The interdisciplinary Future North project experimentally investigates the territories and landscapes of the High North or Subarctic regions of Northern Europe. It studies the relationship between people and their environments and attempts to map the ›future‹ landscapes that are developed through both social and individual agency. The project is founded in a conception of landscape as a shared material human experience, one that supplements the traditional conception of landscape as primarily an aesthetic category. It looks at landscape as both a result of political, cultural and social development – but it also explores landscape as an agency in the production of these. The aim of the project is to raise awareness and knowledge of new landscape typologies, to include the everyday in the category of landscape, and explore tools to articulate and narrate future thinking with and from within the landscape. Two basic archive functions are evoked here: first the systematic documentation of exploration represented by the research travel, and secondly the reading of the landscape as if it was an archive – in ways that enable new narratives about the past and present condition to emerge, thus reconditioning a contemporary space of future thinking.
