I travelled to Longyearbyen, Svalbard, in October 2025 as part of the PolARTS art–science tandem Fire & (A)Ice, embedded in the scientific OptimIce project on microfossils preserved in snow and ice from around the globe. The original plan had been to go jointly on this trip, but due to a maternity leave, I travelled alone and worked in remote yet close collaboration with my scientific partner, Dr. Sandra Camara. While this altered the social dynamics of the fieldwork, it sharpened certain aspects of the collaboration. I had a much more active role in the field than anticipated – which was as challenging as it was exciting.
The primary task of the trip was the collection of surface snow samples from Svalbard to complement a global dataset on microfossil deposition. Longyearbyen was not only of interest as a missing geographical point for microfossil analyses. For our tandem, it represents a place where different kinds of archives coexist in a microcosmos: natural and artificial, human and more-than-human, biological and technological. Pollen and atmospheric material settle into fresh snow that may one day become ice cores; research infrastructures try to stabilise certain forms of knowledge; and former extractive sites continue to structure the landscape and cultural heritage (long) after their original function has ceased (the last mine closed in 2025). The field, in this sense, is always an archive in the making, one I aimed to interrogate and artistically complement.
I collected snow samples at six locations around Longyearbyen, logging the work under Sandra Camara’s remote mentorship and instructions. The work – for a scientific layman – required attention to procedure and documentation. Throughout the process, Sandra and I remained in contact via messages, images and short calls: “Do I have to clean the shovel regularly?”, “Can I touch the snow with my gloves?”, “How much dirt/sediments can there be in the sample?”… Questions arise when an artist slips into scientific tasks. I found myself temporarily adopting a more explicitly scientific mode of attention – not to produce interpretation, but to ensure continuity and comparability. Alongside this scientific sample collection, I shared observations that did not seek to become scientific data at all. In my artistic practice, shaped by my background in humanities, I’m interested in epistemological processes and contexts or conditions in which scientific factuality is embedded.
From what I witnessed, Longyearbyen is a particularly interesting site for this: The (human idea of the) pristine exists alongside specific forms of human encounters with their notion of wilderness, a temporary, often comfortable exposure – indulged yet still at distance. Scientific research that is technologically advanced exists alongside raw material extraction that enables such processes while at the same time influencing the samples that science interrogates. Artists trying to inscribe themselves into this history and landscape, arriving on the same mid-sized commercial airplane which few of us share in our stories. The histories stored in the ice and landscapes exist alongside the creeping potential of the future, when we one day need to use the seeds stored in the Global Seed Vault or the Arctic World Archive. I was lucky enough to witness where new crops (including from Switzerland) are stored – and I was struck by the performance-like ceremony to celebrate the (icy) guardians of memory.
Moving through Longyearbyen and its surrounding landscape (always an endeavour with the presence of polar bears – a relationship shaped by the presence of guns on humans, fostering our position slightly above the wilderness we so vividly seek to indulge in), the proximity of glaciers, former mining sites and research facilities became increasingly interlinked. I visited Gruve 3, fully accessible. Entering this particular mine offered a strangely similar spatial experience to the melt water channels inside the glacier encountered during one of the snow collection trips. The geological features of Svalbard really unsettled familiar visual expectations. Like the mine, the glacier appeared more unheimlich and dirty, more mysterious compared to the glaciers I encountered in Switzerland. This difference resisted established aesthetic templates of ice and echoed one of the tandem’s ongoing concerns: how images – whether produced through microscopes, cameras or datasets – establish norms of clarity, purity and legibility. Ice cores, like photographic or digital archives, are never neutral containers but are shaped by visual cultures, which the visit at Svalbard Museum also emphasised.
I always carried my cameras to document all these encounters. In this case, a digital and an analogue one allowed me to experiment with different renderings of the same and to play with the temporalities of the medium within the temporalities of the landscape. During a research phase, this process is always non-deterministic for me. I follow intuition and what is visually striking to me, analogies within the landscapes or moments where images or imageries start to break. Often these are unexpected. For example, I found it striking how the last hills of mined coal or extracted sediments from dormant mines subtly intersect with the landscape. However, I usually only discover connections much later, when I edit images.
After leaving Longyearbyen, I attended the Svalbard Science Conference in Oslo. The conference offered insight into current discussions about (local) polar science. It provided an opportunity to observe how evidence is presented and uncertainty negotiated. At the same time, the format revealed familiar asymmetries: Artistic contributions were strongly framed in terms of affect or as communication facilitators, while perspectives from the humanities – which would approach climate change, technology or geoengineering also as cultural or historical processes shaped by ideology – were barely present compared to a seemingly increased awareness for social sciences. For me, this absence highlighted how important it is to intersect the disciplines and give artists active voices in the discourse. I thank the Swiss Polar Institute, Pro Helvetia, the people on site and Sandra Camara for encouraging such intersections.
Janis Polar is a visual artist and a beneficiary of the PolARTS funding scheme, a joint initiative of the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia and the Swiss Polar Institute. His fieldtrip took place in summer 2025 in the context of the project ‘Fire &(A)Ice – Exploring image-based aesthetics of microfossils in ice cores’ with Sandra Brügger, a paleoecologist at the University of Bern.