Bendik Giske

On July 11, 1897, three men - the Swedish engineer Salomon August Andrée and his companions Nils Strindberg and Knut Fraenkel - set off from Spitsbergen for the North Pole in a hydrogen balloon, a daring attempt to conquer the Arctic from the air. Contact is lost after a few days. They are never seen again. Thirty-three years later, on August 6, 1930, a sealing ship makes a chilling discovery on the remote Island of Kvitøya, the northernmost part of Svalbard. The expedition’s remains, bodies frozen in time beneath the snow, alongside journals and undeveloped film material. Ninety-three of the 240 recovered photographs are salvaged. The documentary reconstructs this expedition between delusion and vision, between scientific ambition and human vulnerability as a compelling mosaic of past and present – ​​an archaeological crime thriller about the price of discovery, the beauty of the unknown, and the melting of memory in the ice of time, with a touch of tragic, unrequited love.

We hold where study takes a choreographic approach to image-making and mourning. The film enacts a series of duets, both within and between images, featuring choreography by boychild with Josh Johnson and by Ligia Lewis with Jonathan Gonzalez, both to original music by Bendik Giske. The work is rooted in Tsang’s ongoing dialogue with collaborators Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, authors of The Undercommons, and in particular on their recent essay Leave Our Mics Alone, which posits an (im)possible set of images of resistance, through poetic notions of blackness (and/or transness and/or queerness) as an improvisational mode of being, in common with others, working through and of the environment.

In Corsica, a woman chooses to care for the earth by burning it.