Between stayingor leaving home
With the support of the ECCA Foundation, Florine Schmid and I visited different remote places in the arctic and investigated weather the comunity can sustain itslef in a globalized world.
In August 2025 the duo travelled to the small settlement of Saqqaq, located in Disko Bay in Greenland. The village is accessible only by boat or helicopter and is home to approximately 120 people. Around twenty children attend the local school until the age of fourteen; afterward, they are required to leave Saqqaq if they wish to pursue higher education in distant cities.
Since 1721, when Denmark colonized Greenland, change has often been imposed on the population. Today, this process continues through climate change and global interests that increasingly shape local realities. Different push and pull factors determine the future of the community. Saqqaq becomes a mirror of a global condition, raising not only the question of what is changing, but what happenes when change happens faster than a culture can adapt. How can we remain fully human when change dismantles the cultural, social, and environmental foundations of our lives?
The project follows the kids of Saqqaq and two young adults: Thommy, a local fisherman, and Paarnannguaq, who returns to visit her hometown. Continuous change reshapes cultures everywhere,
but it is particularly visible above the Arctic Circle, where the lives of Indigenous communities have been fundamentally altered for decades. The word Inuit translates to “human” in Greenlandic. Yet some people no longer identify as Inuit, no longer fully as “human.” With a hybrid methodology, journalistic and artistic aproaches, the duo combined interviews, photography and land art. Through collaborative art workshops with the children of
Saqqaq, they gained insight into the dreams of their generation for the place they call home Rather than offering answers, the project invites viewers to confront the emotional consequences of change. It asks how societies can move forward without erasing the knowledge, bonds, and meanings that hold them together.
