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HIGH in the Arctic, photographer Gautier Deblonde stumbled across a surreal town, one that seemed out of place and out of time. “I’d never seen a place like it in my life,” he says.

Barentsburg is a Russian coal-mining town on Svalbard, the northernmost permanently inhabited place on Earth. Home to around 600 Russians and Ukrainians, this Arctic town is often shrouded in a black cloud produced by its belching power plant.

Deblonde travelled to the Arctic last year with 20 artists and scientists as part of the Cape Farewell project – a series of sailing voyages into the Arctic…