Over the last century adventurers have travelled to Greenland to explore this unknown land. The pictures they brought back depict heroes battling against nature and pristine wilderness. However, today many of us know little about life on the world’s largest island, where 57,600 inhabitants live on approximately fifteen percent of the land — the rest is covered in ice.
Greenland is going through a period of rapid change; the government is reconfiguring after hundreds of years under Danish rule while climate change is reshaping the island’s natural environment. As global temperatures rise causing Greenland’s glaciers to melt at record pace; hunting and fishing conditions are changing along with the increasingly unpredictable weather — threatening both natural sea life — and the inhabitant’s traditional livelihoods. Most of the inhabitants live in isolated settlements on the coastline, and with limited job-opportunities, they depend directly on nature through hunting and fishing. On a more positive note, environmental change is expected to open up new opportunities, as vast oil, gas and mineral resources are discovered beneath the ice. Many Greenlanders put their faith in this as their way to independency and a replacement of the annual subsidies from Denmark.
Triggered by her curiosity to take a deeper look into a culture in flux, Andrea Gjestvang first travelled to Greenland in 2008. In the following yeas she spent several weeks visiting small communities along the west and east coast, and the very north. Through this project, she tries to observe how small settlements and their intimate family-lives are affected when traditional livelihoods disappear, forcing people to search for a new identity and new ways of living.