Anastasia Mityukova


Disappearing act

Before going to Greenland, this place was a fiction, a place that I had built in my imagination, nourished by novels, stories of explorations, images from films and documentaries since my early childhood. When I left this summer for the first time for Qaanaaq, the northernmost village in the world, I realized how my imagination was fooled by the immaculate and grandiose images that we all have of the Far North. On the spot, it reigned over an austerity, a void, a brutality of life that is almost "unphotographable".

On the way back, I wondered where this imagination was coming from. I had to make a kind of archaeology of my own knowledge. I re-read the books of my childhood, leafed through the books of exploration - and what I found there filled me with disappointment : so many clichés and stereotypes.

"Disappearing act" are images from one of my childhood books. Meticulously I erased each image. A long process that allowed me to begin a new step in my artistic research - enabling new foundations for myself and my future work. In order to add some nuance to the collective imagination of the North.