Footprint in the snow

Just some impressions bout Lapland. How to be affected by landscape.

In the last few years, the landscape has been the focus of my whole work. My interest is not in the landscape as the art of the beautiful sight but as the territory of consciousness. In my reading about the poles I discovered a phenomenon called “the Whiteout.” The Whiteout arrives on white days, when the skies are covered with a uniform layer of clouds and the ground in snow. The Whiteout makes all points of visual reference disappear and sensory illusions appear. Explorers fear it greatly as it makes them lose all their bearings. Unable to find their way, they may die two feet away from their camp or and crash in their helicopter after losing their sense of height.

I tackle the question of the landscape starting from the experience of the body and the mind. This weather condition seemed to me to refer exactly to the problem that I was after: namely, the sudden appearance of space and the possibility of naming it. The transgression of all visual bearings in the quest for sensory illusion” is in a way the very subject of my photography.

So I tried to get closer to this moment of Whiteout by travelling to the pole.

I stopped at the 64° North, a few degrees shy from the pole, in Swedish Laponia, to do a project on the scale of our bearings. To contemplate Saxnäs’ landscapes at a temperature close to -25°C confirmed my sense of a volatility of space. I tried to capture in my pictures the moment of visual vibration when the apparition of the landscape seems to happen in the blink of an eye. What prevails is this feeling of being wrapped up in white, grey, an emotion of cold that belongs to a process of disappearance. In the same project, I sought to balance the feeling of levitation that one gets during the day with night views that, strangely enough, give more consistency to space. In the winter in Lapland, there is only 4 hours daylight.