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Joachim Koester:Greenwich
Meridian
by Lars Bang Larsen
Utopia is, first of all, an island, necessarily isolated, a drama
wrapped around the ambitions, shame, and conflicts of a civilization,
a frame wrapped around the hope of its redemption. Utopia is founded
on aspirations toward change, the desire to better people's lives.
But inevitably, the horizon you attempt to change--that is to say,
the culture reflected in the features of your dreams--was displaced
from the very beginning. The failed utopian dream rubs in society's
ills.
In the autumn of 1953, nineteen Inuit and one representative of
the Royal Canadian Mounted Police landed at Resolute Bay in Cornwallis
Island in the Far North, a pivotal location in the history of the
quest for the Northwest Passage. The Inuit were "volunteers," gathered
from their homes in Port Harrison, Quebec, over 1000 miles away,
to form the experimental body of a pioneer project initiated by
the Canadian government. Other small groups had also been compulsorily
transferred to islands in the same area. The official objective
was to relocate the Inuit from the allegedly overpopulated areas
of northern Quebec to Resolute Bay, which 400 years before had been
home to a Thule Eskimo village, conspicuously marking this as a
"compassionate return."
Retrospectively, the project functioned as a cover-up; in 1993,
in front of running cameras, Canadian government officials admitted
to the fact that the Resolute experiment had been a part of Canadian
Cold War tactics in the Far North. In the face of perceived threats
of territorial expansion above the Arctic Circle from the U.S.,
Russia, Norway and Denmark, Canada felt compelled to reoccupy these
remote islands to reinforce its presence, initiating colonization
by proxy, as it were. The Inuit were thus planted as human flagpoles
at Cornwallis Island, "perhaps one of the dreariest and most desolate
places ever to be seen," 1).
In 1971, the Canadian government approached the architect Ralph
Erskine with the intention of having him construct a racially integrated,
model settlement. Erskine, whose research and innovative ideas regarding
Arctic cities had already earned him an international reputation,
had emigrated before the war from England to Sweden, where he believed
a new, modern architecture was being forged. There, he tried to
develop a Nordic regionalist style tempered by a social conscience:
"I plead for poetry and beauty that is created out of real conditions;
I plead for an architecture which expresses our dreams of a more
just society. " 2)
The development at Resolute was conceived in the form of a classic
Greek amphitheater which, acknowledging the direction taken by the
political will, was to integrate the two elements of the town, namely
the new Inuit settlers and the men affiliated with the Canadian-American
airforce base to which Resolute had been home since 1947. For climatic
reasons, the site would be shielded by a protective ring of terrace
houses; the existing houses of the Inuit would be temporarily relocated
into the center, along with other, upgraded homes. Additional features
were to include a shopping mall covered by a glass dome, an ice-hockey
rink, a hotel, and so on.
For Erskine, the dubious relocation of the Inuit was outweighed
by the opportunity to improve their living conditions. Here was
a chance to realize an ideal Arctic city, grouping disparate structures,
services, and bodies within a circumscribed whole designed to nurture
a sense of community in those inhabiting an isolated part of the
world. However, ErskineÕs initial proposal of collective living
and open-access housing was summarily rejected, primarily due to
fears of confrontation between the Inuit and the airbase men. Ordinary
single-family quarters were favored instead. In 1978, shortly after
the existing shanties and military huts had been moved, the future
of the community seemed to be in jeopardy. The airbase did not receive
the expected upgrade, thus reducing the need for new accommodation.
Additionally, the adjustments necessary in the face of potential
conflict between the two groups meant an unforeseen escalation in
cost. Meanwhile, problems occasioned by the extreme cold had struck
the first stage of construction work, the terrace houses, representing
yet another financial obstacle. In the end, Erskine's New Resolute
was abandoned after the completion of only a small section of the
overall scheme, a structure now decaying on the eastern edge of
town.
Joachim Koester's Row Housing (1999) depicts outbuildings and shelters
occupying the site Erskine selected for the new town, now languishing
in varying states of disrepair. These are constructions that shouldn't
have been there, circling the synecdoche of the enormous absence
that was the reason for their initial displacement: a single building,
the sole, greenish artifact of Erskine's long-ago dream. Row Housing
is a series of grim, desolate images showing the predictable outcome
of colonialist intervention in the Inuit community, remnants of
a dominant discourse's violent--and not only symbolically so--domination
of the real. Perhaps what makes us truly uncomfortable is their
depiction of the slow-motion decay of the whole notion of utopian
regeneration, the chaos that ensues from the vainglorious desire
to abolish history, and begin anew.
Koester's motifs are disorderly in every sense: messy, provisory,
displaced, deterritorialized, but also strangely eternal, as if
freeze-dried. A small sleigh waiting forever for the snow. Whale
bones heaped across a roof. A blue pickup truck without wheels,
going nowhere. And in one photo, if you look closely enough, children
playing in the distance. Confronted with such images, it becomes
clear that a total view of the dispersed township is not to be.
The houses, so fragile the earth could just shrug them off, are
uncommunicative, at once too close and too real. Your gaze recedes
into the vacant, razor-sharp horizon line of cyan and gray. It's
as if Erskine's all-embracing plan still haunts these barren images,
a ghost frame banishing for all time their documentary slant toward
the wonderful world that almost was. Resonating quietly here--Koester
favors photography, video, and film-is the history of narrative
within modernism, whose pursuit of universal visual codes itself
comprises a utopian quest. This work takes in utopianism's literary
heritage, as well as notions like Georges Perec's "infra-ordinaire,"
which opens onto the ambiguity inherent in all descriptive acts.
Within Koester's thusly relativist logic, geographical and architectural
sites, and utterances about them, apportion and supplement one other,
chase each other around. In Day for Night, Christiana (1996), for
instance, the bluish scenery in the images enhances the ambivalent
status of the anarchistic "free state" of Copenhagen's Christiania,
a site at once dreamlike and abjectly real, both hippie utopia and
case study in decay and redevelopment. Sandra of the Tulip House,
or How to Live in a Free State (1997-99) is a 70-minute, 16-millimeter
film and multi-channel installation produced in collaboration with
the American artist Matthew Buckingham. Applying the myth of Christiania
as a laboratory of freedom to their own work, Buckingham and Koester
acknowledge their status as outsiders in the local culture by fabricating
what is patently a fictional framework. The work's mix of historical
photographs and new footage from the district is organized around
the figure of Sandra, a temporary resident of Christiania, whose
voiceover teeters between unraveling and articulating the film's
visual thread. Here, present-day Christiania overlaps its distant
past as a military base, its recent utopian or counter-cultural
past, and its possible future. What is revealed is the complexity
of Christiania's claim to "freedom," which doesn't--could never-figure
anywhere except within its own borders, in this non-place where
unfocused desires and tawdry conditions, despite all ameliorative
efforts, are accepted for precisely what they are, i.e., a world
of ramparts and old barracks fencing off glances from the outside,
rife with suspense, weighted down by the will toward weightlessness.
Indeed, however different their intentions, modes of existence and
discursive regimes, both Christiana and Resolute Bay testify to
the fact that utopia isn't a radically reformulated society lying
somewhere beyond or ahead of us, but precisely that which unites
the real with our always already fictive apprehension of it.
In Greenland, terra firma exists only in the form of a thin archipelago
curving up the island's coastline. Otherwise, the former Danish
colony is all inland ice; were it to suddenly melt, all that would
remain would be a narrow, circular rim of rocks outlining what had
been the world's largest island. Untitled (Russell's Glacier) (1999),
a slide work with superimposed text from one of the first explorers
on the ice, is an attempt to focus on the West's inability to understand
such a landscape. Inland ice is the landscape as other, both inconceivable
and marginal, eminently hostile to life and growth, impervious to
"cultivation." In the Arctic, you cannot navigate by gauging difference.
On the inland ice there are no features to look for, no landscape
to read: there is just the frigidity of whiteness, a stupefying
repetition without a single break in the vast, soft snowscape. Territorial
colonialism is in this case geography as fabrication, a geo-fiction
that arises from the slippage between vocabulary and experience.
As John Moss writes: "When you encounter Arctic passages, it is
difficult to sort out your own familiarity with the landscape, shaped
by memories of previous reading or by dreams or empirical experience,
from shared assumptions looping through the language, gathering
inchoate particulars of actual or imagined journey into line. Conventions
of the text precede, determining how the wilderness is read; limits
of the narrative become the boundaries of landscape, and grammar
topography. Images of elsewhere define the terrain and make the
alien appear accessible. The imagined Arctic, shaped by the imperatives
of culture into which it is being written, is only a reminder of
what is real" .3)
Greenland instantiates the metaphor of the unexplored, the white
spot on the map, the degree zero of visuality. Its hyberbolic, prosaic
name reveals that the terrain had to be identified in terms of recognizable
attributes in order to impose on it colonial discipline and hierarchy.
If the disappearance of Sir John Franklin in 1845 at Resolute BayÑin
the middle of an attempt to locate the Northwest Passage, in a ship
equipped with 129 men and the most advanced technology of the time--confirmed
the popular image of the Arctic as a mysterious and horrifying wasteland,
then fictions, imaginings, and metaphors were necessary counter-strategies
to control its untenable difference. The white inland ice does hold
horror at its heart--in the real political sense, Greenland is a
place of darkness--but the whiteness has no heart you can penetrate,
no darkness that differentiates it: you can only lay claim to this
place as the idea of a landscape, and only possess its circumference,
never the territory of its surface. "A white patch for a boy to
dream gloriously over," as Conrad writes. The inland ice is a mirrorless
house of mirrors.
Koester's latest work addresses the fact that today, the whole world
is postcolonial, not just those territories, peoples, races, creeds,
and discourses that were once colonized. Colonialism represents
the cannibalization of the culture of both colonizer and other.
It remains as a stain in the real after all the colonies have been
indemnified, re-imagined as free. On the border between fiction
and fact, overlapping narrative modes and cultural geographies point
to strange and powerful forces within the colonizer's culture, blurring
place and utopian non-place; and individual as well as collective
past, present, and future.
Lars Bang Larsen
1) According to papers of the HMS Assistance dating from 1854. The
Assistance came to the rescue of Sir John Franklin who had disappeared
several years earlier in his attempt to find the Northwest Passage.
2) Ralph Erskine:
Building in the Arctic, 1954.
3) Enduring Dreams: An Exploration of Arctic Landscape, Anansi Press
1994.
First published in
Art/Text, Feb-April
2000
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