Jasper Coppes: Aasivissuit | Exp. documentary | 4k, super 16mm, hdv | colour | 0:23:30 | Netherlands, Greenland | 2020

Synopsis

Recent footage of melting polar ice in Greenland as shown in the global mass media has represented the country as both the ground zero of climate crisis and a vast expanse for resource exploitation. The film Aasivissuit aims to provide a different view, showing instead the landscape and its inhabitants: focusing on people’s discussions about climate change and how they adapt in their complex relationship with the changing environment.

The film follows two park rangers exploring the Greenlandic landscape. They exchange new and old knowledge of the land in their conversations. They talk about how ancient fertile sediment from Greenland is used to nurture exploited soil elsewhere and how microbes have found a way to deal with pollution. Drawing attention to the non-human presence within the landscape, the camera occasionally adopts the perspective of a fly or a raven, or dives into one of the holes in the melting ice cap where toxic metals collect. The film investigates how we can experience and perhaps understand these different perspectives.

“The film Aasivissuit is the outcome of four years of exchange and collaboration with various Greenlandic nature experts and scientists who intimately know this stunning landscape. Their perspectives, as well as those of other-than-human inhabitants such as the raven or the microbe, formed the blueprint of the film. Rather than focussing on their environment from a human centered angle, our aim was to represent the sunlit grasslands of Assivissuit between Polar sea and melting inland ice sheet, from the point of view of the landscape itself – showing how entangled our relations are.”

Biography

Jasper Coppes is an artist from Netherlands, based in Amsterdam. His practice takes shape across a variety of different media, such as; film, writing, sculpture, architecture and sound. With his work, he questions the dominant stories we tell about landscapes and the processes that take place within them. Long-term dialogues with specific sites, people and other entities form the basis of his practice. Recent exhibitions: 2020 ´Exploded View´ Zone2Source (NL), 2019 Museum Nacht Scheepvaart Museum (NL), 2018 ´Cabinet Interventions’ Glasgow International Festival (UK), 2017 Glasgow Short Film Festival (UK), 2015 ´Roineabhal´ Galerie van Gelder (NL) Coppes is a tutor at the Royal Academy of Art in The Hague, MA Artistic Research and at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam.