A poem that is not one
“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 of
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 geopolitical
issues. Through a random editing process that evokes
Raymond Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion
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.”