Image of a building in the arctic surrounded by the wait snow and sky.

Gregor Sailer (Austrian, b. 1980)
Caisson-retained Steel Island I, Tuktoyaktuk, Northwest Territories, Canada
C-print, 2020
The Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, Photography Collection

77

Gregor Sailer on the Polar Silk Road

Transcript below

The term “the Polar Silk Road” has been first mentioned within the Chinese Arctic White Paper in 2018, and it describes new trade routes in the north, so the more the ice melts, the more new trade routes emerge, especially the direct North Pole routes. So not only China is interested in these developments around the North Pole, but also the Arctic neighboring states, especially as well, new accessible, raw material deposits.

The door leads to geopolitical tensions and, as a result, an intensive militarization around the North Pole. For me, architecture is not only constructed landscape but above all a carrier of contents, and I’m much more interested in showing the signs and tracks of human beings and not that much pictures of human beings themselves. So that increases for me, the surrealistic character of those particular places.

The photograph here, the Caisson-Retained Steel Island, shows an abandoned, artificially created steel island in the Tuktoyaktuk Bay. It has been transported in the beginning of the eighties, where it remains like a silent giant frozen by the Arctic Ocean. So for me, it is a symbol for the past, for the present, but also for the future. There’s still lots of oil there, and I’m afraid that the oil exploration will be continued.

The working conditions have been pretty challenging. It was very, very cold. We had about -55 degrees Celsius, and working during such conditions with an analog view camera is pretty challenging. For instance, you never know when film starts to break, around -50 degrees, but it’s a risk. So those special working conditions increase my consciousness and my perception, and that also influences the picture’s language in the end. So I am looking for silence within the picture and not that much for spectacular views.

End of Transcript

Gregor Sailer