Can we talk about a cold Arctic without images of icebergs?
The geo-aesthetical Arctic and Jette Bang’s films (1938-1939)
Keywords:
Geo-aesthetics, Jette Bang, Arctic image production, film practice, archival research, editing Kalaallit NunaatAbstract
This article introduces and reflects upon the discovery of a handful of long-forgotten films by Jette Bang (1914-1964) – the Danish female photographer renowned for her photographs of colonized Kalaallit Nunaat. As a cultural archive, the films – showing the country’s early modernization – have been the subject of studies looking at the representation of ‘Greenland’ in Denmark. Different from that, this article approaches Bang’s film as an aesthetic archive that challenges the conventional geo-aesthetics of cold. In the context of the Arctic as a hotspot for climate change in the present, sold to us throughout the 20th century, the article thus engages with how questions pertaining to representations of the Arctic cannot be separated from questions pertaining to image making (presentation) as knowledge practice. In light of how images of and from the Arctic are assumed to have a decisive effect on the world and prompt (future) action, due to the region’s key role in cultural imaginings of the planet’s future and its political and ecological systems, the aim is ultimately to address the risk of aestheticizing and imposing colonial frameworks of imagination in the production of the Arctic’s future(s).
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