Four Edges of Pyramiden

The ex-Soviet mining town Pyramiden, built on the archipelago of Svalbard, stopped functioning in the late 1980s and was finally deserted in 1998, leaving behind a number of empty residential buildings, an abandoned library, and a desolate cultural center that all together form a ghostly memory of life from the socialist past. Svalbard, historically known as no-man’s land, was used for mining natural resources during the Soviet era. As a result, the natural environment of the area has been altered. After the Soviet Union collapsed however, Svalbard—one of the northernmost places in the world’—has metamorphosed again and become a destination for researchers, escapists and adventurous passersby. In this film, Ieva Epnere performatively presents four human stories about the present state of this spectral place that both implicitly and explicitly reveal previously forgotten non-human worlds.