Anthology of Water: Residency in Svalbard
For sixteen days the ship followed the coasts of the archipelago, revealing new landscapes of ice and water every day. I shot hundreds of sequences in slow motion, eight static takes of about thirty minutes in real time, and kept a logbook on the memory of images and on the presence of the body in the landscape.
On site, the first form of the anthology came into focus. Conversations with the guides and the researchers fed a reflection on how the Arctic is represented in the context of climate change. Among those encounters, a meeting with the director of the Longyearbyen library opened a line of research around a possible community project between that library and a Montréal institution. Built on a dialogue of archives and screenings, the idea would connect contemporary footage shot on site with local archives, and give the communities concerned access to those images, allowing memory and ways of seeing to be shared between two distant territories.
With the artist Myriam Behman, a parallel project also began. Over the last two days we stopped filming and simply wrote what we were seeing, trying to print the landscapes in memory rather than in the camera. A correspondence came out of it: each month we send one another a letter describing our memory of those places. The letters stay sealed, to be read together in a few years.