a shot, and it takes quite a few minutes to arrange the cards and fan them so that they’re even, so that they’re not covering each other over.
And by the time you get the colors out, the boat has moved on. And so i—it’s a matter of, um, you have to make a choice of very few color palettes in a short amount of time to do the tests with. Mm-hmm.
Lutz Koepnick
Keep holding up your cards. Mm-hmm.
Lutz Koepnick
Later in our trip, back on dry land, we hiked up toward the closed site of coal Mine 7. Nearby stand two astonishingly large satellite dishes. They send radio waves high into the atmosphere and listen for the faint echoes that return. Researchers use these signals to gain unique insights into the ionosphere—the charged layer of the atmosphere that affects spacecraft, navigation systems, and even our climate. The dishes are so enormous, and consume so much electricity when they move, that local residents sometimes have to be warned about temporary power outages.
As captivated as she was by the sight of these immense dishes, their orientation toward space, Jana’s attention kept returning to the traces of mining that surrounded us. And here, too, she held up her cards against the landscape—a different set from the ones she had used at the glacier, of course.
Jana Harper
Yeah. So when we went up to Mine 7, um, there are, are of course piles of coal, so yeah, I held up a darker palette of colors. I’m actually not great at color theory, and so I was also learning and teaching myself and trying to see what was in front of me, and literally using those cards as a way to learn about the colors that were there.
Lutz Koepnick
You made photographs of these color studies, but the process itself, holding up these cards in front of landscapes, whether these were glacial landscapes or mining landscapes, was that a form of drawing, of painting, of capturing the landscapes with non-extractive means?
Jana Harper
I think that in order to really see the range of colors in a landscape, you have to engage in slow observation. And I think that the landscape painters of eras past engaged slowly in these landscapes and, you know, they had to mix that palette of colors that they were seeing, and that is also a slow process. I think that the process I engaged in was much quicker than what they may have experienced, but I still was trying to slow it down. And I think that somehow that slowness is part of where the non-extractive thinking and behaving comes from. We’ve heard this a million times, but the verbiage around taking a picture, shooting a camera, you know, it’s, it’s, it’s violent language.
And to be more intentional and be slower in our approach means that we see differently.
Lutz Koepnick
In our next episode, we’ll hear a bit more from Jana about her work with rocks on the archipelago while we also speak with two geologists and one historian 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. For now, however, I simply wanted to know what she remembers or will remember most about her, our, time on the island. Was it the geology, the ice, the legacy of coal mining, or the way all of these forces come together in one extraordinary place?
Jana Harper
Looking back, I remember, first of all, the beauty of the place. Uh, secondly, how bloody complicated it is. How complicated it is between nations, uh, with regard to time, climate, politics, landscape, the human dilemma of ending the coal mines. Uh, all of it. It’s all interrelated. Um, in a stunningly beautiful place that I feel so fortunate that I got to spend some time in.
Lutz Koepnick
Would it be right to say that your collages precisely expressed that kind of ambivalence? They’re beautiful and they are cut-up images.
Jana Harper
Yeah, that’s a great way to put it.
Lutz Koepnick
Thank you.
Thank you.
Jana Harper
My pleasure. Thank you.
CONCLUSION: ON TIME
Lutz Koepnick
Svalbard’s move away from coal is riddled with paradoxes and inconsistencies. Its newer histories of tourism—and even of scientific research—have their own extractive underpinnings, but they also allow us to rediscover Svalbard’s colors and lights: to move beyond the shadows cast by coal and its long history of extraction. Or perhaps to see those colors and lights with greater ambivalence, as Jana’s work suggests.
And yet, much of Svalbard’s attraction today continues to reside below the land’s surface—in darkness, even during the endless daylight of the polar summer.
In our last episode, we took you down into Mine 3, a former coal mine that has been transformed into a popular tourist attraction. We’d be remiss in this episode not to talk about two other sites on Svalbard that have also taken up residence in former mine shafts—inside the elemental interior of the earth.
One of them is, of course, Longyearbyen’s most famous structure today: the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, built into the mountainside not far from Mine 3.
The vault currently safeguards more than 1.3 million seed samples from around the world, stored at a steady minus 18 degrees Celsius. In 2015, seeds originally deposited by a research center in Syria became the first ever to be withdrawn from the vault. They were used to replenish collections of crops—including varieties of wheat—lost amid the violence of the Syrian civil war.
You can’t simply go inside. Access is tightly restricted, and the people who administer the project are based hundreds of miles away.
So all we could do was make our way up to its starkly modernist entrance, jutting out of the mountainside. Jonathan took photographs. Jana held up her color samples. And I took pictures of the two of them picturing the concrete tower.
But seeds aren’t the only things being stored deep inside Svalbard’s mountains.
Not far away is another repository: the Arctic World Archive, a place designed to preserve pieces of our cultural, scientific, and political memory against the uncertainties of the future.
The archive contains a remarkable assortment of materials. GitHub deposited a snapshot of its public open-source repositories. The Vatican Library has preserved manuscripts connected to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Norway’s National Museum deposited digital records of Edvard Munch’s works, including conservation documentation recording their physical condition. UNICEF placed a copy of the Convention on the Rights of the Child inside the archive. And the European Space Agency has deposited scientific materials there as well.
Code. Art. Literature. Human rights. Scientific knowledge.
All of it placed deep underground, inside a former coal mine, as though the mountain itself could become a kind of memory device.
A seed vault for data.
Katrine Loen
It’s very interesting that you mentioned the Seed Vault, because that was part of our inspiration, actually.
Lutz Koepnick
This is Katrine Loen. She is a co-founder of the Arctic World Archive, alongside Rune Bjerkestrand. Her office is in Drammen, a city near Oslo that, in the summer of 2026, was itself confronted with a dramatic wildfire.
Katrine Loen
We, uh, opened it back in 2017, and the ambition is way beyond ourselves, uh, because what we want to do is to preserve, uh, the world’s memory, heritage, and knowledge for the benefit of future generations so they can remember and learn from history.
And we also thought that when, uh, the Seed Vault—if they can have an archive up in the Arctic, why can’t we do it and preserve, uh, the memory of humankind? We have, uh, developed this new, uh, storage technology called the PiqlFilm. That is quite a unique storage medium.
Lutz Koepnick
These are ambitious goals, no doubt. They require all kinds of investments and technologies to preserve data against the odds not just of planetary change, but the logic of planned media obsolescence. How will people in 500 years still be able to read, to mine, this data?
Katrine Loen
We have a recipe. On the film, you can both store digital data—human-readable data—so you can, um, like, you can put actually your, uh, whole computer, like a backup, on the film. And that looks like, uh, huge, uh, QR codes.
Mm-hmm.
8.8 million data points. And so what we do at the beginning of each film roll, we have, uh, like, the source code and the file format. So, um, in the future you can just, um, read it back to your, uh, computer and regenerate the data back. We have developed, like, this, uh, virtual machine. So, uh, you can just, uh, put, like, the, the code of the virtual machine onto the film, and it can automatically read back the data.
The history of the mines is so fascinating because Svalbard used to be down at the, uh, equator many million years ago, and it traveled up, and all these layers of the history of the Earth are then compressed.
And then the miners came and took out coal that is like the history of, uh, Earth, and we bring them back. Also the history of humankind. So that was, like, really, um, uh, fulfilling our dream in a way.
Lutz Koepnick
There is something striking about this transformation. A landscape once tunneled into for the extraction of fossil carbon is now being used for preservation: seeds in one mountain, data in another. Instead of bringing material out of the earth to fuel the present, these projects put things back inside it, hoping they will survive into some uncertain future.
A seed vault for crops. A seed vault for data. Both weathering our precarious times deep inside Svalbard’s mountains. Both, in some sense, meant to fill the void—to repair, perhaps, some of the damage coal mining has left on this remote Arctic island.
I have all kinds of questions about this process. I’m sure you do, too.
Is it really going to work? Is damage caused by extraction ever truly reparable? Or is this simply another of Svalbard’s many paradoxes—another attempt to cover over the ambivalences and tensions that Jonathan Rattner’s and Jana Harper’s work on the archipelago has tried to bring into view?
I’ll let you sit with those questions.
We live in times that often crave purity: clear and clean answers, unambiguous positions, righteous hopes for futures that bear no traces of—and owe no obligations to—the past.
But Svalbard is a messy place. A bloody complicated place, as Jana puts it.
Artists have often imagined it as timeless, elemental to the core. But change is Svalbard’s new normal. Its landscapes tell story after story about the footprints of human intervention, while the tunnels beneath the ground haunt the beauty we hope to encounter above it.
Maybe that’s part of why we crave purity in the first place: to protect experience, thought, and judgment from the vagaries of time. From the knowledge that nothing stays quite what it was.
Go and see Svalbard for yourself, should you ever have the chance. Find your own answers. But allow yourself, too, to hover for a while among its unresolved—and perhaps unresolvable—tensions.
We left Longyearbyen on a fairly sunny Friday in late June. The next sunset was still almost two months away.
Two more months in which the light would perform all kinds of wonders above the barren landscape, for all kinds of other visitors arriving in Svalbard.
As our plane took off from Longyearbyen’s tiny airport, we caught one final glimpse of the gray concrete entrance to the Seed Vault—and, nearby, the portal leading into the Arctic World Archive.
It’s easy—and there are good reasons for doing so—to see Svalbard’s vaults as capitalism’s latest attempt at colonization. Not simply to colonize land, but to colonize past, present, and future. To colonize time. To mine time. To protect ourselves from what time is all about in the first place: change and growth, decay and disappearance, birth and death. Impurity.
But that’s a rabbit hole for another day.
For now, I feel grateful simply to have had the opportunity to come here. To be here. And to accompany our team as we asked difficult questions about what art can do in the face of planetary overheating—and what it might mean to learn to live after coal.
And so, as our plane climbed through the first layers of cloud and Svalbard slowly vanished from sight, I found myself thinking again about those two vaults below us.
Seeds in one mountain. Memory in another.
I thought of them, despite all my doubts, as two small arks for a damaged planet. Not promises that everything can be saved. Not proof that the damage can be undone.
But refuges.
Places built around the stubborn proposition that something should endure.
And perhaps, in that sense, they share something with art at its best: neither can repair the world by itself. Neither can erase what has already happened.
But both can insist that what we carry from the past still matters.
That there will be something worth passing on.
And that our future on this planet might still have a future.