Melting Barricades
Inuk Silis Høegh and Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen
We conceived Melting Barricades in 2004 as a collaborative project to comment on the Greenlandic Home Rule 25th Anniversary. It consisted of a fictive Greenlandic army complete with propaganda material, drafting performance and a military headquarter from where the defense of Greenland and Greenland’s invasion of the world was planned.
Greenland’s independence was already an issue back then, but we wanted to ask what Greenland wanted with its independence. Which values did it want to protect–and which values did it want to contribute–in a globalized world? The invention of a Greenlandic army was a framework to ask these questions in a different way.
We organized a drawing competition for all Greenlandic children and found out that Greenland’s core values were peace and openness (as a nation it has never been at war with other nations). With those values as a foundation, we proposed for Greenland to colonize the world and cool down all military conflicts (back in 2004, the US and Denmark were engaged in the invasion of Iraq). Flying icebergs were our primary weapons.
Irony, humor and speculative fiction were central to the project, which operates like a kind of Trojan horse, smuggling in difficult questions about the colonization of Greenland, but also seeking to empower a small nation to colonize the world. Today, with the US threatening to take control of Greenland through the use of economic and military power, the meaning of our propaganda video has changed once again: from absurdity to the promotion of an act of actual resistance against a new aggressor.
An interview about the project can be read here.
Inuk Silis Høegh (GR) graduated from the Royal Danish Art Academy in 2010 but had already established himself as an artist and filmmaker in Greenland and Denmark backed by his M.A. in Film and TV-production from University of Bristol, England (1997). Inuk works with conceptual works in a variety of techniques including installation, photo manipulation and film. His art has been shown in Greenland, France, Latvia, Canada and all around the Nordic Countries, with recent solo exhibitions in Greenland Culture House and Taseralik, Sisimiut, Greenland. His shortfilms and documentaries, among them the prize winning Sumé: The Sound Of A Revolution, has toured on TV and festivals all around the globe. Inuk received the Niels Wessel Bagges Grant in 2005 and the National Culture Award from the Government of Greenland in 2015.
Asmund Havsteen-Mikkelsen (DK) was born in 1977 and is a MFA graduate from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Copenhagen University with a MA degree in literature and philosophy. He has participated in the research program at CCA Kitakyushu in Japan and between 2007 and 2015 he was based in Berlin. His artistic practice with a strong focus on architecture spans various formats from painting, installation, sculpture and theoretical writing, such as Generic Singularity, Non-philosophy and Contemporary Art and Community of Contribution. Most recently he published Danish Speciesism. In 2018 his project Flooded Modernity–a submerged replica of the Villa Savoye by Le Corbusier–in Vejle Fjord gained international attention. In 2020 he contributed to the catalogue for the Venice Biennale for architecture. His works have been shown at museums and galleries throughout Denmark and Europe, such as the Museum for Contemporary Art, Roskilde; Kunsthal Charlottenborg, Copenhagen and John Hansard Gallery in Southampton. In 2024 Melting Barricades was acquired by Nuuk Art Museum as part of their permanent collection.