P137A.TIF

P137B.TIF

FIGURES 8 and 9

Pen and ink wash on paper

FROM WHALES TO COAL MINES

DANIEL MERIDOR

The story of the Svalbard archipelago in the Arctic Ocean is a story of exploitation. Its status as a no-man’s-land, or terra nullius, a national status widely agreed upon since the seventeenth century, allowed for the misuse of its natural resources without restrictions and taxation. While ships competed for whales to hunt at sea, mining companies vied for coal with the erection of new structures on land. They assumed that conquering more territory would strengthen their case in future negotiations for national status of the archipelago. After World War II, only Norwegian and Russian settlements survived on Svalbard, while coal mines owned by other nationalities were abandoned.

Today, old conveyor belts stretch throughout the island into the port. Deserted towers, houses, and mines still stand as a reminder of a different era. These structures struggle under the loads of snow, water, rust, and time.

In this series of drawings, I reincarnated these structures by reconstructing them over the landscape. The first act was careful observation of the new qualities of decay the structures had acquired by being exposed to large amounts of water over time—qualities that did not appear in their construction drawings and would be less present if the structures were active and inhabited.

Then I drew a series of precise architectural ink drawings, which revealed portions of these structures in different scales. These drawings were soaked in water, left to dry, and redrawn over and over again as a Sisyphean task. The process allowed the memory of the original proposal for these structures to fade and established a new structural terminology—broken, detached, additive, compressed, and tensioned—used to articulate the new construction.

Water, then, became the main motif of the project—from the actual destruction of these structures to the fading memory of their origin. Ultimately it provoked a reconstruction of the existing above the jagged ground of Svalbard.