Arctic in mourning and pain

'Code-Stitching' as an Affective Methodology in Climate Debate and Decolonization

Abstract

The article examines how Kalaallit Inuit (Greenlandic) artists navigate a cultural and political context in which, by virtue of their status as Indigenous people, they are granted a particular authority to speak on behalf of the ice and nature. The article explores two very different artistic approaches to this question. It opens with Inuk Jørgensen’s short film Entropy (2024), which initially presents itself as a call from the Inuit to the surrounding society to change course before it is too late. The main part of the article focuses on Jessie Kleemann’s Arkhticós Dolorôs project, consisting of a video performance (2019) and a work of poetry (2021). Drawing on the concept of “code-stitching” (Ramazani 2015), the analysis examines how Kleemann delineates new ways of approaching a contradictory reality – one that, for Indigenous peoples, or perhaps especially for Indigenous peoples, spans languages, cultures, and worldviews. My argument is that Kleemann’s performative explorations of modern Kalaallit Inuit identity can be seen as a political intervention, replacing the fetishized image of the tragic Inuit – frozen in the past and their essence as indigenous – with a remembrance of the historical trajectory. With the insights gained from Kleemann’s work, the article returns to Jørgensen’s film, which can also be read as an emotional intervention in an internal Greenlandic debate on resource exploitation. The analysis demonstrates that decolonization – even when it concerns indigenous peoples – is not automatically synonymous with environmental activism.