ONE MAN’S VOYAGE TO STOP CLIMATE CHANGE

David Buckland exhibits a knack for bringing together two unlikely groups: artists and scientists. As an artist, designer and filmmaker, Buckland has been working on Cape Farewell, which for the past four years has been home to artists, writers, choreographers, filmmakers, environmentalists and scientists on the good ship Noorderlicht, in a fjord located near Longyerben, Svalbard, just north of the 79th parallel. This March, Buckland decided Cape Farewell would have its last voyage, and invited novelist Ian McEwan, playwright Caryl Churchill, artist Antony Gormley and choreographer Siobhan Davies, among 20 others, including Rachel Whiteread (whose work is picture on this page), to take a firsthand look at climactic change.

The project uses radio, film, journalism and art to bring attention to the effects of climate change and global warming on the polar ice caps and, more generally, the world. Since the scientific data doesn’t seem to call enough attention to the alarming rate at which the ice caps are melting, Buckland hopes that his collaboration can “engage the public’s imagination” to alter such practices as burning coal for fuel. His work has already been incorporated into graduate-level studies in the United Kingdom.

To say that Buckland and his team suffer for the art is putting it mildly. Already, the project has embarked on three Artic sailing exhibitions through once-ice-blocked passages. And on Buckland’s latest (and last) voyage this March, it took him a half an hour to dress. His outfit? Five pairs of pants, four shirts, a down jacket, topped off by an all-in-one thermal suit. “I just looked at the temperature,” he said, from his most recent voyage. “And it’s a balmy -28 degrees Celsius.” www.capefarewell.com—JS

MORE DIGITALL HEROES