Sharing Experiences: Nikhil Vettukattil about his residency at Artica Svalbard

We had the pleasure of speaking with Nikhil Vettukattil about his artist residency at Artica Svalbard in Longyearbyen during the autumn of 2023. OCA is one of the key partners of Artica Svalbard who offer one of the northernmost artist residency programmes in the world. During his time in Longyearbyen, Vettukattil worked on a project examining food systems, the 'Nordic diet', and the effects of climate change in the context of extreme environments.

Can you tell us a little bit about the project you worked on during your residency at Artica Svalbard in 2023?

During my three months in residence at Artica Svalbard, I began an art project around the ‘Nordic diet’, the food system in Norway and other northern countries, and the climate crisis, within the extreme context of Longyearbyen, and Svalbard's total reliance on imported food. I did not realise at the time that it would grow into an ongoing work that has preoccupied me ever since.

My project examined how food infrastructures shape us and our self-understanding, and from there draws upon conceptual art methods to look at the recipe as an algorithm for everyday life. This involved exploring historical food practices but also artistic methods such as natural dyes and pigments, contemporary issues for those working with food, and speculative approaches to how these systems could be made differently.

What inspired your focus on the Nordic diet and food systems?

Ever since I first visited Oslo fifteen years ago I've always been struck by the huge difference between Norwegian supermarkets and food culture more generally in comparison with the one in the UK. Both the selection of foods, the way they are presented and marketed, and the price relative to income. That didn’t really stop when I moved here years later.

I think for everyone the question of “What should I eat?” is something we have to deal with every single day, several times a day, and yet it never stops being a complex question with many answers to do with health, ethics, pleasure, class, culture, emotions, identity, and so much more. I think for many people there is an awareness that how the food system works is unsustainable and in many ways irrational on a global level. And often we are made to feel that it is only through consumer choice that we can make decisions about these things or exercise some agency or control. In the year before my residency, I had been quite ill and put on a very restrictive diet by my doctor to identify the cause. That also made me turn my focus to how difficult it is to know what is in food, and where it comes from, and led me to integrate this into my work, which has already been concerned with ‘lifestyle’, the combining of art and life, and what the philosopher Michel Foucault called the ‘aesthetics of existence’, for some time already.

You’ve mentioned an interest in the cost of food and the relationship between imported and locally sourced diets. How did you approach this issue during your time at Artica, and what were some of the key findings or challenges you encountered?

Turning my everyday consumption into part of my research allowed me to extend the resources I had to do my work. It also changes my life, and so then informs my thinking and the work I make.

In Longyearbyen, the food system is both simplified and at the same time more abstract. There are two supermarkets, the Coop Svalbard AS, an independent branch of the supermarkets that originated in the cooperative movement in the seventies. And then there is the Thai supermarket, which serves the needs of Longyearbyen's (relatively) large Thai community. The Coop, rather than serving basic necessities as you might expect so close to the North Pole, is overstocked with exotic fruits for tourists and the local market, and has a bigger range of ingredients and variety than I am used to seeing in Oslo.

You are no longer allowed to grow anything on Svalbard to protect the ecosystem. However, you can hunt and fish, although you cannot sell what you hunt, meaning most people buy their reindeer meat and fish frozen and imported from the mainland. These are just some of the many paradoxes I would encounter, not to mention flying to this extreme location for a few months to do an art project in relation to global warming.

Artica Svalbard encourages dialogue with the local community. Did you have any memorable experiences from engaging with the local community of Longyearbyen?

Well, on my first day in Svalbard Lotte and Lisa took me and the other residents to a hunting demonstration that was a very memorable beginning to my research. A lot of my conversations happened very organically with different locals and visitors, tour guides and businesses. I remember meeting many unique people and their stories of what brought them to live in Svalbard. One striking conversation was with a woman who had a degree in economics and yet was selling hotdogs in the Arctic to support her elderly parents and children back in the rural village in Thailand that she is from. There are no resources for people to learn Norwegian in Svalbard which keeps people as permanent outsiders as Norway makes a bigger claim to the territory, alongside Russia.

How did your research on food systems in the context of Svalbard shape your thinking about broader global issues, such as sustainability and ecological transitions?

I think there will not be a conscious transition, change will only happen when there is no other option, and this will have terrible consequences. I think this is also what scientists keep telling us, and we have intimations of a future that will continue the global separation of those who have (clean water, technology, visas, employment, for example) and those who do not, and most of the resources will be put towards the consequences of these decisions, making this separation smoother and more ‘normal’. Food prices will not stop going up anytime soon, and the food varieties we eat are not chosen for taste, quality, nutrition or sustainability, but mainly for ease of production, durability in transport, and more than anything, profitability. At the same time, there is a huge diversity of edible species, methods of cultivation, flavours and knowledge that is full of potential under a different set of conditions. I think the decision fatigue we experience in the Global North around food is symptomatic, and in the future, we might look at the food system we have today as wasteful and, well, just a bit ridiculous.

Your project took you to several different locations—Scotland, Greenland, Finland and now Gotland. How did each place shape your perspective on this topic? Did you notice any striking similarities or contrasts between the food landscapes in these regions and Svalbard?

There are many striking similarities in terms of the needs and problems confronting people who live on these islands, which in some ways have similar ecosystems and biotopes, but also broadly ways of life. These similarities make the huge differences in the social, economic, and geopolitical circumstances of these communities, their fates and their futures, so dramatic. The situations in Narsaq and Longyearbyen couldn't be more different, but as mining towns, their population size, needs, and challenges have a lot of overlaps too.

Looking back on your experience at Artica, how has this residency contributed to your practice? What impact do you think the residency has and will have on your future work?

I never expected the project to grow in the way it has, and also the interest in the work, and the way it connects with people from all sorts of backgrounds. It’s also informed my other work and practices, which is quite different, in many subtle ways. I am very interested in starting with experiments in the conditions of art production and seeing what kind of results that makes possible. The communities this project has brought me into relation with have really opened up my perspective and helped me find like-minded artists, scientists and activists who inspire me, feel connected to, and work in dialogue with.

Apply to Artica Residency here → 

Discover more: