M - Antennae The Journal of Nature in Visual Culture

nature. The affirmation is one that has
destruction implicit to its own rejection of nature
as a process, not a product.
Nature existed long before human life and consciousness
appeared and will exist long after we are gone. It is not a
question of everything is nature, more precisely, organic
and inorganic material containing different kind of
information. Our Western stigmatised view on nature
represents a fair for the unknown, which again creates a
need for a philosophy of nature. You don't need to
explain what you are a part of.
There are similarities between Asian and
Northern native cultures in terms of traditions,
life transitions and their basic approach to
materials.
The more I learn about indigenous people globally the
more I see a similar approach to what we in the
Western world call nature. To Inuits nature is birds, lakes,
caribou, and distinct explanations of the variety
surrounding us in order to survive.
If you photograph garbage it does not change
the situation unless we understand what the
cultural conditions are and we start to talk about
that. Otherwise we are merely objectifying the
whole process of destruction and mediation of
the land and nature yet again.
If by garbage you mean leftovers from human activity it
exists everywhere. If we want to describe an area and
the social conditions there you have to catch some of
the values existing. All communities have values but
sometimes they are difficult to recognise partly because
of our own intolerance.
What of the Inuit and indigenous people of the
North in Scandinavia. Do you perceive any
difference between the Inuit of Greenland or
Canada, or the Saami in Norway?
Among Inuit in Canada there exist different cultures.
There are differences in language, in climate and different
ways of surviving. In Greenland the language in the
northwest is very different from the east. The snow
conditions are different. Traditionally Inuit are hunters
while for several hundred years the Saami people have
herded the reindeer, which gives a more predictable
sustainability. Among the Saami people you have ten
different languages. There exist thousands of local
differences due to local conditions.
Everything comes from nature that we are
consuming and yet culture seems to have denied
any links to nature. There were propagandists
then too.
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Well, everything we consume is not produced in nature,
but from the time we established market economy the
links severed.
Art critic, writer, lecturer and interviewer, John Grande's reviews and feature
articles have been published extensively in Artforum, Vice Versa, Sculpture, Art
Papers, British Journal of Photo-graphy, Espace Sculpture, Public Art Review, Vie des
Arts, Art On Paper, Circa & Canadian Forum. He is also the author of Balance: Art
and Nature (a newly expanded edition by Black Rose Books in, 2004), Intertwining:
Landscape, Technology, Issues, Artists (Black Rose Books, 1998), Jouer avec le feu:
Armand Vaillancourt: Sculpteur engagé (Lanctot, 2001), and his most recent book,
Dialogues in Diversity: Marginal to Mainstream published in Italy in 2007 by Pari
Publishing.
Patrick Huse is a Visual Artist from Oslo, Norway — who has worked extensively
with large pedagogical museum art projects connected to Northern issues for many
years. He has produced books related to the different projects. He has carried out
social research in Arctic Canada, Greenland, Iceland and the Nordic countries and
cooperated with a large number of academics from several universities. His books
are used as text books in academic courses in universities and university colleges.
The Uncultivated Landscape is an extract from Dialogues in Diversity by John K.
Grande, published by Pari Publishing. The text is here re-printed with permission of
the author and publisher � Pari Publishing