In 1931, the Greenlandic writer Augo Lynge published a science fiction novel, the second fictional book ever written in Kalaallisut, the language of the Greenlanders. In Three hundred years later. Grønlandshavn in 2021 (translated into French by Jardin de Givre editions in 2015), the Inuit novelist imagined what his native land would become, ninety years later, the year of the tercentenary of Danish colonization. Augo Lynge dreamed of independent Greenland, a land of plenty enjoying its wealth and flourishing.
French photographer Olivier Laban-Mattei wanted to check if the dream had come true. In January 2020, after a stay of a year and a half spent in Mongolia, documenting the upheavals of a society caused by the frenzied exploitation of its mining resources and its brutal shift towards globalization, he went for the first time times in Greenland.
This one and a half month exploration trip took place in the middle of winter. Some wish to see icebergs and polar bears. He started by spending two weeks in Nuuk prison. A dive into a universe 10,000 leagues from that of postcards. There he met the biggest cannabis dealer in the archipelago. But also these small-time delinquents, who commit crimes in the hope of ending up incarcerated, with a roof over their heads, in a city where they can no longer find accommodation, prices have skyrocketed since property developers in made their playground.
Blocked by the pandemic, Olivier Laban-Mattei returned a year and a half later, at the beginning of the summer of 2021. This time accompanied by his son, Lisandru Laban-Giuliani, 22, a student at Sciences Po. The archipelago, closed for over a year, was just beginning to reopen. They were the only foreigners.
Allegory in black and white
For three months, they surveyed Greenland – a territory four times the size of France, with a population of 56,000. The Minister of Foreign Affairs, the fisherman, the drug dealer, the young, the old, the living, the dead, those who see the future in a big way, and the others, who no longer have much hope… The father and the son listened to them. They took the pulse of this society haunted by the demons of colonization, master of its destiny and its resources on paper, but still linked to the former Danish colonizer.
Olivier Laban-Mattei brought back a book of texts and photos. His title : black snow – an oxymoron to designate these landscapes “blackened by global air pollution, which destroys the albedo effect, depriving glaciers of their reflective power and accelerating global warming, in a vicious circle”. It is also an allegory: “I wanted to break the idea of the virgin and sublime territory, to show that it hides a certain darkness and to talk about the suffering of people”, he explains.
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