Arctic Cycle I
Fondation Fiminco, FR 2026
Toned cyanotypes on linen, ceramics,
contextual video (wip)
540cm x 20cm, various
Between the blank spaces of old maps, the history of the
North Pole begins not with knowledge, but with projection.
European cartographers drew islands, seas, and mountain
ranges that never existed. They populated land and sea
with monsters and fantastical creatures.
This project engages with this overlap of mythology, cartography, and fossil capitalism. In my toned cyanotypes, the foreheads of oil company CEOs emerge from the sea, fragments of faces appearing like islands, cliffs rising from Arctic waters or sea monsters drifting across an open ocean.
Their foreheads evoke the *Rupes Nigra*, the mythical black magnetic rock that Gerardus Mercator imagined at the center of the North Pole in his sixteenth-century maps. Perhaps Mercator was projecting a myth. Perhaps Europe had always been searching for a black center beneath the ice. In retrospect, this invention feels almost prophetic: a premonition of the oil, the “black gold” hidden beneath the Arctic, that would later fuel colonial expansion, industrial extraction, and climate catastrophe. Mercator could not have known this.
Yet within this cartographic error emerges an uncanny connection between historical fantasy and contemporary reality.
The oil executives in these works no longer appear as individuals but as geological forces, new landmasses of the fossil-fuel era. Their heads become landscapes. Their foreheads become islands. They also recall the sea monsters drawn on ancient maps at the edges of the known world, creatures embodying fear of the unknown.
Today, however, the monsters no longer seem imaginary. They wear suits, run corporations, and leave behind melting ice.
Another historical map depicted the North Pole not as frozen land, but as open water. What was once a cartographic mistake now appears almost visionary. Through pollution and fossil-fuel extraction,
reality itself begins to resemble those earlier fictions. The pole is becoming liquid. The map becomes true, not because it was accurate, but because the world has been transformed according to the destructive logic that those fantasies unconsciously anticipated.
Yet another form of knowledge had existed all along. Indigenous Arctic communities developed sleds, fishing tools, hunting techniques, and navigation systems precisely adapted to the environment.
Their technologies were practical, sustainable, and capable of survival. Meanwhile, European expeditions failed, starved, or disappeared into the ice, while industrial machinery continued
to be celebrated as superior. The “Dornier Wal” (whale), a flying boat designed by my great-grandfather Claude Dornier, embodied this belief in technological progress: steel, engines, oil. Two of these machines were used by Roald Amundsen and his entourage on their mission to reach the North Pole in 1925 but the mission failed due to a mechanical defect.
I made ten small ceramic objects, hybrids remniscent of both my great-grandfather’s seaplane and a traditional arctic fishing hook.
What does progress mean when the best machines have trouble even reaching territories that Indigenous technologies had inhabited for centuries? Perhaps adaptation is more intelligent than domination. Perhaps a sled that functions is more civilised than an airplane that crashes.
The colonial gaze also appears through representation. Indigenous people were photographed frontally and in profile as ethnographic specimens, classified, measured, archived.
Europeans received painted portraits: individuality, dignity, character. Indigenous people, meanwhile, were transformed into anthropological data. This visual language formed part of a scientific racism that claimed to document humanity while constructing hierarchies within it. So in an attempt of level these power structures I portrayed the nine present CEOs of oil companies drilling for oil in the Arctic in this way.
The project research and development was conducted at:
Søndre Green Noresund, NO 2023
European Union Joint Research Centre Ispra, IT 2024
Fondation Fiminco Romainville, FR 2026
Report for EU JRC Ispra:
https://freight.cargo.site/m/P2969070617558695334451526207404/Makers-in-Residence-Report---Artistic-Explorations-of-the-Arctic---Lars-PREISSER---20253.pdf