Svalbard is a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean, situated between the northern coast of Norway and the North Pole. It is the most northern inhabited place on the planet, with the largest settlement being in Longyearbyen, located in Spitsbergen, and is home to around 1,800 people. In the Arctic, there is a war over resources. As the ice melts more and more, many countries surrounding the Arctic want to stake a claim in Svalbard and utilize its resources for their own purposes. Many people see this as a looming disaster, but for the Arctic Nations, this change means an opportunity; access to a brand-new ocean. The Svalbard Treaty, signed on February 9, 1920, established Svalbard as a free economic and demilitarized zone. The treaty says that any country who has signed the treaty “shall have equal liberty of access and entry for any reason or object whatever to the waters, fjords and ports of the territories”, otherwise saying that any country contracted in this treaty can have its people on Svalbard and can exploit the land for commercial or economic purposes. The land legally belongs to Norway, however, forty-five countries have signed this treaty, allowing these countries to have an economic claim to this land, whether that be “maritime, industrial, mining, or commercial enterprises ‘. One exception to this rule is that no nation, including Norway, may have military assets on Svalbard.

The project maps three main factors in Svalbard related to time and producing a projective overlay that interrogates how these factors interact in the future, through the lens of a climactic timescale: climate change, industries and resources, and oddities and border anomalies.