Introduction

Academic and media attention to the so-called “far” north, while long limited, has also reflected centuries of imperial desires and pursuits among the world powers. This attention increasingly turns to neo-colonial pursuits of minerals and untapped remaining resources exposed by permafrost thaw in vast and often unprotected circumpolar regions (Nuttall 2010; Nuttal 2023; Reeploeg 2021; Smith 2025). The future that sparsely populated circumpolar regions face by consequence is one which places them not at the outskirts, but at the center, of the twenty-first century’s capitalism.

The Greenlandic artistic organisation Arctic Culture Lab described the situation well, which they fielded within the confines of how it impacted their small institution. They wrote:

The consumption of the Arctic as an exotic place might add some fancy event on the CV of a visiting artist, howabeit it will not contribute to the Arctic. To speak with Edward Said`s criticism of Orientalism: the Arctic is nothing more than a simplificating, western concept which compensates lack of knowledge by projecting a world-view towards a place far away.

“A place far away”: This is where the project Studies in Remoteness begins. Distance is, it turns out, profoundly subjective. Urban people are surrounded by “far away places”, for example, even within the cityscapes they inhabit – the innumerable apartments of strangers, the many cultural organizations, clubs, subcultures, and shops they have never visited. Remoteness is all around, it is that which escapes attention because attention is finite. Even one’s own body, with all its inaccessible interior workings, is remote. There is, by consequence, something intimate about the distance and inaccessibility of remoteness. Remoteness demands imagination. It is also deeply political, shaping the sensoria of global modernism. In Regarding the Pain of Others (2003), Susan Sontag described the way that remoteness emerges as a construct of privilege, writing that, “it is absurd to identify the world with those zones in the well-off countries where people have the dubious privilege of being spectators, or of declining to be spectators, of other people’s pain” (110-111). Remoteness can begin where, quite precisely, one consciously or unconsciously so declines. The task of the project is to critically address this kind of remove and narrate its histories.

Continue to I. Histories of Distanced Relations