The Tour

'The Tour' explores the relationship between actual and virtual realities within and across Longyearbyen on Svalbard, by touring the place with Maxi Taxi and its employees - one out of two taxi companies in the Norwegian settlement. A verbal montage based on participatory conversations with three taxi drivers from respectively Norway, Denmark and Russia, illuminate the role of the individual as an at once conserving and creative agent, and thus a more general concern og the film being: how experience and meditation of place happen, simultaneously, as actively generative forms of emplacement. The structure of the film, a guided tour, reflects Longyearbyen as a paticularly accessible and wellinfrastructured location in the Arctic, characterized by mobility and temporality, but also filmic strategies as form of guiding. This is evocated through a reflexive usage of the distinctive expressive structures embedded in the relationship between image and sound.