Icebreaker Dreaming

The icebreaker is the future speeded up, as polar ice melts and icebreakers open up sea routes and fossil fuel extraction. The ship helps bring about its own obsolescence.Icebreaker Dreaming uses found footage shot from the bridge of a Russian Arctic icebreaker. It conjures a route for Arctic shipping connecting the distant Arctic with urban, fossil-fuelled, metropolitan life. The film is in a circular frame which, when the projection is small, recalls a ship’s porthole with a view out to a bleak, rugged Arctic sea. There are moments when the layered, swirling images around the circle recall the famous ‘Blue Marble’ images of the Earth seen from space. This brings home the connection between the movements of an isolated icebreaker across the Arctic and the fate of the Earth as a whole. When projected at a larger scale outdoors, as it was, dramatically, in Bloomsbury Square on the side of Pushkin House’s 18th Century townhouse in London, the film brings the icebreaker’s distant journey into the immediate experience of the city. It expresses wordlessly, but powerfully, the link between the exploitation of the Arctic and our daily lives in the city.