Photography

The series of nine close-up photographs in the series Carapace captures the ice-encrusted walls inside the Svalbard Global Seed Vault. With a constant temperature of -18 °C, the vault is built 120 metres inside the sandstone mountain Platåberget on Spitsbergen Island, far from tectonic activity, war and rising water levels. There are three vaults inside the structure with only one active, the other vaults are for the future with a maximum capacity of 2.25 billion seeds. For this photographic project only the walls of an empty vault were photographed, drawing attention to both the absence of the intended function as storage, and the potentiality for the future. The images exist both as abstract representations and as a documentation of the crystallisation process that takes place in this extreme environment.