Cape Farewell Greenland Voyage 2007

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Aminatu Goumar
Artist (Niger)

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Aminatu Goumar is musician and singer from the deserts of Africa. Born in Niger 28 years ago she was raised as a Touareg nomad traveling between Mali, Morocco, Algeria and Niger. She prefers to call herself a Saharian and not attached to one fixed country.

Aminatu now lives in Paris playing guitar, percussion and singing alongside Moussa Ag Keyna with the band Toumast. They take the music of the desert blues in an unexpected and radical direction and their album ‘Ishumar’ (‘Identity’) is a testimony of years of combat and struggle of the Toureg people. These compelling songs of exile and the nomadic life are driven by looping camel-gait rhythms, stinging electric guitar and gutteral call-and-response vocals. Bold touches in production – strings, sax enhance the funky grooves are punctuated by the beautiful, errie voice of Aminatu.

A Touareg nomad, who has spent his or her whole life amongst the compounds of the Sahara desert, is loath to leave. He follows his camels on the quest to find water, he tends his animals whilst absorbed in song, wrapping their faces in the turban that protects them from the harsh desert sands. But political persecution and drought are destroying this existence and have driven many people from the life they love. Aminatou, like many of her people, understand the vital significance of water and the direct impact global warming is having on their existence – they are close to the land and feel the effects first hand.

Despite the pain and sadness in the songs,there is also a passion for the desert that emerges through the lively rhythm, the vibrant melody and an irresistible pop sensibility.

http://www.realworldrecords.com/toumast

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Nick Cobbing
Film-maker (UK)

Nick is a photojournalist, cameraman and photographic artist based in London. His work concentrates on Environment, Ecology and Community, exploring the diverse and changing relationship between humankind and planet Earth. Nick’s recent project Surface Tension picked up four awards for the photography. Surface Tension is a series of aerial landscapes, featuring the interior of the Greenlandic ice-cap and showing, in abstract style, water and ice systems.
www.nickcobbing.co.uk

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Emily Venables
Oceanographer (UK)

Emily is an oceanography Ph.D student, working on the impact of mixing between warm Atlantic and cold Arctic waters. She worked for a year on the physical oceanography of the West Spitsbergen Shelf, with data she collected on a three week cruise in 2005. She has since been to sea monitoring the change in currents affecting the Arctic, between Iceland and Scotland, and will return in August this year to the Greenland-Scotland Ridge to monitor the mixing processes between these currents.

www.sams.ac.uk

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Shiro Takatani
Artist (Japan)

Born in 1963. Graduated from Environmental design – Art Dept. of Kyoto City University of Arts. Joined ‘Dumb Type’ as one of the founders in 1984, and has been involved especially in the visual and technical aspects.
In his solo activities, Takatani participated in a municipal project of Groningen, Holland (artistic director: Daniel Libeskind), in collaboration with Akira Asada in 1990. Takatani created images for the collaboration concert Dangerous Visions with Art Zoyd and the National Orchestra of Lille in March 1998. He did visual direction for the Ryuichi Sakamoto’s opera LIFE September 1999. And he released solo video installation work frost frames 1998, optical flat/fiber optic type 2000 (a collection of The National Museum of Art, Osaka, Japan). Also, He created the video installation piece IRIS collaborated with Fujiko Nakaya, a fog sculptor, for the Valencia Biennial in 2001.

Commissioned by the Natural History Museum of Latvia in Riga, for the exhibition Conversations with Snow and Ice, his installation was presented in November-December 2005, as part of a retrospective of the works of the snow and ice scientist Ukichiro Nakaya (1900-1962). In 2006, under the auspices of the Japan Foundation’s 2006 Australia-Japan Exchange Project Rapt! 20 contemporary artists from Japan, selected for a one-month artist residency in Australia and exhibited the new piece Chrono in Melbourne.

Recently he created new audio visual installation LIFE – fluid, invisible, inaudible… in collaboration with Ryuichi Sakamoto, commissioned by YCAM (Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media), in March 2007.
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Dan Harvey
Artist (UK)

Dan has collaborated with Heather Ackroyd since 1990. In 2007 Ackroyd & Harvey created their most ambitious public artwork to date, FlyTower on the National Theatre’s Lyttleton flytower. Here the artists grew seedling grass directly on the exterior of one of London’s landmarks, transforming this iconic building into a living artwork of massive proportions.

Since 2003 Dan and Heather have made three expeditions to Svalbard with Cape Farewell, investigating and responding to the effects of climate change. Their major work, Stranded was created for the Cape Farewell exhibition Art & Climate Change. Dan voyages with both the Youth and Greenland Expeditions in 2007.
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Matt Wainwright
Sound recordist (UK)

Matt works as a sound recordist, cameraman and stills photographer. His main body of work is television documentary, with subjects centred between art, fashion and music. Matt throws himself into new projects with full enthusiasm, and is very excited by the prospect of his first Cape Farewell voyage.

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Dr Carol Cotterill
Marine and Coastal Geoscientist (UK)

Carol initially trained as a theatre designer, specialising in lighting design, and the effect of colour on the human emotions. However, a rather convoluted path led to re-training as a geoscientist, and working for the British Geological Survey. She now works on many different aspects of palaeoclimate work, habitat mapping and geomorphological interpretations of past landscapes and environments at a national and international level.

“Climate change is affecting everyone on some level. I can see that graphs and figures won’t appeal to everyone, but we have to find a way of getting the message across. Cape Farewell is a superb channel, combining arts and science in a unique way.”
Dr Carol Cotterill

www.bgs.ac.uk 

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Caroline Ross-Pirie
Film Producer and Director (UK)

Caroline is an award-winning observational documentary and art filmmaker who’s undertaken many extraordinary journeys. Her ventures in time travel include the BAFTA nominated, RTS and Indie award winning C4 House projects (1900 House, 1940s House, Edwardian Country House etc); taking people back to live as their forebears. She’s directed films following Ghenghis Khan’s journey from the blue mountains of Mongolia to the Danube for Millenium (BBC2), and Darwin’s Journey on the Beagle for C4 Travelog. She took veterans on a musical journey, back to the Normandy Landings, for Challenge Cantata and pushed Sister Wendy round the world in a wheelchair to tell The Story of Painting (BB1). Caroline’s journeys have also taken her into infinity and beyond with the award winning drama Hotel Hilbert (BBC 2).

She’s currently in post production with the series Guilt Trip (BBC2) which takes others on a journey to discover how their consumerism impacts on the world.