Sequence of investigations on the landscape in Nikel. The first one takes on defining the landscape in Nikel. The second concerns how the landscape is experienced from different perspectives. In the third part we take a closer look at how the these landscapes overlap over time from different perspectives. These investigations are an attempt too understand the “new hierarchies” as something that is detachable, connectable, reversible and modifiable.

// Contradictory landscape

Where the tiny raindrop travels around the globe inside clouds, the sun shines through a layer of sulphur dioxide in daytime and the moon and stars decorate the sky at night.

Where people pick mushrooms and take a walk in the wilderness, happy kids run around the bushes and the fi sh swim in the water.

Where families live, kids go to school and play with friends in the town square, couple meets for ice cream and the pigeons sit on the store roof.

Where people go too work inside narrow tunnels and raw buildings, the nickel get processed and sent to other places around the world.

Where people walk and drive in when they travel from place to place, some stop or live in Nikel others just pass by it.

Where tourists walk with gaze and experience the catastrophe that is visible when you come from other places.

Where the life have been sucked out of the ground and plants have absorbed the toxic waste.

Where the electricity and electrical signals are carried between places and connect places and people with each other.

The enjoyable landscape

The cultural landscape

The industrial landscape

The path landscape

The tourist landscape

The nexus landscape

The drained landscape

The atmospheric landscape

// Defi ning the landscape in Nikel

Child: Looks up at the moving sky and sees shapes and stories, measures the landscape with her small body and wonders why there is so much dust, dead nature and little life in the landscape.

Owner of Norilsk Nickel: Looks at the industry from a distance, thinking about the manufacturing and the companies profi ts.

Father: Takes care of the family. goes to work in dark spaces so the family can move to Moscow. Enjoys time at his garage with some friends and picks mushrooms with his wife and little girl.

Mother: Walks to the store and the polluted breeze embays her body. She makes dinner for her family using the mushrooms they hand picked after talking to her sister on the phone.

// The landscape in Nikel from different perspectives

Bird: Comes fl ying to Nikel from Murmansk, sits down on transmission line to rest and look for food in the empty nature. Before leaving it stops in the city and eats near the stor.

Mushroom: Absorbs nutrition it needs to survive in the landscape, feels how it takes in the contaminated rain that had fallen the previous day right before it gets picked up and put into basket.

Plant: At the same time it gets covered with sulphur dioxide dus it tries to stretch out its branches for sunlight that shows itself for only a few months in the summertime.

Tourist from Finland: Feels the abstract idea of death in the landscape when thinking about his grandfather that talked about colors and the vegetation that was there before the year 1921.

Tourist from China: Feels how the industry structure enables her to see and understand the passing of history and feels the time cycles that surpass individual life is abnormal in this landscape.

Tourist from Netherlands: Feels how the sound measures the space and makes its scale comprehensible when walking on the dead nature that collapses underneath her feet.

// Twelve hours with a family in Nikel

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The Chinese tourist sees the mother walking the little girl to school and takes a photo of them. She puts the photo on the internet.

The mother talks on the phone with her sister, she tells her about the tourist her husband met, the mushrooms and the news on the radio this morning.

The mother wakes up from the radio and wakes up her daughter, the family eats brekfast while listening to tha radio.

When the family goes to pick mushrooms the little girl sees a bird fl ying from transmission line into the city. She wonders if it is the same bird she saw erlier today.

On the radio there is news about the owner of Norilsk Nickel and the industry.

At work everybody are talking about the news.

When the father is on his way home from work he sees the tourist from China. The tourist guide asks him about the industry structure and how it is to work there and how he feels about living in Nikel.