Photography by Scarlett Hooft Graafland

Dutch photographer Scarlett Hooft Graafland transforms inhospitable terrain into new surreal spaces. For My White Night, Graafland’s canvas is the vast white space of Igloolik, a tiny Inuit village in Nunavut, Canada. Mixing elements of photography, performance, and sculpture, the work addresses topics such as climate change and generational gaps. Allowing the landscape to “dictate the work,” Graafland creates “visual question marks without giving answers.” Inspired to work in such remote conditions because of her “nostalgia for regions that are still completely natural,” Graafland chose Igloolik because of its “traditional Inuit life and cultural activities.” What she found, however, was a land “captured between traditional life and westernized equipment.”
     With over half of the population under the age of 16, most of the youth know nothing of the traditional ways of Inuit life and are completely Westernized — “going to school, learning how to use the computer, consuming Western food and drinks like soda and juices.” Addressing this disconnect is “Lemonade Igloo”. For it, Graafland fashioned lemonade ice blocks out of water and lemonade powder, and then had the elderly Inuit men use the blocks to build an igloo. When it was all finished, Graafland invited the Inuit children inside to drink orange juice.
     Other works illustrate the vastly differing seasonal weather conditions characteristic of arctic environments, as well as the devastating effects of climate change.