A Poem That Is Not One
07–15–24

A Poem That Is Not One arises from the confrontation between the artist’s experience on the ground in Qaanaaq and the images she associates with this Arctic geography. After returning from her research trip, Mityukova tried to understand how our conception o this region is formed by browsing through magazines, books or articles, whose content had shaped her imagination since childhood. From this retrospective and introspective journey, she retained fragments of texts describing these regions of the Far North, where recurring motifs and expressions are mixed: «fjords», «phosphorescent night», «gusts of wind» or «ice crystals» tell of virgin landscapes, exploration or the unchanged life of the Inuit populations, without taking into account the many current geographical, social or geopolitica issues. Through a random editing process that evoke Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billio Poems, Mityukova generates poems that, through the repetition of these romantic motifs, reveal the omnipresence of an imaginary world that contributes to the construction of a romanticized and simplified vision of the Arctic, even today.