25 years later...
Caught in the archaic dichotomy of culture vs. nature, the Norwegian Energy Act Regulation stipulates that upon decommissioning a wind power plant, the landscape must be restored to its natural state. However, by viewing this critical infrastructure as a mythical figure, this speculative research strives to establish a different way of caring for the blasted landscape.
67 wind turbines by Siemens Gamesa, each standing 80 meters tall with a rotordiameter of 130 meters are situated on Kvitfjell and Rødfjell, Kvaløya - built directly on top of the spring pastures traditionally belonging to the Sami reindeer herding district 14. I enter this land with a profession whose planning of infrastructures have been employed as a tool for cultural imperialism for the last 400 years.
"On screen, the Arctic appears as a melting pot of images, cartographies, emerging technologies, prospects, industrial residue, tubes, sticks, dust, humiliated species, possible hazards, and echoes of violence."
- Kjerstin Elisabeth Uhre, Perforated Landscapes: a study on contested prospects in Sápmi, 2020
The Norwegian Energy Act Law strives to be express a certain understanding of nature in the landscape. Though undoing the infrastructures can hugely benefit the natural restoration, it also effectively hides the wounded mountain that was exploded to lay down the roads and rock adapters. Whose landscapes should be understood, sensed and valued? The study challenges the notion of "natural state" by merging three worlds:
1. Rock art engravings from hunter-fisher-gatherers
2. Traditional Sami understanding of nature
3. Night elfs in World of Warcraft
This is done by playing with the role of the shaman. The shaman appears not only in rock art throughout the arctic circumpolar, but also as the noaide in sami culture, and as the druid in World of Warcraft. They are a central figure in the knowledge of nature, and possess the ability to transform into animals, and travel between different cosmic worlds.
Even the green shift, and the modern sciences, bring along their own set of myths and rituals. Stones, loose masses and naked mountain wounds are arranged to alter the terrain, bearing witness to the story of the landscape.
"If, however, one avoids the linear, progressive, Time's (killing) arrow mode of the Techno Heroic, and redefines technology and science as primarily cultural carrier bag rather than weapon of domination, one pleasant side effect is that science fiction can be seen as a far less rigid, narrow field, not necessarily Promethean or apocalyptic at all..."
Ursula K. le Guin, The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, 1986
