Julia de Cooker - Svalbard – An Arcticficial Life from Kehrer Verlag Heidelberg on Vimeo.
Julia de Cooker | Svalbard - an Arcticficial life | KEHRER VERLAG
There is a place where no one is authorized to be born or to die.
Julia de Cooker, Svalbard - An Arctictficial Life
The first impression you have when you arrive on the Svalbard islands is to land on the moon.
The photographs of Julia de Cooker tell just about this strange combination of estrangement and
loneliness.
As she writes in the text enclosed at the end of the book Svalbard - an Arcticficial life:
- At this latitude, the Svalbard society, with a quarter of its population changing every year, is almost
- At this latitude, the Svalbard society, with a quarter of its population changing every year, is almost
science fiction. Strangeness appears through different sorts of details. The combination of
elements that have nothing to do with each other, or with the natural environment, is gripping. -
The book, published by Kehrer Verlag in 2017, is a collection of photos which report a state of
mind more than the history of a place or of the people who live there.
The pale blue light on the snow, the sea of ice, the waves of wind, the cold, the endless Arctic
night are just some of the atmospheres that Julia de Cooker captures with intensity and clarity.
This incredible clarity combined with the strange circumstances and Svalbard's habits make
these images almost 'surreal'.
The artist created this project from 2013 to 2016 and exhibited part of it in an exhibition, in
March 2017, at the Galleri Svalbard in Longyearbyen.
The collection presents many images that belong to different groups. First of all there are the
landscapes covered with snow with the northern lights that glimpse over the mountains, which
seem to come out of a fairytale.
In some cases, different photographs are collected together in group of two or three and placed
side by side to form a single landscape. However, these groups do not reproduce a particular
real place, but are combinations of different views that in some way resemble each other and
which the artist has artificially re-created.
There are views of Longyearbyen, the Norwegian town and of Barentsburg, the Russian town.
There are also portraits: a blonde girl, covered with a heavy seal fur, is sitting on a snowmobile,
turned three-quarters. She is taking up her rifle: the weapon is obligatory for everyone who
want to go outside the city, in defense from polar bears attack.
Another beautiful portrait is that of a girl who works at the Karlsberger Pub; she poses giving
her back to a wall where are collected bottles of whiskey of all kinds.
There is a group of photos that prove in a detail how much the human presence in these places
can be absurd. In a photo there is a canoe drifting in a sea of snow. In another there is a white
limousine lost in the mountains. The formal beauty of the images contrasts ironically with the
content of them. The idea was to unmask the islands and to see it for what it is far from any
sort of exoticism. But through Julia de Cooker’s photos, it is difficult to resist at the
extraordinary beauty and mysterious charm of these places and then let yourself go to a strange
mixed feeling of irony and nostalgia.
