Wahlenbergbreen Mementos, originally
More than a collection, Wahlenbergbreen Mementos is a story, the reflection of an unforgettable adventure, lived in the Arctic during my studies. A story built through many encounters, with the inhabitants of Svalbard, with scientists and first of all with this Nature so beautiful, so strong and fragile at the same time, so desperate and tenacious to whom we owe everything and that we have the duty to preserve.
August 2019. Here I am in the Arctic, in the town of Longyearbyen on the Svalbard archipelago. I have been preparing this trip for months. We, master students of St Martins School in London, had to go abroad to feed our final project, a collection evoking a subject of our choice.
The Arctic, a matter of course
My motivation was clear from the start: to create jewelry that makes the link between people and the planet, through the subject of the climate emergency.
The destination of the Arctic appeared to me as an obvious one for several reasons:
- It is an unknown part of the world, where the only images conveyed are those of polar bears;
- This region is warming four times faster than the rest of the globe, due to its location and the tilt of the Earth, but also to human action.
- Glacial landscapes have always fascinated me. I love the power that emanates from these places that man has not managed to appropriate, the sounds, the beauty of the immaculate white, the deep blue...
And more than anything, I refused to become a designer who talks about a subject she doesn't master.
I was there to understand, to see for myself, to talk with the first concerned and these researchers installed there to study the glacial phenomena and to inform us.
What I was going to experience in Svalbard would go far beyond my expectations.
Revelations
I first met two exceptional people: Kim Holmén, then international director of the Norwegian Polar Institute, and Heidi Sevestre, a world-renowned glaciologist.
Both share the idea that we should not talk about climate change only through numbers or data, but through what catches people's attention: a shape, a color, a texture... and that artists and designers have a role to play in this.
My stay is punctuated by a number of activities as diverse as surprising: walking on glaciers, visiting the world seed bank and the Svalbard satellite station, visiting an abandoned Soviet Union camp, or this unique encounter with beluga whales and walruses in the middle of the fjords...
I have the honor of accompanying Kim Holmén and a film crew of an English documentary, on an expedition for a day. It was there, on a tiny boat facing the Wahlenbergbreen glacier that, without knowing it yet, I was to give birth to my first collection.
Faced with this giant of ice that can't leave anyone insensitive, my feelings are mixed: I am amazed of course. I feel tiny. The emotion is such that I have tears in my eyes. The sadness that I feel in front of a nature that is withering away then gives way to anger.
I now have a mission: to transmit what I have seen and heard and to touch people through my work.
It will take a year for this first collection, which is so dear to my heart, to come to life.
A tribute to the place where I lived for a month and to the people I met there, it could not have been named anything else than the glacier, which appeared to me as a revelation and legitimizes the approach I have adopted since then, through my creations.
Capucine Huguet
