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Hi, I’m Octopa.
Pleased to meet you.

I’m a shape-shifting, fictive, online creature. I spend most of my time trying to make sense of climate change and our complex, dynamic world. The icy waters and slippery surfaces of the Arctic are my home.

I belong and I diverge, I contribute and I evade. I’m a sentient non-human anomaly. I move between sea and land. I’m my physical, biological self, by birth. But I’ve been altered, by irruption and interruption, against my will, contaminated by plastics and bio-effluent; though that means I’m able to run on land as well.

I am of the past but I move in the present and shift and change in the future. Being a shape-shifter and a time-traveller is what makes me special. Ready for some unexpected moves and some time bending?

The Northern
sea route

Oh, did I forget to tell you we’ll be connected to the Northern Sea Route (NSR) along the Norwegian and Russian coast? What a massive zone it is and hard to reach and fathom. It's experiencing rapid change from a once frozen passage to one now increasingly freer of ice.

This route is still remote as it was for 17th-century western explorers sailing wooden craft in search of a trade route through the ‘North-East Passage’. Today, the NSR is an immense and intricate tangle of interests and potentials: environmental and geo-political, cultural and communicational, political economies with technological innovation.

Follow Octopa’s lead and discover a diversity of speculative scenarios about the tangled presents and potential futures of the vast Northern Sea Route.

Each of the 28 fictions offers an opportunity to play with an unfolding narrative by first imagining how you would evolve in its future. Then, you can anticipate what you can do today to act on its creative and possible transformation. The slippery experience should also prompt you to think and act in other contexts!

Start by clicking on one of the illustrations to launch your navigation.

BACK TO ATLAS

Anthropocenic
Settlers and
Indigenous Peoples

ICE UPON A TIME

Octopa drops you into a knotty and tangled timeline. At first sight, this future resembles many others. The perks and risks attached to shipping and resource extraction activities create tensions. But in this case, the tensions have grown within the arctic nations. It is the rise of Arctic Blockadia, Octopa declares!. Blockadia?, you ask. Silly she says, it’s when activists, renamed Arctivists in this region, coordinate actions to step in and slow down the development of the Northern Sea Route.

By protesting and demonstrating along the route, these Arctivists are trying to mitigate the impact of the NSR on climate and nature, at the expense of a mythological growth. Blockades have become trendy. Arctivists create barriers - made of big and small, of ships and bodies - to disrupt cargo flows and extraction activities.

Octopa takes you to one of these demonstrations. To your great surprise, you notice the struggle has become very symbolic. The tensions are even stronger between impoverished back country and prosperous arctic regions. Coastal environmentalists are facing hinterland extractivists, each of them defending a vision of the promises of the sea route.