In November 2020, the light installation MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! opened in Longyear City, Svalbard. Mounted on the wall of the town´s backup power station (a huge diesel generator), the installation was exhibited through the winter and dark times.
Amund Sjølie Sveen is the artist behind NORDTING and the light installation MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! Since no one else has written a proper review of the work, he has done it himself.
The article was published in Norsk kunstårbok 2021 (edt. Susanne Christensen)
Make the North Great Again?
The sign appears just where the road bends up toward town, after the short drive from Longyear Airport. Whether you’re a tourist or a resident, it greets you in towering red and white letters: MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! At first sight, it’s hard to know what you’re looking at. A polar branch of American expat Trump loyalists? A desperate gimmick from the tourist industry to lure visitors north during the pandemic? A political revival campaign for the Arctic at 78 degrees north? Or simply another provocation from the world of contemporary art?
Svalbard is unusual in every way. An archipelago no one was ever supposed to live on, and where no one would have lived if it weren’t for strategic decisions in capitals far away. Longyear City is a peculiar hybrid: 2,500 people carry on with daily life in what is, in fact, the world’s northernmost functioning community—north of both Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Siberia. There are cafés, choirs, a Coop supermarket, carpenters, artists, kindergartens, and people driving their snowmobiles to weekend cabins—much like any other northern town. But Svalbard is also an artificial construct. Or perhaps more precisely: it was definitely constructed, but now it is slowly becoming something of its own.
People first came here in search of resources: whale, seal and pelt, later coal. Everything was shipped south, profits pocketed by adventurers and investors. Longyear City itself—named after an American coal baron—was a pure company town without local democracy or community life until just a few decades ago. Transience is still the rule. Growing old? You must leave. Can’t support yourself? You must leave. The local big band never knows who of their members will still be in town six months from now. Maybe an Italian polar scientist who happen to also play the baritone sax will fly in? On the scale of history, Svalbard was terra nullius just a moment ago: a land without owner, where “history” and “roots” mean something quite different. No family graves. No Indigenous people. No parish records from the 1500s. In many ways this is still the Wild North, and everyone is a settler.
A hundred years before the words MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! lit up the islands, Norway was granted sovereignty over Svalbard through the Svalbard Treaty. Arguments over the reach of that sovereignty continue to this day. Russia has never been pleased with Norwegian control and takes every chance to protest. The issue is so sensitive that Norway even canceled official celebrations of the treaty’s centennial in 2020. The North, still, is unsettled territory.
Coal made Svalbard interesting in the first place. Today, even the coal is no good reason to stay. Mining continues only to supply the local power plant, though the coal is unusually clean and still prized elsewhere. Longyear survives not because of coal but because Norway needs presence. Svalbard is all about geopolitics: strategic location, resource potential and territorial claims. The logic is much the same as when King Håkon Magnusson built a fortress in Vardø on the mainland back in 1307: the crown was marking territory against Russia. To claim ownership, you need boots on the ground—a well functioning community is the most effective presence money can buy. That includes art.
In 2015, Norway’s Ministry of Culture tasked the Northern Norway Art Museum with establishing an art centre in Svalbard. The project looked very much like classic colonization with tourist-industry ambitions: international art celebrities flocking to the Arctic wasteland and tourists flocking to experience the art of art celebrities in the Arctic wastelands, while the Norwegian flag is flying above it all. Even the Norwegian royal family took part, through Artica—a residency and print workshop launched in collaboration with Queen Sonja.
Not everyone agreed that imported royals and art celebrities were the answer. Eventually, museum director Jérémie McGowan was charged with giving “Kunsthall Svalbard” content. He invited in NORDTING—one of his last moves before being abruptly dismissed, officially partly for failing to fulfill Svalbard obligations. That firing is a whole story in itself, but the point here: there is a constant battle over defining and shaping the North —over the role of art, over Svalbard, over the stories of the past and shaping of the future. NORDTING’s light installation is part of all this.
NORDTING calls itself both a liberation movement and a people’s assembly, and has even fielded candidates for parliament elections. NORDTING has built its reputation on staging so-called “Things”—an old nordic term for governing assemblies; part PowerPoint lecture, part variety show, part community meeting. Across the circumpolar north from Vardø to Alaska, NORDTING operates shamelessly in the space between populism, satire, activism and art—and has a knack for irritating people. The slogan MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! has been with them for years: the first T-shirts appeared in 2017, back when Donald Trump still seemed mostly like a joke to non-Americans. The Svalbard installation was unveiled with flags, speeches, music on oil barrels and stockfish—and even a spot on the national evening news. All classic NORDTING ingredients.
There is of course no doubt that NORDTING´s slogan rides the Trump wave, even if no one could predict the outcome of the U.S. election or the storming of Congress when the installation was planned. The original phrase is perhaps the most potent political one-liner of our time, designed to awaken the sense of something magnificent being lost, something that must be restored. The potency has made the artwork contentious. American residents of Svalbard bristled—unsurprisingly—at being reminded of what kind of politicians their democracy has produced. Critical voices of the art world seemed to dismiss the whole concept: engaging with a Trump slogan at all would be impossible, or even immoral—an almost untouchable symbol, nearly on par with Nazi insignia. And anyway, everybody pointed out, this slogan isn´t funny in 2020.
NORDTING insists they mean it seriously, branding it a “public awareness campaign.” The argument goes that the Arctic still carries colonial traits: political power is located elsewhere, wealth created by resources extraction flows outward, the region is a stage for power struggles between external powers, and the distance between local lives and southern decision-makers is immense. This logic extends beyond Norway: it´s difficult to forget that Donald Trump seriously tried to buy Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland). The U.S. has pursued increasingly aggressive Arctic policies in recent years, and one of Trump’s last acts in office was to reopen Alaska’s protected wilderness to oil drilling.
The conclusion of NORDTING is simply that the North must become great again—in the sense of reclaiming power. It is hard to disagree, but also hard to take literally. Is the installation meant to rouse Longyear’s inhabitants to strap on reindeer antlers, storm the governor’s office, and declare an independent Arctic republic?
Perhaps. Perhaps not. The key difference between Trump-supporters and northern freedom fighters, at any rate, is that here the struggle runs bottom-up. Frustration is real. People feel run over. It is no coincidence that Trygve Slagsvold Vedum of the Center Party—champion of Norway’s peripheries—is predicted to conquer the north in the 2021 elections. Still, one might ask if the installation would resonate better on the mainland—or in perhaps in Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland)—than in Svalbard. But NORDTING has long pushed Pan-Arcticism, modeled on Pan-Africanism: a vision of one circumpolar community beyond national borders. Svalbard—at once extremely northern and highly international—is the perfect stage. In this ultimate North, everything is pushed to the extreme.
NORDTING argue they are turning Trump’s slogan on its head, reclaiming it for empowerment. This is obviously the language of artists with good intentions—but is such subversion even possible? Does not Trump himself take up all available space, outperforms all attempts of transformation and inevitably totally overshadows the artwork? Possibly. Yet contemporary art may have no choice but to try. The alternative would be to leave both Trump and politics untouched, and there is little to be gained from that.
Stepping back from the American news headlines for a moment, other layers of the artwok will emerge. The North has always been described through the gaze of outsiders: a white, untouched, virgin land, a frontier waiting to be conquered. Svalbard embodies this mythology, its history filled with rugged men battling the powers of nature, chasing wealth and fame. Trump, in his way, conjures something similar: a longing for a time when “men were men” and America was “real.” But what, exactly, is the “real” North we should return to? Sámi indigeneity and poor health care? Or all the way back to the chieftain Tore Hund 1000 years ago? Perhaps the point is simpler: people actually live here now, with their own needs and opinions—and those needs and opinions must shape society more than today. That is what makes the North Great.
Time and time again, tourism is cast as the savior of the exotic northern periphery. On Svalbard, this has already come true. Those who don’t work for the state, work for the tourists. Clearly, MNGA was partly aimed at the thousands who normally fly in during the winter season. With tourists gone during the pandemic, the sign has spoken mostly through media. The pandemic is anyway a bigger problem for the local community than for the artwork. Svalbard’s special legal status means anyone can live and work here, there are no visa requirements or work permits, but you have to manage by yourself. Non-Norwegian inhabitants cannot fall back on Norwegian welfare safety nets. Nobody will rescue you. Longyearbyen has been bleeding, and patience is thin—also when it comes to public spending on art.
The local Facebook group “Ros & Info Longyearbyen” is the arena where some accuse NORDTING of being just as colonial as anyone else: no one have asked the locals what kind of art they want, the argument goes, and a light-polluting installation was the last thing needed in the middle of the polar night. NORDTING probably hadn’t seen that critique coming, and eventually dimmed the sign—after some had already unplugged it in protest. One could easily argue that Longyear was well-lit already, but somehow people find glowing Yamaha signs easier to accept than glowing MNGA-signs. This is one of Svalbard’s unavoidable paradoxes: the “untouched” nature sold to tourists is eroded by the selling itself. The coal plant, airplanes, and Yamha-snowmobiles make the winter season shorter, the polar bears thinner, and and the tourism economy weaker.
For those of us who have always found neon seductively beautiful, MNGA is proof we weren’t wrong. Perfectly shaped and balanced, bold letters in symbolic primary colors, put together in a design that would have soothed even old-school typographers. It is classic readymade: ordered from a factory in Estonia, paid for with Norwegian cultural funds, shipped to Svalbard, displayed against the dramatic backdrop of Arctic landscapes and the glow of a polar night. Potent and beautiful—disturbingly so, of course, but that is also the point.
As usual, we are dealing with is a blissful mix of chance where a pandemic and a U.S. election meet more or less conscious choices of context, message, and effect. As one local put it: “The ideas behind it are good, I agree completely. But as art, it still sucks.” Maybe that is precisely the beauty of public art: its context is never fixed, its meaning shifts as circumstances change, and there is only so much anyone can anticipate or control. It is a risky business—or prototyping, as NORDTING prefers to call it. Slogans, statements, analyses and performative interventions are thrown into the world to be tested agains reality. The result is often good conversations.
Today, the mantra in politics, tourism, and art alike is the same: you must sell stories and experiences to survive. Political philosopher Chantal Mouffe—a star of of leftwing populism—argues that politics and emotion are inseparable, that without communities with shared identities no political force can arise. That is why we need stories, slogans, songs, and symbols that bind people together—and here the artist is the expert. Could MNGA truly function as a mobilizing slogan for northern empowerment? In our current political reality, nothing seems impossible.
Perhaps it’s true, as some say, that everyone who moves to Svalbard is moving away from something—that there is an element of self-chosen withdrawal. If so, it can be uncomfortable to be reminded that there is no true escape. We are all entangled, stuck in the glue whether we like it or not. There is nowhere to hide from politics, capitalism or complexity—not even at 78 degrees north.
Amund Sjølie Sveen
I 2021, MAKE THE NORTH GREAT AGAIN! opened i Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland), in cooperation with Nuuk Art Museum.The installation was shown on the wall of the National Library in the pedestrian street of downtown Nuuk, through two winter montes. In February 2022, the light installation was moved to Kirkenes (NO) in cooperation with the festival Barents Spektakel. A smaller version have been exhibited in Nordens hu in Tórshavn, Faroe Islands. A Russian-language version was planned to open i Murmansk (RU) in the spring of 2022. This was never realized.
For updated info on MNGA, please see:
https://www.nordting.no/initiatives/make-the-north-great-again
