Expanded rephotography

The research project is based on the premise that we need new ideas about the complex effect of global warming and climate change as a result. Artistic research can expand the tools that science has to visualize these effects. Climate change is a reality and it affects the Arctic most of all areas on earth.

The project develops a visual tool that gives us the image of a changing landscape and allows us to travel through time with the help of historical images that can be linked with images from today's views of the places we can visit. We are trying new ways of talking about an issue that concerns everyone, but which it is of great importance that the generations that now have power take very seriously to ensure a sustainable future for future generations. Art has an ability to speak directly to people and perhaps that ability can be part of a solution to find extended models to show connections over time and the ongoing and future effects of climate change.

In the project, we work with an idea of ​​what we have called ‘the long story’, which is about creating a dialogue with history in an interdisciplinary perspective and through its examples talk about the present and changes in nature, caused by human influence. With artistic methods and expressions, we want to create the 'long story' where history and the present meet and create a platform for a story that does not have a defined end but is open forward and where the story through transparency and collaboration can be passed on to the next generation of artists, researchers and the committed public to follow up and decide where they want it to go. The idea here is to break the doomsday perspective that increasingly permeates the notion of climate change. The long story aims to tell that everything is connected and the value of nature in a way that includes a notion that a healthy and living earth is a basis for our living conditions.

We have chosen Magdalenefjorden on Svalbard as the focus of the project as we have several years of experience of working there and here is a historical basis that gives us 400 years of stories from the site and we know from experience from fieldwork that the fjord has undergone a great change and that the landscape is changing at such a rapid pace that it is of great value to document the place and initiate a 'long story' as a tool to talk about how the Arctic landscape is indirectly and sometimes directly affected by our lifestyle and how it plays a important role in the global ecosystem. The result of the project will be an exhibition including a Virtual Reality (VR) experience based on 180° video and a book that deepens and presents the different parts of the project.