international conference university of tromsØ, 5-8 … · 2017-08-31 · international conference...

INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE

UNIVERSITY OF TROMSØ, 5-8 SEPTEMBER 2012 María del Mar Azcona session 6B 4 Chiara Brambilla/Holger Pötzsch session 1A 4 Debra Ann Castillo KEYNOTE Wednesday 5 Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan session 4A 5 Aileen A. Espíritu session 1B 6 Bjarge Schwenke Fors session 1B 6 Filip Geerts session 2A “Reading and Reacting” 7 Reinhold Görling/Johan Schimanski session 6A 7 Klaske Havik session 2A “Reading and Reacting” 8 Anne Heith session 3A 9 Sylwia Hlebowicz session 1B 10 Stefan Holander session 2B 10 Henk van Houtum/Stephen Wolfe session 4A 11 Lene M. Johannessen session 6B 12 Elisavet Kalpaxi session 6B 13 Saija Kaskinen session 3A 14 Nadir Kinossian session 3B 14 Yael Levin session 4A 15 Monica Mecsei session 2B 16 Ulrike Hanna Meinhof KEYNOTE Thursday 16 Ruben Moi session 6A 17 Jyrki Pöysä session 4B 17 Johannes Riquet session 1A 18 Mari Ristolainen session 1A 19 Mireille Rosello/Tim Saunders session 4B 19 Anka Ryall session 6A 20 Tuija Saarinen session 3A 21 Petra Schlømer session 4B 21 Marc Schoonderbeek session 2A “Reading and Reacting” 22 Liudmila Sorokina session 3B 23 Frederik Tygstrup KEYNOTE Friday 23 Dmitry Vilensky PRESENTATION Thursday 24 Furuzgod Usmonov session 3B 24 Urban Wråkberg session 2B 25

NOTEPAD with abstracts in chronological order and space for notes

PARTICIPANT LIST with affiliations and e-mail addresses

BORDER AESTHETICS • UNIVERSITY OF TROMSØ • 5-8 SEPTEMBER 2012 • 2

Organisors and financing • The Border Aesthetics Project (2010-2013) is a research project financed by the

Research Council of Norway under the KULVER (Assigning Cultural Values) programme, with supplementary funding from the University of Tromsø (http://uit.no/hsl/borderaesthetics).

• Border Poetics/Border Culture Research Group, Faculty of Humanities, Social Science and Education, University of Tromsø (http://uit.no/borderpoetics).

• This conference has been made possible by additional funding from the University of Tromsø (for international conferences) and from the Department of Culture and Literature.

Border Aesthetics This conference will investigate how changing perceptions of borders relate to shifting aesthetic practices. In so doing, it draws upon two guiding observations that must inform any notion of a border aesthetics, these being a) that aesthetic theories and practices regularly invoke and engage with notions of the border; and b) that borders are in turn capable of producing aesthetic effects and can themselves be conceived of as aesthetic objects. Papers can focus on the literature, film, photography, visual design, urban planning, and video art to name but a few examples. Also work produced by creative artists working in or imagining border regions will be welcomed. In particular, the Barents Region and the Mediterranean are important areas of study but we also will consider – and encourage – investigations of other regions.Our concentration on border regions enables the Conference not only to explore and develop further the relatively new field of migratory aesthetics, but it will also formulate what might provisionally be called a zonal aesthetics. Indeed, one of its principal goals will be precisely to establish how a new ‘aesthetics of space’ of a kind likely to be required by the study of the divergent groups, objects, values and activities that inhabit and pass through border zones can be described, explained, negotiated, and evaluated.

In the process, the conference will explicitly address the question of how aesthetic activity participates in the processes by which people relate to the real and conceptual geographies in which they live and through which they move. This focus is both socially engaged and inquisitive about the dynamic ways in which cultural phenomena are ascribed value through aesthetic practice. At the same time, it situates the conference at the vanguard of current thinking about aesthetics.

Keynotes Ulrike Hanna Meinhof is Professor of German and Cultural Studies at the University of Southampton and a specialist in discourse analysis. Her main areas of research currently involve ethnographic research on transnational networks of migrants, especially musicians from African countries, in multicultural neighbourhoods across European border communities, in provincial regions and in metropolitan spaces across Europe. She has previously led the EU Border Identities and Changing City Spaces projects; ongoing projects are SoFoNe: Searching for Neighbours: dynamics of mental and physical borders in Europe, and TNMundi: Diaspora as social and cultural practice: A study of transnational networks across Europe and Africa.

Frederik Tygstrup is the director of the Copenhagen Doctoral School in Cultural Studies and Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Copenhagen. His primary specialization is in the history and theory of the European novel and his present research interests focus on the intersections of artistic practices


and other social practices, including urban aesthetics, the history of representations and experiences of space, literature and medicine, literature and geography, literature and politics.

Debra A. Castillo is Stephen H. Weiss Presidential Fellow, Emerson Hinchliff Professor of Hispanic Studies and Professor of Comparative Literature at Cornell University. She also directs the Latin American Studies Program. In her often transdisciplinary research, she specializes in contemporary narrative of the Americas, gender studies, and post-colonial literary theory. Her most recent book is the co-edited volume (with Kavita Panjabi) Cartographies of Affect: Across Borders in South Asia and the Americas.

Cultural Production Panel We have invited four actors in the Barents Region aesthetic borderscape to present their work and share with us their thoughts on cultural production in Northern borderlands and on the border as a focus for cultural work, in the light of the themes of the conference.

Panelists are Knut Erik Jensen (filmmaker), Liv Lundberg (poet and professor of creative writing, Tromsø), Liv-Hanne Haugen (dance artist) and Luba Kuzovnikova (artistic director, Pikene på broen, Kirkenes). Chair: Ruben Moi.

Reading and Reacting Panel The Border Conditions group at the Delft University of Technology have organized this panel and will present their work in three papers.

The panel Reading and Reacting: From the Research of Border Conditions to Architectural and Urban Design proposes to discuss original, transgressive and experimental modes and models that relate the research of border conditions to design. By setting up hypotheses and creating scenarios, future developments could be tested and probed, applied and implemented in urban and architectural design projects. Precisely the ‘translation’ of in-depth territorial and urban readings into design procedures and strategies constitutes the main objective of this panel discussion. Techniques such as drawing, mapping, digital media and text will form the tools and instruments that enable the translation ofurban and territorial readings into strategies for architectural design, and explore the potential of such translations.

Participants are Klaske Havik, Marc Schoonderbeek and Filip Geerts. Chair: Nadir Kinossian.

Resident artists: Chto delat? / What is to be done? Dmitry Vilensky of art collective Chto delat? / What is to be done?, based in St. Petersburg, will present the group and their ongoing work on a Songspiel based on the Russian-Norwegian borderlands. The presentation will be at the Tromsø Gallery of Contemporary Art (Tromsø kunstforening).

The platform Chto delat? / What is to be done? was founded with the goal of merging political theory, art, and activism in early 2003 in Petersburg by a workgroup of artists, critics, philosophers, and writers from Petersburg, Moscow, and Nizhny Novgorod. They are at present working on a project concerning the Norwegian-Russian border.


María del Mar Azcona session 6B University of Zaragoza

Urban Borders in Gran Torino “I fix things, stuff like that”. With these words Walt Kowalsky (Clint Eastwood) describes himself to Youa (Choua Kue) in Gran Torino (Clint Eastwood, 2008) when he is invited to a youngster gathering taking place in his Hmong neighbours’ house. Eastwood’s role as fixer is not new to his star persona (“fixing things” was after all what his roles in Sergio Leone’s trilogy and the Dirty Harry franchise were about). What is new in Gran Torino is the nature of the problem to be fixed since it involves the reconsideration of the character’s own national and cultural identity through his, at the beginning openly reluctant, engagement with the urban borders that exist within his Detroit neighbourhood. The filmic geography of Walt’s neighbourhood is of great importance in the construction of this film, particularly in its employment of a “border dynamic” in the middle of a quintessentially U.S. space. In this paper I want to explore the articulation of the process of disintegration of borders traced by the film through an analysis of its spatial dynamics, and the impact of the presence of border crossers and transnational citizens on the construction of national identity.

Chiara Brambilla/Holger Pötzsch session 1A University of Bergamo/University of Tromsø

InVisible/InVisual Subjects: Notes Toward the Aesthetics and Politics of (Medial) Borderscapes The present contribution will focus on (medial) borderscapes of power and resistance. After an initial clarification of terminology we will move to a conceptualization of the ways through which media technologies act upon politics and either maintain and stabilize or subvert and change existing regimes of power and oppression. We deploy the theoretical frameworks of Hannah Arendt and Jacques Ranciére to understand a politics of in/visibility vested in a particular distribution of the sensible that is practiced by increasingly de-territorialized, global border-regimes. We will draw upon a conceptual distinction between in/visibility and in/visuality to distinguish various ways through which such border-regimes impact upon the lives and day-to-day practices of political subjects. Finally, we will exemplify the terminological distinction with reference to two cases where regimes of in/visibility and in/visuality impact upon the lives and well being of global subjects; drone warfare waged by Western powers in the global South and African migrants’ video self representations across the Mediterranean Euro-African borderland.


Debra Ann Castillo KEYNOTE Wednesday Cornell University

Rasquache Mockumentary: Alex Rivera’s ‘Why Cybraceros?’ This paper studies Rivera’s 12-year-old spoof outsourcing website, with particular attention to the 4.5 minute 1997 video that served as its original point of departure (he is now best know for his 2008 feature film, “Sleep Dealer.”). Rivera’s work in general involves a practice he calls a “rasquache aesthetic” of filmmaking. In a recent interview he defines this concept more precisely, commenting on how Latinos/as channel the creativity that responds to necessity, as people with limited resources turn to repurposing and recycling for their original work. In the hands of Latino/a artists associated with rasquachismo, like Guillermo Gómez Peña, Lalo Alcaraz and Coco Fusco, all of whom have influenced Rivera profoundly, this practice of collage becomes a conscious and conscientious cultural practice. In a parallel manner, in Rivera’s work, the tearing apart and rebuilding of cultural images adds texture and depth, and both his fiction and documentary films include stock footage, rough animation, public domain google map images, and a variety of other materials.

Daphna Erdinast-Vulcan session 4A The University of Haifa

Borderlines and Contraband: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject The proposed paper draws on my forthcoming study, Between Philosophy and Literature: Bakhtin and the Question of the Subject (Stanford University Press), which offers a view of Bakhtin as an “exilic” philosopher, torn between a post-Nietzschean sensibility and a profound temperamental religiosity, and compelled by his own thinking to turn from philosophy to literature (philosophy’s traditional “other”) in an attempt to account for the dynamics of ethical subjectivity. Bakhtin’s canonization in the West as a precursor of postmodernity (loosely characterized by its militant de-authoring of meaning and the debunking of master-narratives) has been built on a series of concepts – Dialogicity, Polyphony, Heteroglossia, and the Carnivalesque – whose common denominators seem to be the transgression of borderlines, the celebration of plurality, and the resistance to any and all forms of hegemony. But these “transgressive” concepts, formulated between the late 1920s and the 1940s, are radically opposed to the spirit of Bakhtin’s early works, which appears to be thoroughly conservative, religious, and profoundly concerned with the need for borderlines and frames. Counter-intuitively, perhaps, the Bakhtinian trope for ethics is that of the “loophole”. The paper would suggest that it is precisely this apparent contradiction, the simultaneous recognition


of the need for boundary-lines and the equally compelling need to transgress and transcend them, which generates the Bakhtinian “architectonics” of ethical subjectivity.

Aileen A. Espíritu session 1B The Barents Institute, University of Tromsø

Æsthetics/Politics/Ethics: North Korea in Kirkenes Featured in the 2012 Barents Spektakel were performances by a youth accordion ensemble and of a directed picture spectacle from North Korea brought to Kirkenes by the Norwegian artist and director Morten Traavik. Traavik’s collaborative exhibition to bring the best that North Korea could offer was hugely popular in Kirkenes, attracting the attention of both national and international media. Through an analysis of the exhition itself, the media discourses about it, and some of the voices of those who saw and participated in the exhibit, I attempt to explore the meaning behind the Traavik’s exhibition of North Korea at the cross-border art festival, The Barents Spektakel. If we accept Ranciere’s arguments that there exists no border between æsthetics and politics, and that indeed they are interdependent, what then is the æsthetic politics and the politics of æsthetics of Traavik’s exhibition of North Korea in Kirkenes? North Korea remains one of the most closed, secretive, and repressive regimes in the world, a dystopia of the communist dream, how then does the exhibit fit into Ranciere’s æsthetics? Moreover, what role does ethics play in the relationship between æsthetics and politics in Traavik’s exhibit?

Bjarge Schwenke Fors session 1B University of Tromsø

Border Dramatics: The Samovar Theatre on the Russian-Norwegian Border The Samovar theatre is a professional theatre in the small Norwegian town of Kirkenes, close to the Russian border. Since the theatre was founded in the early 1990s the border, as concept and place, has been essential in its performances. The last years the theatre has even developed its own particular theatrical style called “border dramatics”. The style is marked by the use of actors from different countries on stage as well as the use of multilingualism. Up to nine different languages are spoken on stage at the same time. The theater’s performances also tend to mix genres; music, dance, video and acting. The topics of the performances are generally border related. In my


paper I will discuss what border dramatics is about. What are the ideas behind it and how does it relate to the real life and politics of the Russian-Norwegian borderland? My paper is based on extensive anthropological field research in the town of Kirkenes, including participatory field research in the theatre.

Filip Geerts session 2A “Reading and Reacting” Delft University of Technology

The Territory of Architecture or the Architecture of the Territory: The Border In-Between Architecture is inherently involved in the making of borders, replacing old with new borders, and producing space by virtue of the precision of these borders. A certain interest in understanding and reconfiguring existing border zones is understandable, when this seems to touch the essence of what architecture is able to do. Insight into what borders are, and the content needed to reconfigure borders, more often than not, needs to come from what borders demarcate: the reality of the territories the border divides. The territory is therefore the other side of the coin, the sine-qua-non of the border: any investigation into the border, beyond stating it is there, will necessarily pan out into an investigation of territory – in the form of a geographic survey, re-drawing, measuring, ‘mapping’ etc. Architecture tends to start from the precision of the border that can be gradually perforated, re-aligned, materialized, etc. – increasing its own complexity within a given resistance. More often than not the territory informing the border, its raison-d’être is neglected. The territory has become a vague notion, borrowed from other disciplines at best. It seems that together with ‘border aesthetics’, a discussion on ‘territory’ is unavoidable. With the discussion on territory by Vittorio Gregotti, published in 1965-66, the contribution will present a particular moment in architecture culture to start to question the legitimacy of looking at territory through an architectural lens again, both in its historical context and as a horizon for practice.

Reinhold Görling/Johan Schimanski session 6A Heinrich-Heine-Universität Düsseldorf

Reading Kafka’s ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ as a Text about Sovereignty, Aesthetics and Borders This paper reads Kafka’s short text ‘Die Sorge des Hausvaters’ (‘The Cares of a Family Man’) as a


partly allegorical text about sovereignty, aesthetics and borders. We use Kafka’s text as an entry point, opening up the field of reflection by examining its main motifs. The main figures of the text are the fairly anonymous “Hausvater” (the family man, literally the “House-Father”) and a mysterious toy-like figure, “Odradek”. The Hausvater is by implication the sovereign of the family and the house, a bordered space, where every thing has its place and its meaning. The text tries to positions Odradek through its name which may have Slavic as well as German origins. But as uncertain as these etymologies of its name is its origin in general. For the Hausvater Odradek is a denizen of in-between spaces. It lives in the margins and on the thresholds, moving freely between the inside and the outside, disappears and reappears again. Is it like a migrant crossing the borders of the nation-house? Its interdeterminacy resist the sovereignty of the Hausvater. If the Odradek is a “Sorge” (worry, concern, care) of the Hausvater, does the Hausvater want to get rid of it or look after it? Is it an undeterminable threat? It is even uncertain if it dies. The very form of the Odradek has unclear borders, a “flat star-shaped spool for thread” with some broken threads hanging on to it, a small wooden crossbar and a right-angled rod. Its uselessness it reminds us of the Kantian definition of beauty as being disinterested, but its melancholic aesthetic as a fragment makes sovereign have “Sorge” about it. The Odradek is uncannily similar to the sovereign as being outside the law. What marks off the border and relationship between the sovereign – with its violent phantasm of omnipotence – and the aesthetic? Or is the aesthetic that which mockingly resists such bordering and reveals the sovereign’s fear of death? Who is the Hausvater? Is he the narrator “I” or the generalized “one” or the text? Why these sliding subject positions in relationship to the sovereignity of the narrator and the literary fragment as a performative act? This is not a case study of a Kafka text, but a dialogue with the text asking it what it has to contribute to a discussion of sovereignty, aesthetics and borders.

Klaske Havik session 2A “Reading and Reacting” Delft University of Technology

Literary Tools for Site-Specific Analysis of Borders and Marginal Urban Areas This paper proposes to connect the disciplines of architecture and literature in the site-specific research and design of urban border conditions. If borders are seen as the marginal urban regions where the “other” resides, it becomes important to provide alternative models for reading the spatial, social and temporal conditions at hand. The


ambiguity that is at stake at such border conditions calls for an approach that is able to balance between here and there, subject and object, individual and collective, and reality and imagination. This paper proposes that urban planners and architects should learn from the gaze of the literary writer, which enables us to shift between these seemingly binary oppositions, illustrating that in fact, the lived experience of urban places is a matter of both. Literary instruments such as character, narrative, metaphor and scenario offer valuable means for the investigation of urban border conditions, and for their design.

Anne Heith session 3A Umeå University

Diaspora Aesthetics: Blackness, Fluidity, Representation The paper discusses the emergence of diaspora aesthetics through representations of Afro-Swedishness. These representations deconstruct symbolic borders which create binaries between white Europe and black Africa. When analyzing the formation of Black identity and subjectivity in Europe Michelle M. Wright emphasizes the contradictory nature of this process: Although there is no biological basis for racial categories (there is no such thing as a “black,” “white,” or “Asian” gene, and the amount of genetic disparity between persons of different races is the same as that between persons in the same racial category), Blacks in the West have nonetheless had their history shaped by the very concrete effects of Western racism. (Wright 2004, 2) Wright depicts the discourse of racism as deeply embedded in European culture and modernity, legitimized by the works of philosophers like Hegel who posited that the “Negro” stands outside the history of intellectual, technological, moral, and cultural progress “guided by the Absolute of reason” (Wright 2004, 8). The history and philosophical tradition which have posited blacks as the Others of white Europe still influence discourses defining Europe and its Others. Today this discourse co-exists with discourses of post-racism and post-ethnicity which suggest that the categories of race and ethnicity no longer are valid or ethically justifiable as they highlight and contribute to constructing racial and ethnic variations. Within the field of Black Diaspora Studies the concept of “fluidity” has been proposed for conceptualizing the contextual character of constructions of blackness. Wright, for example, discusses blackness as “fluidity” which may both harm and heal the black individual (Wright 2004, 2). She proposes an understanding of black subjectivity which implies that the category is seen as produced through negotiations between the abstract and the real, or in


other terms “between the ideal and the material.” (Wright 2004, 3). The Afro-Swedish artist Makode Linde’s installation at the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm in April this year will be used as an example of how white denial of the impact of racism is problematized by a work of art. This part of the presentation has the subtitle “Black Face – White Nation”. The other example which will be discussed is the Afro-Swedish author Johanne’s Anyuru’s debut as a novelist in 2010 with Skulle jag dö under andra himlar [If I Were to Die Under Other Skies]. The subtitle of this section is “Becoming Black in the Post-White Nation”. The major theme of the novel is a young Afro-Swedish man’s conversion to Islam.

Sylwia Hlebowicz session 1B University of Tromsø

A Story of Defenseless City Idiot – A Case Study of jurodstvo on the Basis of Chingiz Aitmatov’s The Executioner’s Block Seldom does one encounter such a multifaceted phenomenon as jurodstvo. Not only can it be treated as a form of extraordinary ascetic exploit peculiar to the Russian Orthodox Church, but also as a kind of ludic performance, an indelible part of the Russian milieu. This paper is aimed at depicting some epistemological borders within the abovementioned concept on the basis of Chngiz Aitmatov’s The Executioner’s Block. The implementation of broadly understood cultural/historical approach to the masterpiece is supposed to prove that the main character is a border figure. Driven by most subtle humanistic principles, the main protagonist is excluded by humanity. This article will explore borderland jurodivyj lives in, as the main figure verges on the ridiculous and the sublime, balances between sacrum and profanum, oscillates between the earthly and the otherworldly. The myriad of antithetic, mutually exclusive elements fuses in the person of jurodivyj making him axis mundi of two realities – the Russian Orthodox Church (the official culture) and the popular and carnivalesque culture (non-culture).

Stefan Holander session 2B Finnmark University College

‘The Visibility of Contamination: Stefan Jarl’s The Threat Today’ In 1986, as invisible radioactive substances drifted across Northern Scandinavia from the failed nuclear plant at Chernobyl, Ukraine, the Swedish filmmaker Stefan Jarl came to document the impact of the


disaster on a Sámi community in Northern Sweden. The specific sense of the film’s apocalyptic conclusion – the end of a harmonious, ecologically wise indigenous way of life – evokes a more general fear of the borderlessness of the modern world, which is today conceived both in terms of the threats of cross-border ecological disturbance and an integrated global economy. But The Threat’s ethically and dramatically polarized sensorium, founded on essentialist notions of indigeneity as opposed to technological and industrial modernity, is both threatened and enabled by transgressive and contaminating forms of signification. This affects, I argue, the film’s status of the image of Sámi culture as analogous to the contamination experienced by the Scandinavian welfare states from the Eastern bloc. While examining the continuity of the film’s images of the Sámi with the social and ecological victims of Jarl’s earlier work, this paper also attempts to define it in the context of recent developments in Northern ethnic and ecological politics, and place it in relation to the distribution of the sensible operative in recent Northern documentary on ethnic issues.

Henk van Houtum/Stephen Wolfe session 4A Radboud University Nijmegen/University of Tromsø

The Waiting State: Kafka and Coetzee’s Imaginary Geographies of the B/ordering of the State This paper will interrogate the borders of states and their borderscapes by focusing on two literary texts focused on waiting at a border of the nation state. To a large extent a border can be considered a waiting act. A border causes a standstill, a difference in time and space. It is this waiting that we will analyse in detail. This state of waiting is most powerfully and poetically represented by two famous works of literature, the parable “Waiting for the Law” by Franz Kafka (1914-15, published 1925) and John Maxwell Coetzee’s novel Waiting for the Barbarians (1980). It is with these two texts that we approach the issues of waiting, so typical of a b/ordering and othering process. We will argue that the waiting act consists of three dimensions which are mutually reinforcing, waiting in terms of subjectification and internalisation of the state by which citizens are made, the waiting act as it is enacted by a border guard; and finally the waiting as is done by migrant would-be citizens as they are accessed and their papers processed. In each text these dimensions are represented aesthetically creating a problematic use of allegory. We will show how each text moves from limited dimensionalities or analogies, to new presentations of multiple aesthetic perspectives within the borderscapes of the nation state.


The first part of the paper will deal with the mapping of waiting at the border in Kafka’s text “Before the Law” with its emphasis on the individual who waits to come before a state system of authority, and the limitless postponements and adjustments society makes through its officials to subjectify and control such individuals and how both guards and border crossers internalize the state of waiting. We will then consider waiting at the border in Coetzee’s Waiting for the Barbarians. This text presents a community awaiting the transgression of their borders by an invading “barbarian force”. In this text societal and social insecurities figured by the “barbarian other” are transferred onto an imaginary geography of fear necessitating the use of an army contracted to protect the community. Such private police discipline and control those people living at the border and in the borderscapes of what is coined here the Waiting State. We will analyse how “the machine of the state” sets in motion a border discourse and an internalized state map that argues waiting is sublime.

Lene M. Johannessen session 6B University of Bergen

Alex Rivera’s Sleep Dealer and ‘Americanity’ on the Border Under the Cybracero program American farm labor will be accomplished on American soil, but no Mexican workers will need to leave Mexico. Only the labor of Mexicans will cross the border, Mexican workers will no longer have to.1 In his 2008 film Sleep Dealer Alex Rivera extends political tendencies and technologies already well known to us into a future scenario where the border wall between the US and Mexico, the ‘Great Wall of Mexico,’ is completed and the US effectively sealed off from border crossers. Early on in the movie the protagonist and narrator, Mémo, recalls how he came to Tijuana to “plug in to the global economy,” and “to be a part of the American Dream.” While the two phrases are well worn staples in any immigrant undertaking to the US, the plugging in here refers to literally connecting Mémo’s body to a cyber network through nodes in his neck and arms, allowing him to perform work across the border without actually being there. “The American Dream” similarly is a reference to the actual dream-like state the cyber employees (cybraceros) are in during their work hours. Sleep Dealer thus describes a political and cultural perfection of the complexity Wallerstein and Quijano have coined as “Americanity:”2 the construction of new economic and political institutions in the Americas through a process of

1 “Why Cybraceros.” http://alexrivera.com/cyb-eng.html 2 Aníbal Quijano & Immanuel Wallerstein, “Americanity as a Concept or the Americas in the Modern World System,” International Journal of Social Sciences 134 (1992): 23-40.


peripheralization, and beginning with coloniality,3 (24). This paper seeks to examine Rivera’s dystopic representation in view of among other Enrique Dussel’s ideas of transmodernity, and with special attention to the simultaneous and sinister processes of retraction and activation that the real and virtual borders give rise to. I suggest that the commentary the film makes should not be treated as futuristic first and foremost, but instead as a logical phase in what Taylor calls “the march of modernity,4“ and in which the US is “modernity’s culmination”5.

Elisavet Kalpaxi session 6B Goldsmiths College

Photographic Self-Portraiture from the Borders to Centre-Stage This paper focuses on the signification of the artist’s image in photographic self-portraiture. In particular, it investigates what happens when the genre’s sincerity and associations with notions of identity and the margins are challenged. Through visual examples, the papers deals with problems of reference that arise in contemporary photographic self-portraiture. The objectification of one’s body image operating in conjunction with photography’s projective power can be seen as inherently linked to narcissism and self-representative interests. This idea is useful to analyse the significance of the photo-album/photo-diary for the fortification of a person’s/group’s/family’s identity, the therapeutic aspects of self-portraiture (i.e., in Photo-therapy), as well as the rhetoric of images produced (mainly from the 1970’s onwards) to challenge the establishment of art and bring visibility to marginalized groups. However, photographic self-portraiture’s narcissism can be internalized without requiring narcissism on the artist’s side, because this has already been done by a tradition onto which the artist draws. In fact, narcissism becomes problematic in our current cultural climate of exchange. The prioritization of art as a context for all self-portraiture and popularity of the genre, necessitate the re-definition of the genre’s references and re-constructing meaning regarding representations of selfhoods.

3 See José David Saldívar, “Conjectures on ‘Americanity’ and Junot Díaz’s ‘Fuku Americanus’ in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” The Global South, 5:1 (2011): 120- 136, 123. 4 See Charles Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, Durham: Duke, 2004. 5 Enrique Dussel, The Invention of the Americas, New York: Continuum 1995 [CLASCO 2002, 10].


Saija Kaskinen session 3A University of Eastern Finland

If the Borders Could Tell: A Hybrid Identity of a Border in Karelian Border Region This paper analyzes the nature of the border. The paper poses the question of whether a border, in this case the national border between Finland and Russia in Karelian border region, can have its own distinctive identity[ies], and if so, could the border itself be or become a hybrid, a border subject. The aim of the paper is to examine the hybridization process of the border by analyzing three literary texts by Karelian regional writers, by conducting personal interviews, and by using the layer model by Giaoutzi, Suarez-Villa, and Stratigea. The purpose of the paper is to show in which ways the border has affected people’s perceptions not only of geographical space and identification with Karelian region, but also their own perception of regional landscapes, regional memories, regional heritage, and identity. The paper explores the hybrid role of the border in the process of challenging historical as well as contemporary practices of inclusion and exclusion, which have resulted in fixed identities. Claiming that hybridization process makes the border porous, enables the inhabitants within Karelian border area negotiate alternative modes of representing their identity which do not divide Karelians but rather celebrate their common roots of culture and identity.

Nadir Kinossian session 3B University of Tromsø

State Spaces, Borders and Architecture The crisis of the nation-state has placed the traditional understanding of the state spatial hierarchy, territorial structure and borders under theoretical scrutiny. Globalisation and regionalisation challenge the economic and political legitimacy of the nation-state (Ohmae 1993). The state spaces have gone through the processes of fragmentation, re-scaling and adjustment to the needs of capital accumulation process (Brenner 2004). The new fragmented space serves the forces of capitalist development which unfolds “through a production of historically specific patterns of socio-spatial organisation in which particular territories, places and scales are mobilized as productive forces” (Brenner and Theodore 2002, p. 354). In the increasingly fragmented and polarised world, cities and regions compete with each other for investment, jobs and visitors (Hall and Hubbard, 1998). The image of the city has become an important marketing and branding tool in enhancing their competitiveness. Globalisation and economic transformation have created new cultural norms described as the “postmodernist collage of meanings” (Harvey 1990). Traditional identities and


cultures based on naturalistic paradigms have become sidelined. The crisis of the state and the transformation of traditional scalar hierarchies are reflected in architecture, urban planning and development policies. This paper argues that analysis of architecture, design practices and branding policies can help to answer questions such as where the region fit in terms of the geographical scale; how places interact with larger territories; and what shapes borders between territories.

References Anholt, S. (2007) Competitive Identity. The New Brand Management for Nations, Cities and Regions. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Brenner, N. (2004) New state spaces. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Brenner, N. and N. Theodore (2002) Cities and Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism”, Antipode, 34(3): 349-379. Hall, T. and P. Hubbard, Eds. (1998) The Entrepreneurial City. Geographies of Politics, Regime and Representation. Chichester: John Wiley and Sons. Harvey, D. (1990) The Condition of Postmodernity. Cambridge: Blackwell. Massey, D. (2007) World City. Cambridge: Polity Press. Ohmae, K. (1993) The Rise of the Region State. Foreign Affairs, Spring, pp. 78-87.

Yael Levin session 4A University of Tromsø

Survival of the Fittest: Metalepsis and the Author Figure in Postmodern Fiction Metalepsis, the narratological term for the breakdown of narrative levels, offers a particularly fruitful case for a discussion of border poetics. In Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, metalepsis is used humorously: Don Quixote wonders whether the author that put his story to writing has produced a faithful account; Huckleberry Finn warns the reader that “There was things which [Twain] stretched,” before reassuringly adding that he mainly “told the truth.” In these two examples, the undermining of the conventionally hermetic separation of the diegetic and extra- diegetic levels, reality and fiction, has entertainment value; that characters are not only aware of their writtenness, but also feel free to critique their makers is a method to poke meta-literary fun. The paper proposes to draw attention to examples of metalepsis from more recent fiction in suggesting that a character’s stepping out of his fictional world and into the world of its author (or vice versa) is no longer primarily used to produce humor but rather to question the ethics of writing and challenge the convention of an author’s omnipotent agency. Karin Fossum’s Broken and J.M. Coetzee´s Slow Man will be read against John Fowles´ The French Lieutenant´s Woman and Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister as representative examples of the devolutionary nature of a uniquely postmodernist metalepsis.


Monica Mecsei session 2B Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU)

Sami Feature Films and Norwegian Film Politics at the Border This paper aim at exploring how Sami feature films challenges Norwegian film politics. Cinema studies and cinema as a cultural expression have a long tradition for being related to one specific nation. This understanding of the nation often coincides with the nation state and can easily be found in national film registers, one nation states film politics, festival programs, marketing strategies, and books on directors and film history. The last decades, the notion of nationality has been put forward in several studies related to culture, identity and globalization. Cinema studies is no exception, though a somewhat slow adopter to the transnational perspective. Since Cinema and Nation (Hjort/Mackenzie, 2000), cinema has been discussed as a medium that is, and has always been, border-crossing and also how “themes on nation” come through in films themselves. Four Sami feature films have been made in Norway. The first one being Pathfinder (Ofelaš) by Nils Gaup in 1987, followed by The Minister of State (Paul-Anders Simma, 1997), Bázo (Lars Göran Pettersson, 2003) and The Kautokeino Rebellion (Nils Gaup, 2008). These feature films are all located north of the polar circle, and the setting is primarily in the border area of Norway, Sweden and Finland. As such, Sápmi is site specific, both in terms of cinematic setting and real geography. Sami feature films shed light on different perspectives of Sami culture and identity that underpins one of the International Sami Film Centre’s main criteria for getting financial support, namely authenticity.

Ulrike Hanna Meinhof KEYNOTE Thursday University of Southampton

From Border Communities to Networks and Neighbourhoods: Re-imagining Europe in the 21st Century My paper introduces geo-political and symbolic dynamics of 21st century Europe through three conceptual prisms: those of borders or border communities, networks, and neighbourhoods. Each of these can be seen as both descriptive lenses for capturing specific phenomenan of social interaction in geographical spaces as well as metaphors for imagining human encounters across visible or invisible divisions, such as for example nationhood, ethnicity, race, religion or gender. In the first part, my paper will analyse the implications for each of these imaginaries for theoretical and empirical research. In the second part I will show with different examples how these conceptual frames affected my own fieldwork practices in a series of European research projects during the last decade: European Border Discourse, 2000-2003; Changing


City Spaces 2002-2005, Sefone 2007-2010 and TNMundi 2006-2010. Examples will include a rich, multi-layered spectrum of every-day life narratives as well as examples of artistic productions.

Ruben Moi session 6A University of Tromsø

Borders and Boundaries in Northern Ireland and the Poetry of Seamus Heaney ‘How should a poet properly live and write? What is his relationship to be to his own voice, his own place, his literary heritage and his contemporary world?’ These questions are asked by the Nobel Laureate of 1995, in his aptly entitled book of essays, Preoccupations. Thus, he articulates astutely a number of fundamental ethic dilemmas and aesthetic demands upon Northern Irish writers trying to locate their own tradition and immediate crisis in aglobal context. Questions that might have appeared too general and too trite elsewhere assumed crucial importance in the situation of Northern Ireland over the last forty years. During that period, Northern Ireland transformed itself from a multi-fractured society on the brink of civil war that put human rights, social institutions and civilisation in general to the point of bankruptcy into a dynamic society of reconciliation and prosperity. Consequently, the statelet appears as a crucible for the interminable relations between diverse aesthetic figurations and the complex conditions from which they arise. Civil outrage, daily murder and pandemic violence intensified profound artistic concerns of personal responsibility, moral values and aesthetic dedication. Both journalism (Dillon 1989, Beresford 1987) and Foucaultian socio-anthropology (Feldman 1991) demonstrate how theindividual’s mental maps and knowledge of the city streets became a question of life and death in a war-ridden society of state suppression and paramilitary violence. This paper examines how the poetry of Seamus Heaney confirms and challenges the many borders and boundaries in Northern Ireland during the Troubles from 1968 to the peace agreement in 1998.

Jyrki Pöysä session 4B University of Jyväskylä

Aesthetics of Space in Karelian Woman’s Reminiscences about her Life at the Border In my paper I’m studying a life history interview with the help of discursive psychological theories of positional identities and conversation analytical close


reading of taped encounter between the researchers and the informant. My interviewee is a 65 year old woman working as a part time janitor at the local cultural club in the Russian Karelian village Jushkozero. The Karelian villages are multi-ethnic, historically mixed border areas, where the ideological in-betweenness of the Karelian people has produced a series of situational identities actualized in everyday encounters. The key “roles” actualized in the situational talk of interviews are interviewer-interviewee, guest-host, and “us” and “them”. What interests me, is the aesthetic and ethic relationship of the subject to the surrounding nature. In the talk of my informant the aesthetic relationship involves the personal life history of the interviewee connected to an uninhabited nearby village, where her ancestors are buried and which is visited during the fishing trips. In my paper I’m interested in the ways she speaks about herself, about her agency, about her environmental surroundings, and about fishing, the pragmatic activity which connects her to the watery landscape typical for Karelian villages.

Johannes Riquet session 1A University of Zurich

Killing King Kong: The Camera at the Borders of the South Sea Island This paper discusses the role of the border as a complex aesthetic zone in 1920s/1930s American island films set in the South Seas. At the beginning of W. S. Van Dyke’s White Shadows in the South Seas (1928), the camera explores the island coast in a long tracking shot from the water. Similar aesthetic practices of investigating the border of the island are frequent in these films, establishing a discourse of cultural contact and confrontation. Accordingly, the films cast a critical look on contemporary Western enthusiasm for ‘exotic’ cultures and locations – as also promoted by an emerging tourist industry – in which they nevertheless participate. I will demonstrate how they resonate with contemporary anthropological and documentary film practices emphasizing authentic representation of native cultures (Malinowski and Flaherty, respectively), but nevertheless point to the camera’s own crossing of the island’s border as an act of appropriation: the camera expresses a gaze of nostalgic longing for a lost paradise while itself epitomizing this loss. Yet it is precisely from this absence that an aesthetic space emerges. It is in the original version of King Kong (1933) that this infringement of borders for the production of an aesthetic space reaches its apex. Armed with cameras and guns, the diegetic film crew violates two borders: that of the island itself and the wall separating the natives from Kong’s realm. Significantly, it is only after Kong’s death at the highest point of another island (Manhattan) and thus


at another border, this time between land and sky, that he fascinates the masses as an aesthetic spectacle; the film, then, meditates on the relations between border crossing, death and the production of aesthetics.

Mari Ristolainen session 1A University of Eastern Finland, Karelian Institute

Zooming in – Zooming out: Politics of Photographic Aesthetics across Finnish-Russian Borders in the 1930s This paper discusses ‘visual bordering processes’ and the aesthetic strategies used in border photographs. The two main objectives are, firstly, to discuss the politics of aesthetic strategies in photographical process of border-building and/or border-unbuilding in Soviet socialist realist and Finnish romantic nationalistic (Karelianism) photographs of the 1930s. Secondly, the aim is to show how the different aesthetics strategies of establishing and disestablishing ‘the other side’ create ambivalences about the border existence in the photographs studied. This paper forms a comparative position on Finnish and Soviet border communities of the pre-II-World-War Finland and Soviet Union in the late 1930s. The aim is to draw a parallel how photographic publications perceive and discursively construct borders and the aesthetic strategies used in the pictures. I seek to show how the national border divides aesthetic strategies used in photographs. The studied photographs are similar by themes, but show the border of reference codes between two aesthetical systems.

Mireille Rosello/Tim Saunders session 4B University of Amsterdam/Volda University College

Ecologies of Borders / Borders of Ecologies As long as a border is conceptualized as a limit that surrounds a territory, the discourse that supports the definition of each territory has a vested interest in remaining hidden. A state or a region is all the more symbolically powerful the more its contours appear unquestionable. In that model, some territories are inside others, subordinate to others and comparable territories are in competition. They police, defend, redraw or erase their borders, disregarding the possibility that the very definition of territory is what could be questioned. When one model of territory is historically dominant, the categories that are deployed to naturalize its shape (spatialization, internal


homogeneity) will prevent other types of ensembles from claiming their identity. Today, should a community wish to view itself as a network and therefore redefine what used to be thought of as the border, it would have difficulties comparing itself to a unit that metaphorizes itself as a territorialized space. Different border practices would appear incongruous, idiosyncratic even if that newly defined territorialization or absence thereof tried to defend values that the traditional bordered territory still pretends or wishes to defend (a “democratic” border in Balibar’s views). We propose to reflect on this problem by bringing together two concepts: ecology and borders. Would an ecology of borders help us redefine the constantly evolving relationship between the implied dominant paradigms that link some forms of territories and their corresponding borders? Would it make it more obvious that the definition of what is bordered must change at least as much as the traditionally bordered territories if we hope to democratize borders? Would an ecology of borders help us create new discrepant topographies where different types of borders take into account simultaneous and incompatible definitions of territories? On the other hand, we also assume that there is a danger in proposing one single discourse, ecology, as the new unifying paradigm. In a second part of the chapter, we will reflect on the borders of ecology and propose to think both terms through a mobile and mutually contesting pair: looking for an ecology of borders will enable us to talk about ecologies of borders and the borders of ecologies.

Anka Ryall session 6A University of Tromsø

Woolfian Border Poetics and Contemporary Circadian Novels Virginia Woolf’s 1925 circadian novel Mrs Dalloway has inspired many successors, some of them important works in their own right. Although few of these novels are as explicitly linked to Mrs Dalloway as Michael Cunningham’s The Hours (1998), more recent novels such as Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005) and Gail Jones’ Five Bells (2011) clearly pay homage to Woolf’s use of the one-day format to reveal whole lives and show how those individual private lives are entangled in history. In this presentation I will focus on close textual readings of one particular aspect of these three works, their imaginative and often transformative reworking of elements of Woolfian border poetics, particularly the predominance in Mrs Dalloway of boundary tropes – windows, doors, thresholds – that create a sense of synchronicity between present and past. Adapting Woolf’s boundary tropes to representations of contemporary realities, all three novels in different ways suggest how the present is deepened “when backed by the past”, as Woolf puts it her memoirs;


that is, when the present is not only informed by a remembered past but experienced in terms of both reenactment and renewal, continuity and change.

Tuija Saarinen session 3A University of Eastern Finland

The Soviet Union and Soviet Citizens in Finnish magazines My research material consists of Finnish magazines which were published in 1970’s and 1980’s in a popular magazines (gutter press). Their audience consisted mainly of workers and non-academic people. During the 1970’s and 1980’s normal contacts between Finnish and Soviet citizens were not allowed. Finns were very curious towards Soviet citizens and tried to cross the iron curtain, however. Tens of thousands of Finns travelled to the Soviet Union each year and made unofficial contacts with Soviet Citizens. Many Finns had colorful adventures in the Soviet Union, not to mention conflicts with the authority. Thus the articles the papers published were also written in a spirit of critics – not in the spirit of “friendship of the peoples” which was the official political stance in the Soviet Union. The papers had to be aware of the official Finnish politic rhetoric concerning the relationships with the Soviet Union. The same time they needed to write what the big audience knew of the Soviet Union. There were a tension between these two goals of writing. The articles of the Soviet Union and Soviet citizens are analyzed by qualitative methods. The narration of the texts are analyzed within the framework of regional, cultural, political and historical. The central questions are 1) What kind of cultural and ideological meanings the texts had? 2) How did historical, ideological and political traditions affect the way how the papers wrote about the Soviet Union and its citizens? The texts are also contextualized with the political history.

Petra Schlømer session 4B independent scholar

Passages, in between Based on Hamish Fulton’s photography in The Pilgrims’ Way (1971) and my temporary position in an empty room, I will examine the limits of art, in relation to walking, road and space/location. Fulton (as he calls himself a “walking artist”) claims that his walk is an art form in its own right, while his


representational outcome in the walks aftermath – which in a more traditional manner resemble art objects – are made only to finance his next walk. My position in the room, the room and how we relate in a mutual construction will be my starting point. A construction that in it’s meeting with The Pilgrims’ Way is doubled, as the photograph examine space in a double manner: First, it depicts a kind of spatial time, second, when contemplators meet the photography a space of it’s own is made up. Heidegger’s concept of nearness and space will be my background. How does Fulton’s walks relate to Heidegger’s concept of building and dwelling? As Fulton walks out on the road, and the contemplator walks out meeting his objects in the gallery, I as well undertake a walk out of the room.

Marc Schoonderbeek session 2A “Reading and Reacting” Delft University of Technology

Border Conditions: Experimental Analysis and Design in Marginal Urban Areas It is in marginal urban areas, borders of states, territories and cities, that marginal urban practices tend to take place. Limits of “normal” behaviour are transgressed and social and political differences become apparent. Such sites, where”other” spatial conditions have emerged, and that are “teeming with suggestive meanings and unexpected potential”,6 have hardly been analysed and discussed within the contemporary architectural discourse. The Border Conditions research group at the Faculty of Architecture in Delft addresses such marginal urban conditions from an experimental approach to urban analysis and architectural design. Methods such as mapping, navigation, and literary techniques such as character and scenario are brought into play in the analysis of urban fringes, and in the speculative design of alternative urban realities. With this experimental approach comes as well a certain understanding and appreciation of the border aesthetics “as found” as well as produced by our proposed design interventions. With the Border Conditions diploma studio in Delft, many urban areas characterised by spatial, social and political borders (such as Ceuta-Gibraltar, Marseille, Berlin Wall, Havana, Nicosia, Cairo) have been investigated with students, and have formed the place of departure for design proposals.

6 From the introduction of Border Conditions. Amsterdam: Architecture & Natura Press, 2010 edited by Marc Schoonderbeek.


Liudmila Sorokina session 3B independent scholar

Stereotypes are Borders in our Heads: Managing Stereotypes about Russians in Northern Norway through the Barents Regional Youth Programme Borders between countries are unique areas where people with different culture meet. The cooperation in the Barents region is special; it experienced periods of Pomor trade, cold war and isolation, and the people-to-people cooperation that is taking place today. Nowadays cooperation embraces all sectors of the society. It is common to form an opinion about foreign countries on the basis of stereotypes. The existence of stereotypes creates borders and barriers for effective cooperation and in communication. Stereotypical thinking leads to erroneous judgments and formation of incorrect ideas about a social group. It causes misunderstanding, unpleasant experiences, distrust, disagreements, conflicts, and even hostility. This arises from the fact that stereotypes shape behavior. I have investigated the phenomena of stereotyping. I have examined cooperation as a tool for reducing the influence of stereotypes on formation of impressions about people. I have chosen the Barents Regional Youth Programme as a concrete example of the Norwegian-Russian cooperation. The youth are the future of the region and their good relations are crucial for the stability in the region. Qualitative interviewing has been the main method of data collection. Data was also collected from articles, monographs, reports of the Barents Secretariat, and personal participation in some events.

Frederik Tygstrup KEYNOTE Friday Copenhagen University

Credit Crunch. Re-negotiating the Border between Fiction and Reality The events that took place in the financial markets in the late 2000s referred to as the “credit crunch,” and the subsequent uprooting of the Western economies, were related to a new and radically increasing dislocation of speculation. Specific territorial assets and situated productive agency were more often than not left out of consideration, it seems, and replaced by a new focus on credit mechanisms, reciprocal insurances and trading patterns. If the ancient credit system were built upon territorial and social specificity, it now has become deterritorialized and eventually re-territorialized on the dislocated circuits of banking. This new practice of speculation, I will argue, is in turn related to an other ancient border, or division, this time of epistemological character: the border between fiction and reality. Assessing some


fictions from the age of the credit crunch, and reviewing some of the ways fiction is understood in contemporary artistic and cultural practices, my aim will be to chart a new landscape of social imagination where the border between fiction and reality is increasingly loosing its authority and its relevance.

Dmitry Vilensky PRESENTATION Thursday Chto delat collective

The Border Songspiel - where do we start and how? In my presentation I will discuss the process of a research and construction of a new film focused on the border situation between Norway and Russia. What kind of artistic means of (re)presentation do we have at hand today to build a forms of narration which not simply represent a current situation but would be able to interfere into reality? In a course of the talk the video film “Museum Songspiel” will be screened as an example of certain artistic method developed by collective “Chto Delat” in constructing a fictional forms of political narratives.

Furuzgod Usmonov session 3B Tajik National University

The Effects of the Uncontrolled Borders of Tajikistan on Perceptions of Security of Local Inhabitants Tajikistan border relations with its neighbors are very complicated both to the south and to the north. With Afghanistan from south it has a fixed border according to the Russian-Britain agreement of the 1895, but the dynamic of political and military tensions as well as escalation of narcotraffic and Islamic radicalization in Afghanistan remain one of the main threats to Tajikistan. China every few years expands its border to the south-west into the territories of Tajikistan. The borders between Tajikistan, Uzbekistan and Kyrgyzstan are demarcated and delimitated, but cause many conflicts and human victims in the region. Also Central Asian countries have complicated tensions on transborder river management. Thus, irregulation in border issues has effects on the feelingness of insecurity of the Tajik people. It has effects on the economic and social potentials of local populations. Moreover, state authorities in Central Asia often speculate on the aesthetic aspect of border problems, by creating images of “enemies”. Thus, my presentation in conference will


be insecure perceptions of insecurity among local populations in a situation where the borders are not strict defined and there is the high risk of armed conflict and terrorist atack from Afghanistan after the withdrawal of troops from this country.

Urban Wråkberg session 2B The Barents Institute, University of Tromsø

Crossing Northern Borders of the Western Knowledge System In several academic specialities the cultural ladenness of any observations has long been acknowledged, but this has had little impact on the way information and data is transferred, understood and indeed produced during most field excursions, be them for scientific, business or recreational purposes. So-called knowledge-relativism is still much disputed in philosophy of science, and mainly rejected by scientific practitioners. A host of detailed case studies over the last decades nevertheless seem to demonstrate the social and historical construction of scientific knowledge and the theory-ladenness of all field examinations, data collection and consensus building.7 This should temper any simplistic empiricism – and the related drive behind many contemporary travellers’ eagerness to experience so-called pristine northern nature, and for temporary visitor’s integration in local traditional social contexts. Some of this, manifest in e.g. dark tourism, is inspired by reductionist popular ideas claiming that “the truth is out there” – frightening and potentially life-altering.8 To deliberate on the misconceptions, or the profound difficulties residing in the nexus of the field and the fact-finding traveller, it may be motivated to discuss what is often conceived of as the borders of accepted Western knowledge to two “exteriors”: the unknown parts of the material world, and the non-Western systems of knowledge. In Arctic field research this border concept seems central, which will be demonstrated by some examples. I will argue that re-photography can be a useful method to address related issues of cultural analysis.9

7 William F. Brewer & Bruce L. Lambert, “The Theory-Ladenness of Observation and the Theory-Ladenness of the Rest of the Scientific Process,” Philosophy of Science 68 (2001) Proceedings, pp. S176–S186; David Bloor, “Relativism and the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge,” in: A Companion to Relativism, ed. Steven D. Hales (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 433–455. 8 This was also one of the slogans of The X-Files, a trendsetting science fiction TV series of the 1990s which renewed interest in paranormal phenomena and conspiracy theories regarding public management of knowledge. While it acclaimed unorthodox empirical techniques to pursue new knowledge it re-confirmed a traditional interpretation of science as a givens, but acknowledged alternative ways of knowing beside it. Teresa A. Combs & Robert Westerfelhaus, “Criminal Investigations and Spiritual Quests: The X-Files as an Example of Hegemonic Concordance in a Mass-Mediated Society”, Journal of Communication Inquiry 22 (1998) 2, pp. 205–220. 9 On the establishment of spatial knowledge in Arctic humanistic field research, see Urban Wråkberg, “In the Days of Pioneers and Amateurs: On the Early History of Arctic Archaeology”, in Spitsbergen in the History Research Works, ed. Vadim Starkov (Moscow: Russian Academy of Sciences, 2006), pp. 40–87. On re-photography and the visual turn in text-focused humanities see Joan M. Schwartz, “Photographic Reflections: Nature, Landscape, and Environment”, Environmental History 12 (2007) October, pp. 966–993.

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