Catalogue > At random

Northern Drift is set in the sparse, yet occupied wilderness of the Norwegian-Russian borderland in the European High North, home to the indigenous Sami culture. The area became an industrial development site in the late 19th century. It is not only a region whose landscape still bears visible traces of the conflicts of the last century, but also one that has come to play a key role in an ongoing Northward expansion fueled by the sense that climate change will make the north an untapped economic goldmine. Resulting from long-term research conducted in the shadow of the protocols and restrictions around the political border, Northern Drift takes the form of an investigation whose object is never quite revealed. Assembled from personal experiences, collected testimonies and local stories, the film presents a journey across the contentious Norwegian-Russian borderland. Exploring the persistence of frontier imaginaries, the film is at once travelogue, anthropological document and retro-futuristic sci-fi, blending these tropes into a re-imagined geography through and a poetic exploration of a labyrinthine zone where past and future are confounded.

Alexis Destoop’s work explores the workings of the image and narrative, the experience of time, and the processes of identification and memory. His practice covers the expanded field between photography and film and has been influenced by his experience in the performing arts as well as his studies in art history and philosophy. Referencing classical representations of the human figure, his earlier works focus on duration and performativity. In recent years his situated practice has focused on transitional environments where ecological pitfalls, economical aspirations, geopolitical tensions and colonial histories coalesce. Rather than treating landscape as a sublime natural object, he approaches it as a thoroughly human construct – with stratified meanings and histories. This explains the decision to attend to contentious zones where global and local processes and interests collide and intertwine, and where it becomes possible to rethink notions of centre and periphery, self and other. Blending fact and fiction, history and speculation, Destoop offers a fragmented, subjective cartography of the transitory states that constitute our present era.