‪Parallel play: Experiments in picturing the near Arctic‪

Résumé 0

‪In the last 50 years, the circumpolar world has moved from the periphery to the centre of international policy and public culture. This paper explores how art and anthropology can work in parallel to create visual and textual representations that ‘picture the north’ as heterogeneous, complex, and unfolding rather than reproducing polarising views of the arctic as a place of extreme fragility or boundless opportunity. It describes a multimodal installation, ‪‪Mackenzie Place‪‪, that is the outcome of a decade-long engagement between an anthropologist and photographer. ‪‪Mackenzie Place‪‪ is a series of still and moving images that provide an in-depth study of a lone high-rise residential tower in Hay River, Northwest Territories –a multi-ethnic town north of the 60th parallel in Canada. We use the term “parallel play” to describe our method of working alongside each other in generative, but not necessarily collaborative, ways. Rather than attempting to have our disciplinary, personal, and aesthetic commitments converge into a coherent singular effort, we maintained proximity around a shared visual/ethnographic anchor to explore what new media may ‘say’, or make say-able, about northern life worlds.‪