Towards No Earthly Pole, 2019

Glacial landscapes have never before had such a strong visual presence in popular culture, where they serve as prominent symbols of anthropogenic climate disturbance. Although few people have visited their remote geographies, glacial regions loom large in the collective imagination, as a last stronghold and melting ideal of a fantasized reality. Towards No Earthly Pole was conceived in 2017, when Julian Charrière was invited aboard a Russian research ship as part of the first Antarctic Biennale, witnessing the shocking emergence of icebergs at night. Playing with the act of reconstructing landscapes, the film interrogates the processes through which images, like fragments or drifting ice floes, accumulate to form terrains we may never have encountered, but which nonetheless inhabit our memory. Composed of footage gathered across multiple cryospheres—alpine glaciers, the Icelandic ice fields, the Greenland ice cap, and the drifting icebergs of the Arctic Ocean—distant places converge into a single, composite geography.

The resulting topography, neither real nor entirely imaginary, belongs more to the realm of dream than to the cartographic. Distances collapse, borders blur, and the landscapes become projections, sedimented from countless mediated images.

The video footage for the film was recorded with self-developed technological equipment at night. A spotlight carried by a drone reveals the massive landscape in snippets, limiting the range of vision and heightening its drama by the deep shadows the icebergs cast. Eerie sounds of cracking ice and water flowing remind us that this frozen landscape is very much alive, breath­ing, moving, and constantly evolving. All of these elements combined underline an otherworldly presence and a scenario in which one begins to lose all sense of grounding or scale, highlighting that the Western human’s limited experience—and, at times, falsely constructed perception of the polar regions—is both reinforced and challenged.


Credits
Co-Director & Editor: Johannes Förster
Score: Robert Lippok
Spatial Sound Designer: Felix Deufel
Colorist: Jan Schöningh
Senior Compositing Artists: Tom Freeman, Neil Reynolds
Compositing Artists: André Roboredo, Christian Kaupert
Matchmovers: Matthias Schiemann, Dragan Ben David,
Karim Arnold Fuad
Post-Producer: Julian Brinkmann
Post-Production Assistant: Yasmin Balai
Post-Production Supervisor: Finn Jäger
Technician: Julian Link

Expedition
Drone Pilots: Per Jacob Blut, Matt Cianfrani, Anders Nerthelsen
Production & Lighting: Carl Kemper
Production Assistant: Till Egen
Photography: Serena Acksel, Philipp Lee Heidrich
Technical Engineering & Ground Control: Constantin Engelmann,
Roman Kolbert

Acknowledgments
The artist would also like to thank The Shifting Foundation.