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There are no maps for these territories *

The aim for this studio has been to broaden our understanding of complexity – to learn to use complexity as a planning tool and to extend our intellectual and practical tools as planners, architects and not at least as human beings. The recognition that we ourselves, and everything surrounding us is in a continuous and inevitable transformation, enforces awareness towards the transforming energies – energies which are unfolding along different trajectories in time and space - shaping complex spatial patterns deeply connected to the changes in the landscape – a landscape which holds the enigma of time and histories as different as the rotation of continental sheets or the ephemeral conception of a notion or an idea.

Our intention has been to see architecture and planning as on-going and never completed processes as life in itself is never finished or concluded. If you really were to take a slice through time - says (the British geographer) Doreen Massey in her book: for space - it would be full of holes, of disconnections, of tentative half-formed first encounters. ‘Everything is connected to everything else’ can be a salutary political reminder that whatever we do has wider implications than perhaps we commonly recognise. But it is unhelpful if it leads to a vision of an always already constituted holism. The ‘always’ is rather that there are always connections yet to be made, juxtapositions yet to flower into interaction, or not, potential links which may never be established. Loose ends and on going stories. ‘Spaces’, then, can never be that completed simultaneity in which all interconnections have been established, in which everywhere is already (and at that moment unchangingly) linked to everywhere else. (Massey, 2005)

The studio has been an open and inviting testing ground for experimental approaches towards the landscape and the practices going on in the landscape – an attempt to do mapping of even realms that are yet to come – to use words from (the French philosophers) Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. In our effort to develop a profound understanding of the landscape and to find new approaches to the changes explicitly going on, we need to investigate and experiment – to map and to research along lines and trajectories that have not necessarily been investigated before – to make connections and juxtapositions that are not obvious, and to find spatial connections and openness that are not prejudiced or closed. Make a map, not a tracing. Says Deleuze and Guattari in their text about the rhizome: What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it is entirely oriented towards an experimentation in contact with the real (…) A map has multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back to the same. The map has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged ‘competence’ (Deleuze and Guattari, 1980)

This means that the mapping will not be completed or conclusive but be following tracks or lines of flight. According to (the Mexican philosopher) Manuel De Landa - Deleuze and Guattari use lines of flight as something to follow and something expected to redeem new responses – as an operator which transcends the real and ascends to the virtual (Manuel De Landa,

There are no maps for these territories - lecture by Gisle Løkken at BAS, 20 December 2011http://emergingarcticlandscapes.blogspot.com/

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2002). In her essay ’Loosing Control keeping Desire’ (the French/Rumanian architect and philosopher) Doina Petrescu elaborates the meaning of the concept: Guattari and Deleuze’s ‘lines’ challenge the usual designer thinking about ‘lines’. They are an abstract and complex enough metaphor to map the entire social field, to trace its shapes, its borders, its becomings. They can map the way ‘life always proceeds at several rhythms and at several speeds’. They map individual cracks and collective breaks within the segmentation and heterogeneity of power. The ‘line of flight’, ligne de fuite, is defined not only as a simple line, but as the very force of a tangle of lines flung out, transgressing thresholds of established norms and conventions, towards unexpected manifestations, both in terms of socio-political phenomena and in individual destinies (Petrescu, 2001).

Emerging Arctic landscapes - Landscapes in Change – Arctic tipping pointsOur field of investigation has been the northern, Arctic landscapes. Until the beginning of the 20th century the high-arctic landscapes were with few exceptions seemingly unspoiled and undisturbed by people, while the sub-arctic areas were characterized by close-nature usage mainly from ethnic minorities, nomads and settlers that lived of husbandry, farming, hunting and fishing.

Myths and notions about the Arctic have defined the territory since Pytheas in Antiquity launched the idea of Thule – a land behind and north of all known land – so unreachable and unknown that it had to be full of precious assets –gold and treasures in a mixture of divine elevation and earthly drama, of storm, ice and cold. The myth holds a vital expectation, but also respect for the unknown and what is potentially dangerous. In this world of desolation and infinity - behind the myth - a complex interplay of people, animals, birds and plants have taken form and developed for several thousands of years. These are ecological systems that resist large parts of both frost and drama - in an environment that is ruthlessly lethal to it or those who cannot adapt – ecological systems, that in their subtle balance have proven extremely vulnerable when facing the global forces that in our time invade the Arctic with an increasing strength. Researchers describe the changes taking place in the Arctic today as a series of changes or ‘tipping points’ that in their extreme consequence are ‘points of no return’. This entails a permanent extinction of species – and a permanent loss of known ecological systems. This could be alteration in marine micro ecology with the consequence of changed sprawling and migration patterns of fish stocks - or it could be permanent loss of natural landscapes because of mineral extraction or construction of heavy infrastructure.

From the first exploration period in the late 16th century, the northern oceans became an arena for extensive fishing, sealing and whaling - being in reality equal to Europe’s first oil boom (a direct and dramatic consequence of this hunt was the near extinction of a large part of the whale stock). While rationality and myth historically existed side by side – not least in cartography and descriptions of distant countries and oceans – the conception of divine


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mysticism rooted in geographical notions is now certainly gone. In our satellite age one has on the contrary created modern stories about earth-bound wealth, hidden inside the mountain, in the earth, in the ocean and in the sea bed – developed through large-scale investigations and prospects, and carried out by large multi-national economical interests. The Arctic is not only the territory of possibilities created by historical expectations and myths, but is today referred to by modern mining companies as ’one of the world’s last natural resource frontiers’.

Landscape as spatial condition - Historically, little attention has been aimed towards these ‘pre-industrial’ landscapes from architects and landscape architects. Alessandra Ponte describes the Arctic as territories that have never been traditionally represented as landscapes; they have not been framed, beautified and represented neither as ‘nature’ nor as landscapes until they were appropriated by the energy producing industry and mediated as landscapes of energy (Janike Larsen in http://www.aho.no/en/AHO/News-and-events/Calendar/2010/Guest-lecture-30092010/).

Within the field of landscape architecture we rather see an increasing tendency to focus on the ‘design’ of landscapes: as the development of new uses for post-industrial land or as transformations of existing land into new park landscapes in connection with strong forces of urbanization. A common feature that may be observed is how nature becomes artificial, generic and is reduced to a design object simply through processes of medialization and conceptualization, and how physical transformations often are linked to consumption – visual or otherwise.

The major part of the Arctic may still be seen as ‘genuine’ nature and as cognitive landscapes, and therefore demand a different approach and different means of investigation than those applied for already ‘domesticated’ landscapes. Global warming, environmental disturbances and political pressures combine to create a completely new physical ‘ground’ which puts great demands on the enfolding response of architects and landscape architects. The need to develop a critical awareness and alternative forms of knowledge in connection with this development transcends the traditional design focus.

Landscape as a concept was in its origin a description of a region or a geographical or administrative area defined by human activity or habitation. During the 16th century, the term evolved etymological through the use by Dutch painters to describe natural or rural sceneries, as artistic interpretations. In the 20th century, landscape has by the (American geographer) Richard Hartshorne (1899-1992) been defined as ‘the external visible (or touchable) surface of the earth. This surface is formed by the outer surface, those in immediate contact with the atmosphere, of vegetation, bare earth, snow, ice, or water bodies or the features made by man.’ This also includes movable objects, but it’s ignoring what is under the ground, the ocean or the sky, or what is perceived by other than sight (like sounds).


http://www.aho.no/en/AHO/News-and-events/Calendar/2010/Guest-lecture-30092010/




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The fact that the notion of a landscape includes the human factor opens for a wide use of the concept including cityscape, or human made, artificial landscapes, and even interiors. It also makes clear the distinction between natural or primeval landscapes (as pre-human landscapes), and landscapes shaped by human impact. In a more resent popular understanding of the conception of the landscape it is reflected a particular meaning, referring to an area of the Earth’s surface, and a general meaning that can be seen and observed. In geography and other disciplines as landscape architecture and architecture (but also within other social sciences as social anthropology) there is a tendency to use the conception of the landscape covering all these understandings – both as an objective assessment and a subjective perception and experience. Without any seemingly limitations the conception of the landscape tend to be more liquid and flexible – covering the whole field of ecology, environment and context – both physically and cognitively. To give clear meaning to the concept, landscape commonly has to be explained through an accompanying describing word as a compound-word like: landscape architecture, interior landscape, polar landscape, tourist landscape etc. This understanding of the landscape implies a radically different coding of the landscape then simply something romantic and aesthetic, or something only relating to natural conditions. It is a conception that implies acceptance of hidden knowledge and for the landscape as something utterly complex.

Alterations through time, forces the global ecology towards a constantly increasing complexity. While there in science in the nineteenth-century according to John Lechte, was a concern to create equilibrium and stasis with the above all aim to eliminating chance – it was by the end of the century developed an acceptance for science as a concept of open systems, irreversible time and of indeterminacy (Lechte, 1995 in Massey, 1005). This is creating the basis on which the landscape has to be investigated and understood as spatial narration of events and practice. An open and progressive reading of the landscape as both an objective and subjective experience gives validity to the multiplicity of practices connected to the landscape – also including natural processes and history – the landscape can be seen as an assemblage of spatiality and interconnecting trajectories – a time space derivation. What if [space] presents us with a heterogeneity of practices and processes? Doreen Massey asks. Then it will be not an already interconnected whole but an ongoing product of interconnections and not. Then it will be always unfinished and open. This arena of space is not firm ground on which to stand. In no way is it a surface. This is space as the sphere of a dynamic simultaneity, constantly disconnected by new arrivals, constantly waiting to be determined (and therefore always undetermined) by the construction of new relations. It is always being made and always therefore, in a sense, unfinished (except that ‘finishing’ is not on the agenda). (Massey, 2005)

This way of reading landscape and practices as an infinite dynamism correlates with the Deleuze/Guattarian idea about the rhizome: unlike the trees or their roots, the rhizome connects any point to any other point, and its traits are not necessarily linked to traits of the same nature; it brings into play


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very different regimes of signs, and even non sign states. (…) Unlike the graphic arts, drawing, or photography, unlike tracings, the rhizome pertains to a map that must be produced, constructed, a map that is always detachable, connectable, reversible, modifiable, and has multiple entryways and exits and its own lines of flight. (Deleuze and Guattary, 1980)

Our entrance in the Arctic is an undefined field of explorations, and it opens for spatial connectivity both to landscapes and to people. The investigations are subjective and individual experiences but have to be made evident to write the future stories of the Arctic – again using Deleuze and Guattari: Writing has nothing to do with signifying. It has to do with surveying, mapping, [and again:] even realms that are yet to come (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980).

Mapping of the unforeseen - In the studio we started with the utterly individual expectations towards the territory – tested and developed along a road trip from Hammerfest to Murmansk – as a narration and a movement through a cross section of seemingly remote arctic landscapes and intrusive developments: From the oil-driven growth of Hammerfest which already has entered the oil economy through the 50-billion ($1billion) base: Melkøya – we could study the city evolving as a mono economy based on the fishing industry through annihilation and regeneration during and after the WWII, and most recently the entrance into a new phase of mono-economy based on oil and gas. Via the new urbanization and entrepreneur based growth of Alta with a history rooted in 7000 years old rock carvings, we entered the core areas of the surviving sami culture in Kautokeino and Karasjok – deeply dependent on unspoiled landscape pastures for herds of reindeers, and also bearers of profound knowledge about durable, close to nature living. We visited the decaying and mythical city of Vardø, which seems to be facing a new era of attention, initiatives and creative undercurrents. We encountered the silence and presence of great nature in the abandoned but slowly renovating fishing village of Hamningberg. The trip took us to the highly multicultural Kirkenes – struggling between the old mining industry and a pending new oil economy – passing by the mined and destructed landscapes of Bjørnevatn – crossing the Russian border and the anticipatory border zone, into the remote and desolated landscapes, cities and settlements on the Kola-peninsula - via the heavily polluted landscapes in Nikkel – not to say dead and retarded to a post glacial condition. The trip ended in Murmansk – a city in decline and transformation, from an industrial harbour and soviet military stronghold with a population of nearly half a million – to an expected population reduction to a quarter of a million in few years - a city in desperate need for renovation of the building mass – and with a unresolved future political significance and an uncertain transition to a modernized economy. Encountering human energy - Along the journey we met people living and working in the landscape – with different anticipations – within fields of planning and preparation for new economies, or within different performances of everyday practice:Among many we met: Snorre Sundquist, director Husbanken Hammerfest: explaining the role of Husbanken in a historical and contemporary perspective


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- Reidar Nilsen, journalist: giving historical background of Hammerfest's shifting monocultures; whaling, fishing and now oil & gas - Sunniva Skålnes, architect / dr, senior advisor at Samediggi Kautokeino: untangling the misconception of northern landscapes as untouched, enabling us to read its inscribed signs of history, narratives: cultures, or Unni Steinfjell, duodji teacher Kautokeino: elucidating how practices and survival are connected to the ability to read details in the landscape.

We met people like Svein Harald Holmen, project manager: highlighting the importance of committed engagement and synergetic processes for renovation of historical buildings and sites or Tormod Amundsen, architect: exemplifying how a special interest and expertise can develop unexpected potentials; finding, facilitating and promoting ornithological sites. Thomas Nilsen from the Barents-secretary talked about the large view and prospects in the Barents region: namely a new border relation of unknown potential – and not at least the Fisherman in Kiberg: running high on king crab economy. Jhonny Andersen: the true northern multiplicity man: fireman, fish-farmer, crab fisher, tourist guide, our excellent bus driver, and a lot more - or Vanja Madsen & Guro Vrålstad, project managers at Pikene på broen Kirkenes: presenting mind the map; cultural complexity and initiative as a subversive act in a masculine environment – the Swedish mining engineer in Bjørnevatn iron mines: representing the modern migrant worker and the structure of resource extraction in remote landscapes. Igor Shaitanov: our 24/7 indefatigable guide and gate opener to the undercurrents of Murmansk culture and night life – introducing Dimitriy Borovkov, owner of Power Hit Radio and planner in the governor’s office: an overwhelming source of information and critical reflections about life in Murmansk in combination with a multiple involvement in cultural and political undercurrents – the anonymous garage man: representing the Russian man in his kingdom; the garage, and even Evgeny Goman, theatre producer and director, teacher and idealist: working day and night for the idea of realising the first youth house in Murmansk – in spite of a continuous bureaucratic resistance.

The studio has brought us experts and storytellers of different kind and of different background: In Bergen we started out with Professor Paul Wassman presenting geopolitics and ecology in the Arctic - Magnus Jørgensen, architect and researcher with experience from students work in the Barents region and Joar Nango, architect and artist unfolding the indigenous peoples use of the landscape. Through a seminar with former diploma students at BAS: Tone Berge, Olafia Zoega, Anette Basso; Ina Bakke Sem-Olsen and Iwan Thomson, we experienced architectural approaches to various Arctic contexts. As a mid term reminder we met geographer and historian Peder Roberts, leading us back into a geopolitical understanding of history and conflicts, and not least architect and professor Catharina Gabrielsson refreshing the theoretical foundation for the studio: field work and practised space as architecture and how findings can apply to a context.

DAV: In between the different assignments of more conceptual nature we searched a deeper encounter with Sami philosophy and mysticism. The


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modern shaman and Dr. juris: Ánde Somby led the students to a different understanding of space and landscapes through his joik-thinking, and through his rhetorical practice - gathered around the bonfire in the circular space of the lavvo. The Sami understanding of the landscape, the specific knowledge, and the language used to describe the complex content of the landscape is so closely connected to survival that disturbances now appearing in the landscape threaten to wipe out not only a way of living, but a profound understanding of natural processes that have linked humanity to nature even through history of heavy industrialisation and alienation from nature. Without a profound understanding of the landscape, and without a language to validate its consistency, the landscape could easily be redefined into a commodity and laid open for exploitation.

What we are mapping is the extraordinary and peculiar, but also the everyday normal – the layers of everyday experience and everyday practices which eventually forms the spatial performance in the landscape; the hyper normal. A hyper-mapping might be more subjective and give focus to values related to the context of the plan, than being strictly neutral and objective. We consider the studio as a comprehensive learning and a thorough investigation on layers of information that often reach beyond the immediate reading or perception of the landscape. To be able to see and understand, we study various phenomena trough different concepts to charge the investigation with expectations:

Vulnerability: The notion of vulnerability is invariably related to the concept of life – either it is human life or life in nature as such. The consciousness of mortality is disturbing and exposes life as fragile. Life does not exist in closed systems, but does always relate to other life forms or systems of varying extent and size - in these relations dependency occur, and not at least a continuous struggle for a position of surviving. It is a slow drama that has been going on since the creation of earth, and encompasses all natural systems of all scales from the smallest biotope to global circuits.

New Hierarchies: The ascendance of information industries and the growth of a global economy are inextricably linked, and have contributed to what Saskia Sassen calls: a new geography of centres and margins (The global city: strategic site/new frontier, 2000). This means that former structures of economical or political hegemony have radically changed (and are still changing rapidly) with the consequence of a displacement (in economical sense), in both geographical significance of cities and places, and in the valuation of different kind of labour: Financial services produce superprofits while industrial services barely survive. These are phenomena that are clearly observed in the geography of the north – and have caused historical alterations in demography and migration patterns – tendencies that in every way increase.

Flexibility: When adverse global forces and global economical fluctuations influence even the most remote places, it seems more than ever necessary to build a flexibility outside the global consumer economy - to be resilient to


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economic alterations, to be prepared for devastating environmental impacts or to foresee future effects from expected climate changes. (The English anthropologist, biologist and cyberneticist;) Gregory Bateson expressed the need for flexibility in his book: Steps to an ecology of mind: There shall be a matching between the flexibility of people and that of the civilization. There shall be diversity in the civilization, not only to accommodate the genetic and experimental diversity of persons, but also to provide the flexibility and ‘preadaptation’ necessary for unpredictable change. (Bateson, 1972/2000). Even though Bateson wrote this paper in 1970, it contains a strong prediction of the coming climate changes and a foreseeing of the challenges that planners and architects have to deal with concerning profound ecological matters. Bateson prescribes the survival of our civilization as closely linked to our understanding of natural processes; We are not outside the ecology for which we plan – we are inevitably a part of it. (IBID) The new invention gives elbow room or flexibility, but the using up for that flexibility is death. (IBID)

This notion of flexibility leads forward to the studio’s final assignment conceived as reorientations, which gives ideas about new openings through new cartographies – and layers of disrupted knowledge. This means that our findings and learning appears to be exercises in new dynamic approaches and entryways to the landscapes and to the complexity of spatial practices. A dynamism that Stan Allen expresses so well (in his dialog with Florian Sauters): Bateson talks about survival not in resisting change, but in terms of accommodating change. It means that your thinking has to be every bit as fluent and adaptive as the kind of systems you are talking about. In other words you cannot apply rigid or dogmatic principals to systems that are themselves fluent, adaptable, changing and always incorporating feedback. (…) It is a way of thinking that mirrors the dynamism of ecological systems themselves. (Allen and Sauters, 2007)

One general objective for the studio has been to address crucial questions, and create a platform for critical discussions about the changes that are going on in the Arctic landscapes. We have been discussing the role of the architect in these matters, and the need for investigations of openness and experimentation – in a way that also consider the subjective, the trivial or the unexpected as relevant for a spatial understanding of the landscape. There is an atmosphere of seemingly euphoric global expectations to the prosperity of the territory - a rationality that kills the Arctic myth. We are past the point where rationality has substituted the definition of reality in a desire for political hegemony and economical profit. The colonization of the Arctic coincides with the fall of the myths – and a decline in the conception of nature as holy. Like Odysseus who tied his body to the mast and blocked out the effect of the seductive song of the Sirens, we have blocked out our ability to be influenced by songs that may break down our rationality and our modern conception of reality. Without myth, all becomes trivial, and without respect and attentiveness the wonder of everything that cannot instantly be translated into numbers disappears.


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It is a challenge for the future to dare to open for a dimension of mysticism and wonder – to open up for literature and poetry that narrate stories about reality, which are totally different from the rationality, we today are familiar with. If a turning point for new ideas about the Arctic were to surface, the rational and the mythical must once again meet and intertwine into a hitherto unknown story – a tipping point for a new way to appreciate and observe the country beyond.

* The title of this lecture, There are no maps for these territories, is borrowed from William Gibson (No Maps for these Territories, 1996).


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