The Circumpolar Podcast – Art in the Face of Climate Change

In this episode of The Circumpolar, Serafima Andreeva speaks with Ruth MacLennan about art and climate change. Photo: Serafima Andreeva

The Circumpolar is a podcast on Arctic geopolitics, governance, and security. Created and hosted by Serafima Andreeva, and supported by The Arctic Institute and the Fridtjof Nansen Institute. The podcast brings together leading experts from various fields of Arctic geopolitics and many Arctic and non-Arctic states to unpack key developments, challenge common misconceptions, and discuss the current dynamics of todays changing Arctic.

What can an artist actually do in the face of climate change? Ruth Maclennan is an artist, filmmaker, and researcher affiliated with the Scott Polar Research Institute in Cambridge. She has spen many years trying to answer that question through her own practice, from the Russian taiga to the glaciers of Svalbard.

In this episode, recorded during the fifth Arctic Art Forum symposium in Norway, Ruth talks about making work in places where climate change is most acutely felt and least visible from the outside. She discusses her collaborative film A Forest Tale, shot in the Russian Arctic just weeks before the full-scale invasion of Ukraine, and her more recent film All the Tears in the Sea, made during a residency in Svalbard. The film weaves together encounters with glaciologists, conservationists, reindeer, mining towns, and the strange hum of wind through Longyearbyen’s lampposts.

The conversation moves between the personal and the geopolitical: how art can hold complexity without simplifying it, why Arctic decision-makers need to listen to the people and species who actually live there, and how showing agency rather than helplessness might be the most important thing a film can do. As Ruth puts it: geopolitics is not a game of chess, it’s a symphony.

Find more of Ruth’s work at ruthmaclennan.com and on Instagram @maclennanruth.