22 March 2024 | 08:30- 10:30 (UK)
Open Session - ON SITE ONLY
Room: Duddingston (JMCC)
Organiser: Vivi Vold (Ilisimatusarfik - University of Greenland)
Event Description:
From Where We View the World (2021), by Inuk PhD Fellow, artist, scholar, and filmmaker Vivi Vold, illuminates the opportunities and challenges of scientific research ‘on’ and ‘about’ Kalaallit Nunaat (Greenland) and Kalaallit (Greenlandic Inuit) society. Film scenes were shot in Nuuk, Greenland during the first ever Greenland Science Week in December 2019. Though the event claimed to “[build] bridges between science and the greenlandic society, business community and government,” Vold’s film offers a visceral, multisensory experience through eyes of an Inuk scholar from Kalaallit Nunaat to show how dominant eurocentric structures negatively affect Inuit scholars and local Inuit hunters.
In the opening section, Vold conveys the cacophonous cognitive dissonances felt by being an Inuit participant in Greenland Science Week by intentionally juxtaposing several visual (layering, coloring) and audio (distortion, silences, music) techniques. The second section of the film shifts to interviews and visits with local Inuit hunters, fishmermen, and artists – whose oral testimonies offer trenchant insights about how their expertise and experiential knowledge is (or is not) respected within the scientific community, but also conveys Kalaallit societal values for Inuit-led research ‘with, by, and for’ Kalaallit. Ultimately, this film refuses and reverses the colonial gaze and “researches back” at scientists working in Kalaallit Nunaat"