The Fish Factory is a badass, fabulously outfitted DIY oasis of a space for art and culture. I loved working within a multinational group of artists practicing in a range of media—from ceramics and drawing to electronic synth and neo-classical music composition and video. I loved being a part of this amazing community built by staff and organizers committed to living and supporting creative lives. Here, within the quiet peace of the village and the beauty of the harbour and the surrounding hills, I accomplished everything I’d planned.

At the Fish Factory I worked on a project involving documented performance art leveraging rhetorical absurdity, reflecting on the dissonances and complexities of arctic touring during a time of ecological and other crises.

The project began when I hand wrote over one-hundred letters asking people in my art world to gift me with instructions for performance to enact and document while on an artist residency in Svalbard in August 2024. I invited entrusted colleagues to share in tender and critical dialogue about art, memorial, witness, mortality and so on, and fulfilled close to forty instructions, wrapping up the final actions in March in Stodvarfjordur. Instructions included collecting my tears to exchange with glacier water, singing a Russian song about polar bears making the Earth go ‘round, performing certain gestures of apology, and leaving no trace.

I wanted to make serious and imaginative attempts to make sense of the sublime within a landscape so emblematic of the zeitgeist of these times. To self-justify my return to Svalbard I needed to continue my explorations of constructed and mythologized landscape, grounded in human relations and interventions with the environment.

The Fish Factory was the perfect place for me to process images, videos, and sounds I made for these documented performances, while writing creative nonfiction about the project.

Risa Horowitz is a visual and media artist based in Saskatchewan where she is a Professor of Visual Arts at the University of Regina.

www.risahorowitz.com

@risahorowitz