The cluster called COSMO-SCIENCE goes beyond the observable social forms in camp and is an attempt to convey my sense of being on a sci-fi spaceship with a mission to save planet Earth. Allow me to go somewhat into substance here. The scientific rationale of the NEEM project was to obtain undisturbed ice more than 2km under the surface to profile a climatic period called The Eemian. Being five degrees warmer than the present, the Eemian is believed to hold significant implications for future projections of global warming. Imagine for a moment, the future of the planet encapsulated in an enigmatic and elusive form of ice called the Eemian.
For me as an anthropologist, this scientific rationale represented a kind of fusion between a factual past and a mythic future. I came to see this fusion - instantiated by the NEEM base - as a particular cultural imagination of ice, for which western naturalism had paved the way. Ice represented annals; an archive of weather information to be deciphered into future projections. In the course of my fieldwork, I came to see this mode of imagining ice as a kind of "analogue naturalism" (Descola 2010).
Cosmopolitics is a term derived from the Stoics, meaning an affiliation to no polis (city) in particular, but to cosmos (the world) in general. The more comprehensive vision of cosmo-science is forged by Stenger's idea of "cosmo-politics", which she took to mean a form of science with no affiliation to any camp in particular, but to humanity in a metaphysical sense. By way of using extreme wide-angle lenses and thus bending the horizon, I have tried to depict the camp as, well as cosmogenic. That is, a closed universe on top of planet Earth in a vast expanse of an empty landscape.
Read more about the photo series A Cold Northern Light here.
