Upon Return a NewArctic: A collaborative museum experiment

The NewArctic exhibition was brought about by unrelated but concurring events. NewArctic was primarily enabled by the Arctic Domestication in the Age of the Anthropocene project, exploring human–animal relations, their place in what's often referred to as civilization, and the consequences of this civilization narrative on wider understandings of the Arctic. This project provided space for ongoing conversations about the Arctic, involving Sámi and non-Sámi researchers. The exhibition was inspired by another decolonizing event taking place during the same period, Bååstede, the repatriation of Norwegian Sámi collections. Inspired by such ongoing decolonizing initiatives, this text is an ethnographic account of the efforts to produce a first, experimental depiction of a New Arctic. It involved modes of engaging focused on reciprocities, including conversations with objects. One core ambition in this work was to produce a vision of the Arctic that did more than re-articulate the content of past Arctic exhibitions at the Museum of Cultural History in Oslo. Instead, the exhibition sought to acknowledge that the space referred to as the Arctic has always been a vision produced by outsiders, a dreamland rather than a homeland. If the Arctic is also homeland, however, how do we articulate what it is like to live in the Arctic today? What stories offer the possibilities of new forms of co-existence and new futures? NewArctic was an attempt to assemble stories of the Arctic as a modern-day homeland in an effort to inspire in captive audiences feelings of wonderment, curiosity, discomfort, but also new awareness and empathy.