Northern Exposure

At e-flux’s newish event space, Billy Fleming recounted the four-day trip to Narsaq, Greenland, he took with students from the Yale School of Architecture last October. The talk was framed as a series of episodic encounters in which the plucky group of twelve surveys the region’s energy and water intake systems and extractive infrastructure; discovers pockets of Indigenous resistance against the mining of rare earth minerals by offshore companies; uncovers the political potency of Geiger counters and other mapping instruments in a colonized land; and is almost stranded after adverse winds down their return flight. That last aspect of the trip was the source of much social-media chatter, which blamed (perhaps unfairly) university administrators for a lack of contingency plans and criticized (on stronger footing) the climatic calculus that underwrites the travel studio model. Fleming acknowledged all this—he referred to an online article published by NYRA that captures some of the drama and desperation experienced by students—even as he stressed the plight of Greenland’…