A story.

Exhibition about a polar expedition

There are three kinds of men: the living, the dead, and those who throw themselves into the sea - Aristotle.

‘What about the men who go to sea in a balloon?’- Andrée must have thought this of himself and his two companions as he watched the balloon, motionless, like a beached whale, resting on a drifting ice floe.

On 11 July 1897, Salomon August Andrée, Knut Frænkel and Nils Strindberg took off in their balloon, The Eagle, from the Norwegian archipelago of Svalbard, with the aim of reaching the North Pole. This balloon, designed by Andrée, was to be steered by a system of trailing cables and sails. His mechanism, which had never been tested before, turned out to be an announced failure. Three days after flying over the Arctic Ocean, they decided to make a forced landing on an ice floe, from where they made a new plan: to walk until they found land. For the next three months, they dragged a boat and sledges full of heavy supplies over a broken piece of ice, until they crash-landed on the island of Kvitøya.

30 years later their bodies were found along with several of Nils' film prints and a journal.

The story of how three Swedish engineers attempted to cross the North Pole by balloon was the first project I published for National Geographic. As part of the research, I made several watercolors based on the photographs Nils took, which are part of the infographic published in the magazine in 2015.

This exhibition is a series of scenes, some fictional and some based on Nils' photographs, that try to reconstruct this expedition.

Anna Charlier was the fiancée of Nils Strindberg, the youngest photographer and explorer on the expedition. Throughout the journey, he kept with him an amulet, a lock of Anna's hair, a ticket to an exhibition they went to together the day before they left, and a photo of her.

Nils wrote her letters and she waited for him for 13 years until she got her life together.

She never forgot him. She literally gave her heart to him.

In her will she wrote that her body was to remain with her family, but that her heart was to be cremated and kept in a silver box to be buried with Nils' remains the day he returned.