Project Iceworm
“Project Iceworm is one of the artist’s first series on
Greenland. It tells the story of the American military
presence during the Cold War, and its consequences on
the local populations of the Thule region, in the very
north of the island. In 1941, the United States built a secret military base there, and in 1953 its expansion led
to the forced evacuation of the Inughuit, a traditional
Inuit community. In the context of the Cold War, the
United States launched the construction of a secret underground base in 1957, Project Iceworm, a forward operating base for NATO forces for the deployment of nuclear warheads close to the USSR. But after a few years
of drilling, the instability of the ice precipitated the
abandonment of the project. The tunnels were filled
in and the rubble and radioactive materials were buried directly on site. Using archival images and private
photographs taken by the local population, Mityukova
reconstructs the history of this form of colonisation,
which leaves behind radioactive, chemical and biological waste, and traces the impact of geopolitical tensions
on the local population. Project Iceworm is a personal
archive still under construction of about 6,000 images
collected from social networks, American propaganda
videos, newspapers and magazines. It aims to deconstruct the romanticized imaginations associated with
these territories, and to reveal their ecological and social realities.”
