Contrapuntal Imagining and Reparative Remembrance in Pia Arke's Art Research Stories from Scoresbysund

Stories from Scoresbysund (2003) was a creative research project by the Danish Greenlandic artist Pia Arke (1958–2007) that documented her painstaking excavation and collection of material from primarily unofficial and private archives concerning the history of Scoresbysund/Ittoqqortoomiit, a colonial outpost in eastern Greenland. After the Danish authorities established the outpost in 1925, they also resettled of a group of Greenlanders into the area, among whom was Arke's maternal grandparents. For Arke, the importance of the collected images was that they anchored, released, and activated marginalized memories. Drawing from Edward Said's concept of contrapuntal reading, the article argues that Arke positioned these photographs as a visual counterpoint to the dominant historical narratives of Greenland's colonization, subverting Denmark's image as a “humane colonizer,” and a benefactor and international guardian and protector of Greenland. Through a montage of this photographic material with other anillustrations and critical essays about the history of European mapping of the north by Stefan Jonsson, Stories from Scoresbysund also offers a counterpoint to the Western cartographic representations of the Arctic as remote peripheries of civilization ripe for exploration and exploitation, which inspired imperial desires, galvanized competition and conflict, including between Norway and Denmark for the control of eastern Greenland. Stories from Scoresbysund shows how colonial representations aided the extension of European states’ sovereignty over Native peoples’ lands and livelihoods. The article suggests that Arke's art-research can be productively conceptualized as a practice of contrapuntal imagining; both as work of anticolonial art activism and as a deeply personal reflection on her severed communal connections and belonging in an act of reparative remembrance.