Visual Artist, MA in Visual Arts Mazzi Elena

Frozen Economy – The Upcoming Polar Silk Road

| Yksivuotinen

I would like to continue and expand a research I started right after my residency at Skaftfell Center for the Arts in Iceland in 2018. After being there, I started analyzing the impact that climate change could cause at geopolitical as well as geological level in the Arctic regions: a new investment of 6300 km has been confirmed from China to realize the so-called "maritime-land silk route", which should connect about 60 countries on three continents (Europe, Russia, China). One of its vital features suppose to be the "polar silk road", which will exploit the Arctic seas increasingly free from ice thanks to the climate warming, to look for 20% of all the world's reserves, including oil, gas, uranium, gold, platinum and zinc as well as to save time in commercial routes, using a safe way (if compared to the Suez canal now in use). Since 2019 I have been collecting materials to apply for a phd in fine arts in Helsinki in fall 2020, in order to develop this research both theoretically as well as using visual tools through my artistic practice. Finland is also part of this project, considering the bridge China is planning to build to cross over Estonia. I was fully convinced that this investment would have changed the entire geopolitical world asset as we know it, but then Covid-19 arrived, affecting even more drastically our global trajectories. Considering what happened, I would like to use this 3 months time to reshape all the materials collected until now, as well as following decisions governments are taking day by day to answer the current crisis. I will deal with a series of issues questioning globalization, looking for new tools to live together in this world, focusing on resilience, starting from the bottom, creating new survival strategies through arts and culture. I will operate by collecting different materials sources using an interdisciplinary approach and process them by preparing a visual archive as well as writing in preparation of the phd proposal.