Memories of Winters to Come
notes, context & intentions on Northern Drift
Northern Drift forms the last stage in a long research project dealing with the current transitional environment of the High North.
I started “exploring” the European Arctic roughly at the time of the opening of the Northern Sea Route (NSR): a trade route between Asia and Europe that had been many explorers' dream - or haunting - over the last few centuries. While my 2 first research trip in the area took place late 2011 and late 2013, I produced the film over about 3-4 years throughout repeated long residencies, between 2016 and 2018, and a long post-production process coming to completion early 2020. In the process I became somehow acquainted with the region, and developed a true sense of place. Over the course of those residencies, I was lucky enough to encounter a range of “experts” who have been extremely generous in sharing their knowledge. Some of those have become real friends. This personal involvement lies at the heart of this project.
Whereas the whole project set off as an investigation into the paradoxical dynamics of climate change and economic opportunity in the High North, I eventually focused on the border area between Norway and Russia.
In the light of the complex geopolitical force field that has marked the region since its recent colonisation (from mid-19th century), the film has become an epistemological investigation into and a poetic deconstruction of the notions of notions of frontier / border / limit. Indeed the area around which the film is set, is “signified" by a loaded and omnipresent (political) border, and results in a complex system of restricted areas.
Set in an area where the main conflicts and revolutions of the last 100 years have left visible marks, there’s recurrent motives of observation and surveillance, of adversity and enmity, and not in the least of contamination by an undefined and invisible phenomenon. With this history of consecutive wars, the military apparatus lies scattered, mostly hidden, across the vast landscapes. As from the Cold War, the region has become a hot border with strategic importance for both NATO and Russia.
The film questions the very notion of the “visible” in different ways. An inheritance of the Cold War, it is one of the most highly nuclearised regions in the world. (Since decades Russia’s Kola Peninsula has been harbouring the Northern Fleet consisting of an expanding armada of submarines). Consequently, there are ongoing issues with nuclear and chemical waste that are part of the “inheritances from old wars”. I opted to thematise the notion of radiation and contamination as a way to express the problematic realm of the (in)visible.
The apparatus of observation forms a recurrent motive in the film: it opens and closes with views on present-day installations in the new era of digital warfare. The ship in the final shot of the film is known locally as the NATO “Spy Ship”, and is a state-of-the-art warship where the familiar view of canons has made way for all sorts of radars. In that vein, an abandoned and dilapidated geological research facility (the Kola SuperDeep Borehole) that performed pioneering work for decades forms the films axis, revealing the ideological shift that occurred after the fall of the Soviet Union whereby the intrinsic value of scientific knowledge was discarded, but made subservient to commercial interest. To me, this phenomenon is revealing of a global trend that defines our age, rather than being a mere expression of post-Soviet nostalgia.
When I first visited the area, the region was prone to a strange optimism fueled by renewed industrial interests; mining activities were tentatively re-activating former extraction sites and the omnipresent largely discarded military infrastructures, battered by the harsh elements seemed like some kind of ghosts from a time long gone. While the border between Norway and Russia was essentially “open”, a lot of former strategic installations were destined to be repurposed to accommodate ships and industry along the new trade route between Asia and Europe. International corporations and consortia had taken hold in the region with regard to the expansion of globalised trade. But following the conflict in Crimea in 2014, the Northern borderland slowly defaulted back into its cold war mode. Between 2016 and my last stay there, early in 2020, I’ve observed the systematic re-militarisation of the area, and the re-awakened feelings of distrust and suspicion amongst people living on both sides of the border. As a returning visitor, insistent to visit, scientific, industrial and military sites, gradually became a suspicious character myself as it turned out…
A crucial aspect of the film concerns the fact that the region is the homeland to the indigenous Sami - Europe’s last living indigenous culture, whose animistic beliefs are related to the Siberian and Central-Asian shamanic cultures.Successive events in the North’s colonial history have had a major impact on their semi-nomadic culture. First and foremost, they’ve been repelled from the coastal lands where they traditionally took the reindeer, in summer. Over the course of the last 150 years they’ve been forced inland, in the forests along the rivers. The film touches upon this and actually follows this inward movement: this trajectory defines the re-invented geography of the film. In doing so, the film subtly addresses the problematic status of “sovereignty”.
But my personal insistence to go back there, time and again, was strongly - if secretly - motivated by the desire to visit the stone labyrinth that exists at the limit of a fjord in that borderland, a place that is hard to access, whether on foot or by sea. The labyrinth is dated about 800 years old. Whereas its meaning or function is unknown, it lies aligned with cosmic elements and bears witness to pre-colonial customs and knowledge. It took me 7 journeys to eventually make it to what was a truly powerful site, and I got treated my share of magic while walking to its centre. This labyrinth is only briefly shown in the film. But ultimately, I feel this labyrinth represents the journey I undertook to touch upon the “spirit" of a place that could never be subsumed to economic or political prerogatives.
The film reconfigures and re-imagines of the political geography of the region as the edit cuts seamlessly from one side of the border to another - from sites in Norway, to sites in Russia. Through this subjective appropriation, Northern Drift aims first and foremost to question the political divide along which sovereignties are distributed, in a contentious region which is never clearly located or defined. This aesthetic disregard for the border constitutes the essential – if implicit – political gesture of the film: a humble act of restitution.
The notion of "Drift" in the title is a conscious reference to the Situationist notion of psychogeography. Ever since the onset, and the first workshop with Peter Eckersall back in 2016, it’s been our intention to veer away from topical issues and transpose the overbearing politics into something altogether more poetical, philosophical. We have constantly explored ways the treat the border into an unknown “entity" with agency, rather than as a mere political symptom. But again, this poetic stance is ultimately a political one.
While the narration draws on fictional tropes, referencing Chris Marker and Andrei Tarkovsky, it’s nonetheless important to point out that the information conveyed in he film is “factual”. Indeed, the material was collected through many extensive interviews with a number of experts - "agents of knowledge” as we liked to refer to them during the process - with have a deep-seated knowledge of and personal attachment to the region. However, I eventually opted to use a narrator, rather than the original voices of those interviewed. The reason therefore was twofold.
On the one hand, it was to do with the confusion of language that arose from the many interviews (taken in Russian, Norwegian, or in English) and the inevitable “translational loss” due to the fact that always in the process someone was not at home in the conversational language. In short, what was understood during these conversations didn’t always reflect what was being said – and I became aware that this issue was prejudicial. A first edit of the film drew on the “multiplicity of voices” from the original interviews, but I disliked how the differences in language somehow re-affirmed the prevalence of the divide I was addressing and questioning. It seemed the different languages became yet another expression of an immutable “border”. The initial question during interviews was “What is the Border?”. But it became clear to me that the phenomenon of the border should be addressed speculatively, as an unknown and that the narrator should be merely trying to grasp the meaning this notion. On the other hand, some of the information was collected off-record during personal conversations. It seemed to me that I should not breach the confidence and trust I was granted, and should somehow “protect my sources”. Moreover, some conversations would occur without recording equipment, and my personal notes became an important asset in the writing of the film. In that sense, the first person narrator seemed like the most earnest way to convey information, while it affirms the vantage position of the outsider. Ultimately, through this first-person narrator the film addresses the pitfalls of ethnographic cinema, and the problematic position of the participant - observer.
As from its initial intention, the film aims to neutralize the adversarial and polarizing tone of rising nationalist discourses, exacerbated in the Northern border zone by re-enactments of its legacy of conflicts and its curling up into dependable forms of enmity. But the film’s investigation revealed the paradoxical and unresolved tension between inward, exclusionary tendencies and the expansionist tendency carried by global consortia eyeing the exploitation of new maritime territories. These dualities are reflected in the antithetical structure of the film.
Alexis Destoop, 2020