Heidi Nikolaisen

Associate lecturer, Bergen National Academy of the Arts, Norway

Thoughts for future beginnings (a beginning for future thoughts).

Heidi Nikolaisen will be doing a joint presentation with Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek.

Heidi Nikolaisen and Cornelia Schmidt-Bleek are both practicing international visual artists and teach at Subject Area Photography at the Dept of Spesialised Art, Bergen National Academy of the Arts. Nikolaisen (Norwegian) is based in Bergen, while Schmidt-Bleek (German/American) lives and works primarily in Berlin, Germany. They are currently in the first stages of researching their individual projects, both generated from a mutual vantage point.

Funding stone at Svalbard / Photo: Lene Krøl Christensen

Their interest lies in the ambitious mission of the Norwegian government to compile and establish the world’s largest archive of crop seeds, housed in the depths of the arctic archipelago of Svalbard, Spitzbergen. Nikolaisen and Schmidt-Bleek aim to generate larger-scale long-term projects, involving interdisciplinary approaches.

The Svalbard seed vault as a Noah’s ark for seeds – doomsday vault

The medias approach to the seed vault has been to call it a “doomsday vault” and Norway’s Agriculture Minister Terje Riis-Johansen has called the vault a “Noah’s Ark on Svalbard.” Heidi Nikolaisen found the media’s immediate approach interesting. Inspired by the Svalbard seed vault, global environmental problems and the concept of the apocalypse, Nikolaisen intends to create a “vault” or “place of preservation” as a contemporary zeitgeist.

Nikolaisen is interested in what thoughts or ideas are created in people’s minds when told about the Svalbard seed vault. What is awoken when presented with the implications of a fatalistic ending? If you had one thought you could give to a future generation, what would it be?

The ICARDA Genebank

“The Svalbard Global Seed Vault is being constructed as a cave excavated into the permafrost just outside Longyearbyen. The SGS is intended to ensure genetic variety for the world’s food plants by storing duplicates of seed collections from gene banks all over the world, and will have storage capacity for over four million different seeds. If a seed is lost somewhere in the world due to natural disasters, war or resource shortages, it can be re-established with seeds from Svalbard.”

Source: Norwegian ministry of agriculture and food

Illustration: NASA

Norway to House Seeds in Doomsday Vault…-a doomsday vault carved into a frozen mountainside on a secluded Arctic island is ready to serve as a Noah’s Ark for seeds in case of a global catastrophe. Its purpose is to ensure the survival of crop diversity in the event of plant epidemics, nuclear war, natural disasters or climate change, and to offer the world a chance to restart growth of food crops that may have been wiped out. The seeds, packaged in foil, would be stored at such cold temperatures that they could last hundreds, even thousands, of years, according to the independent Global Crop Diversity Trust.

Source: Article by Doug Mellgren, Associated Press

Storytelling at Grand Royal arts installation “would you trust a Norwegian” in 2002

One part of Nikolaisens research is to make a journey to Svalbard to attend the opening of the seed vault the 26 of February 2008. Another part is to invite people to contribute their thoughts for “preservation”. This work follow up strategies Nikolaisen has utilized in the past, such as storytelling – the communication in the act of two or more people sharing something – a story/a topic/a place/a thesis or history. She will present the idea of the “mental seed vault” orally to different groups of people and interview them. One group she is interested in talking to, are the archeologists who have started excavating a huge dinosaur, located in Svalbard in 2007

Other groups of interest could be evolution theorists, mathematicians, scientists, different religious groups, fortune tellers.

In the presentation Nikolaisen will draw lines to her earlier work. A part of the artistic research is also to find out what happens to the project during this process and meetings, and how it may change it. The information and the results from these encounters will be gathered as sound/text and photography.

Note: The project is in the starting phase

From the excavation of the pliosaurus 2007, pictures by the Natural History Museum, University of Oslo, Norway

Possible topic of discussion

Earlier Nikolaisen has worked with oral history and the past. This project in turn presents the question of the future. Will the result consequently be something that can be defined as an “oral future”?

More information about the Svalbard seed vault
Heidi Nikolaisen
Flaggfabrikken