Abstract
In the summer of 1977, hundreds of Greenlanders and Danes went ashore in the abandoned town Qullisaat, Greenland. Only five years prior, the city had been forcibly shut down by the Danish government as a part of the ongoing Concentration Policy. Over the summer of 1977, Qullisaat became the group’s temporary home as a revival of the Inuit tradition aasivik, best translated to ‘temporary summer settlement’. I want to argue that Aasivik 77, as the 1977 summer in Qullisaat came to be known, was not only a temporary spatial manifestation of a countercultural back-to-the-land utopia. In the particular case of Greenland, Aasivik 77 simultaneously represented an anti-colonial reclaiming and rediscovering of Inuit relation to nature, culture, and traditions. The event became a starting point for individuals to imagine and practice alternatives to Western capitalist consumer society, while providing a social and spatial alternative to the harmful welfare colonial policies of the Danish state. After an explanation of the historical context of Aasivik 77, focusing on the concentration policies implemented by the Danish state in the 1960s, I will analyze Aasivik 77 in order to show how this specific event became a spatialized anti-colonial manifestation and a re-entanglement of Greenlandic modernity into the natural environment. In a time where Greenland is continuing its struggle for independence, it is crucial to investigate how Inuit and the Greenlandic population resisted waves of Danish led colonial development. Highlighting this political agency shows the power of bottom-up activism that might even inspire future decolonial strategies.
Presenters
Frederik BraünerStudent, PhD in Architecture, University of California, Berkeley, California, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
KEYWORDS
Greenland, Welfare Colonialism, Back-to-the-land Movement, Everyday Utopia, Counterculture, Postcolonial Studies
