Nastassja Simensky
In residence: August - September 2024
Nastassja Simensky is an artist based in Nottingham. She uses fieldwork to explore and understand how complex issues around history and heritage, power and governance, ecology and the geopolitics of extraction are crystallised in specific geographies. Nastassja often works collaboratively with artists and non-artists, including archaeologists, powerplant workers, musicians, and ham radio enthusiasts, to make authored and co-authored artworks. Previously, these have included: place-specific performances on boats, in quarries, and inside a 7th century chapel; amateur radio broadcasts to transmit and publish text and image; sound work for radio and installation; films; and poetic texts. Nastassja coordinates the Archaeology-Heritage-Art Research Network. By engaging with the politics, methods, and processes of archaeology Nastassja reflects on the discipline of archaeology itself, as one of a range of modes of knowledge production that can inform embedded place-specific, experimental, and collaborative art practices.
"From a distance, Svalbard appears a little like a constellation; a scattered collection of rocky outcrops and glaciers rising high out of the Arctic Ocean, surrounded by an expanse of grey sea. Homing in reveals a complex assemblage of feral relations and effects; a place that not only shapes, but is itself shaped by Earth monitoring technologies, molecular toxicity, industrialisation, energy production, and novel practices of material and economic speculation. Meanwhile, the archipelago is simultaneously a site for emergent dialogues within critical heritage, which offer a vital challenge to the existing value systems for ‘conserving’ both nature and culture in the face of inevitable change. During my time with ARTICA, I will use an embedded approach to reflect upon these complexities. Using writing, sound, radio transmission and moving image to shape narratives that traverse scales and temporalities - from the human to the oceanic, and from molecular to the planetary, I hope to reflect critically on the distributed and feral effects and conditions of Svalbard."