Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

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Marcus Brigstocke
Comedian (UK)

Stand-up comic, writer, presenter and actor, Marcus hosts The Late Edition, his own live topical TV show on BBC 4. Marcus makes guest appearances on Have I Got News For You and NewsKnight. He also features on The Now Show, Just a Minute and The Today Show on BBC Radio 4. His humour holds people to account and encourages those with the power to effect change to do so. Through his Now Show counter piece to Martin Durkins’ discredited Great Global Warming Swindle an alliance was formed with the scientific community. Many scientists have since sent messages of thanks and support. Marcus’ experiences in the Arctic will feed into a touring show, to be recorded for TV and entitled Your Time Is Up.

“Don’t tell me there’s no point in us doing anything about climate change until China does something about it. There’s a lot of stuff that China doesn’t do that is still well worth our while… Human Rights, Democracy and Cheddar. There’re three for a start.”
Marcus Brigstocke

www.marcusbrigstocke.com
Read Marcus’s Telegraph Blog

So a very long journey up here via Stockholm, Oslo, Tromso then here to Longyearbyen. Arrived with snow falling, although not much has settled (leaving the textured rock surfaces drawn and enhanced with white dust).
There is something about returning here- so far away from the life style we live back down South and yet now very familiar to me.
The age of this land, the rock formations. You can read through it’s history, the strata laid down over millenniums, exposed, eroded and cracked into dust by the cold and ice.
It’s a raw reality that belittles everything else and puts this world back into perspective. Lonyearbyen is like a Wild West frontier town, one of the changes though is that now they are beginning to place advertising flags down the main street, lets hope this is kept to a minimum, and in fact shouldn’t be allowed at all !
Have tried today to pick up a Polar Bear bone from the Sysselmannen’s Environmental Adviser – it was put aside for us 2 years ago. Seems that I now need a CITES agreement to import it back to the UK for a piece of work Heather and I are working on. Hope Heather can get this for me by my return here next week!

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Amy Balkin
Artist (USA)

As an artist, Amy considers how humans create, interact with, and make an impact on the social and material landscapes they inhabit. Recent projects include Invisible-5, a collaborative work touring California’s Interstate-5 corridor, San Francisco to Los Angeles. The project investigates the experiences those communities fighting for environmental justice along the I-5.

“As political and cultural awareness of global warming grows, the reading, meaning and value of the Cape Farewell voyages will also develop. I hope to return from the trip with an enhanced understanding of the Arctic as a system, and with an increased ability to speak to the impacts of climate change.”
Amy Balkin

www.publicsmog.org
www.invisible5.org

We have finally arrived in Ny Alesund! 

It was quite a lot of work to get here. The kids and the adults spent the entire night taking turns on night duty in 2-hour sessions. This involved waking up in the middle of the night, putting all their warm gear on, and standing on deck with the captain to help sail the boat, pull up sails and watch out for icebergs in the ocean around us. The kids worked really hard all night, and as a result, are very tired today.  However, arriving in Ny Alesund made all that hard work worth the while. It is absolutely breathtaking! 

Today, the weather is beautiful…warm and sunny…blue skies all around us.

News flash: the weather forecast is predicting snow and sleet as of tomorrow (17 September 2007) and possibly the rest of the week, which means our internet connection may be slow or affected by the weather.   We expect that our blogging and videos will be posted as scheduled, however it may changed slightly if we are not able to properly connect.

We have arrived at the Sverdrup Institute. We were greeted by Carl Petter Nielsen, an optical engineer, who has gratiously allowed us to use this facility as a basecamp for scientific analysis and art composition.

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Dallas Murphy
Writer (USA)

Dallas Murphy is the author of four novels, two plays, and most recently two non-fiction books. “I published Rounding the Horn, about Cape Horn in 2004. I sailed down by the Horn in 2000 aboard Skip Novak’s Pelagic. Last month I published To Follow the Water, about oceanography today and the ocean’s influence on climate. I’m a serious sailor with a fair bit of offshore racing/cruising experience. And I’m delighted to be sailing with the Cape Farewell Project.”

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David Buckland
Artist and Cape Farewell Director (UK)

David Buckland, artist and director, started the Cape Farewell project 8 years ago. His initial work with mathematical modelers and climate scientists was driven by artistic inquiry but due to the frustration of the scientific community to get Climate Change debated on any major public platform, he created Cape Farewell to address just this issue.

Eight years on and now, thankfully, climate change has risen to the top of the western agenda but for David the steer is still artistic inquiry. Artists have always aligned their work, directly or obliquely, to the prevailing agenda of cultural positioning, whether it be religion, the enlightenment or self greed. Climate change is no exception but the stakes for humanity are very high, it is about our social and economic survival and will question very basic assumed values we have evolved over the past 200 years.

Questioning these is the driver for David’s artistic inquiry and continues to be central to the work he is currently creating whether it be voyaging with a collection of our best creative practitioners or exhibiting his video and photographic works in urban venues worldwide.

Cape Farewell and the youth team are featured on BBC London news on BBC1 and 94.9FM. The feature focuses on the three students from London; Hayley, Akash and Liam who are voyaging with Cape Farewell as part of the youth voyage.

See the video online

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Beth Derbyshire
Artist (UK)

Beth’s work is inspired by drawing, dance/contact, communication and information systems. Through their creation and installation the work seeks to explore what it means to be an individual in a world where we, and our surroundings, are frequently categorised and classified.

Beth is currently developing the project Anthem, a trilogy of musical films, which explore, dissect and offer different concepts of ‘nation’. It is a truly epic project, expressing contemporary ideas about citizenship and nationality and investigating themes of human migration and borders.  The final part of the trilogy will be shot during the Cape Farewell Greenland expedition.