Image courtesy of National Arts Centre
SPHERE
Arctic Imagination
Ottawa, Ontario
Presented by
National Arts Centre
Arctic Imagination is a multi-year, interdisciplinary transatlantic speaker series and collaboration between cultural institutions, libraries, and museums that sheds light on the transformation of the Arctic as a powerful symbol, an inspirational landscape, and a geopolitical factor.
In 2017-2018, national libraries in Nuuk, Copenhagen, Stockholm, and Oslo, together with the New York Public Library, combined their creativity, experience, and archives to create a joint platform for discussing one of today’s most pressing issues: the melting ice in the Arctic region and the impact of climate change on human civilization.
Co-hosted by the Royal Danish Library and the NAC Orchestra the second edition of this ambitious international collaboration is a not-to-be-missed speaker series focusing on the implications of climate change and a warming North for geopolitics and human civilization as we know it.
This speaker series is presented as part of the NAC Orchestra’s SPHERE Festival. The events will be also be livestreamed to audiences with no tickets required.
See Nordic participants below.
Event Supporters
a rawlings is a mineral, plant, animal, person, place, or thing. Also known as Dr. Angela Rawlings, they are a Canadian-Icelandic interdisciplinary artist-researcher who works with languages as dominant exploratory material. Their practice seeks and interrogates relationality between bodies—be they human, more-than-human, other-than, non. Meditating on languages as inescapable lenses of human engagement, rawlings’ methods over the past twenty years have included sensorial poetries, vocal and contact improvisation, theatre of the rural, and conversations with landscapes.
rawlings has an extensive solo and group performance and exhibition background. They have performed throughout North America, Europe, and Australia at festivals including Roskilde Festival (Denmark), Oslo International Poetry Festival (Norway), and Tectonics Music Festival (Iceland, Scotland). Their work has been exhibited internationally at venues including Dedee Shattuck Gallery (USA), Hafnarborg (Iceland), Hanstholm Fyr (Denmark), and Kunsthall Trondheim (Norway).
rawlings’ books include Wide slumber for lepidopterists (Coach House Books, 2006), Gibber (online, 2012), o w n (CUE BOOKS, 2015), si tu (MaMa Multimedijalni Institut, 2017), Sound of Mull (Laboratory for Aesthetics and Ecology, 2019). Their book Wide slumber was adapted to music theatre by Valgeir Sigurðsson and VaVaVoom (2014). Their libretti include Bodiless (for Gabrielle Herbst, 2014) and Longitude (for Davíð Brynjar Franzson, 2014). rawlings’ Áfall / Trauma was shortlisted for the Leslie Scalapino Award for Innovative Women Playwrights (2013).
rawlings received their PhD from the University of Glasgow where they researched how to perform geochronology in the Anthropocene. In 2021-22, they are researching becoming-with whales in the climate crisis as a postdoctoral fellow with H.M. Queen Margrethe’s and Vigdís Finnbogadóttir’s Interdisciplinary Research Centre on Ocean, Climate, and Society. rawlings also teaches at the Iceland University of the Arts in the MFA for Performing Arts and MA in Music (New Audiences and Innovative Practices). rawlings lives in Iceland.
Svend Hardenberg is a popular Greenlandic politician, senior government official, and businessman, who entered unexpected Netflix stardom as a leading role in Borgen, a highly successful Danish TV series that deals with themes of climate crisis. Hardenberg previously served as Chief of Staff under Greenland Prime Minister Ms. Aleqa Hammond.
Dr. Minik Thorleif Rosing is a world-renowned geologist from Greenland. Among Minik’s many titles and accomplishments, he is a professor of geology at the University of Copenhagen, previous leader of Danish ship-based scientific research expedition Galathea 3, and one of the artists behind Icewatch—a series of melting glacier ice blocks positioned in clock-formation outside notable places of governance.
Dr. Dorthe Dahl Jensen is a legend in glaciology and scientific expeditions on the Greenland ice sheet. Living up to the motto that researchers must be where the changes are happening in order to achieve reliable results, Dorthe has worked in Greenland for years—and with her large research team, has tried to answer one of the most important questions of our time: how fast does the ice melt?
