Arctic Play, forthcoming 2024

Forthcoming from The 3rd Thing in October, 2024, Arctic Play is a drama, a dirge, an expedition log, a series of poetic experiments, a comic book. Mapping an Arctic imaginary of beings and landforms onto a shifting stage of woven and layered papers, Mita Mahato conjures geographic and creative uncertainty as the necessary condition for navigating the climate crisis and its sorrows.

I began working on Arctic Play in 2017, when I went to the Norwegian Arctic of Svalbard for an artist residency. The 3-week trip and the months of preparation leading up to it showed me how embedded Western scientific and artistic practices are within capitalist systems, even in methods and mindsets that see through and outside of them. In Arctic Play, I wanted to see an extractive, unilateral perspective as small by contextualizing it within something multiple and reciprocal, that stutters, and that repositions the reader from moment to moment, and from page to page. I wanted to make a book that would make discomfort feel like a form of care. I wanted to make a book that makes space to feel out the tangles in what land holds. I want readers to hallucinate a red, rocky beach in the meat section at the grocery store and to sustain passionate love for polar bears that are too far away to see. There is no stable, solid ground in a melting, multiple world; instead, we find our compass in what haunts, questions, and transforms. ~ Mita Mahato

To request access to the digital advance review copy, please click here.