This summer the Midnight Sun in Norway provides the setting for a large-scale arts project: musicians, writers, visual and performing artists will rendezvous for a workshop arranged by the arts institutions of the Nordic Council of Ministers and an encounter with the Barents region, an area where borderlines are crossed.
By Mette Bender
CROSSING BOUNDARIES.
Physical as well as mental. An encounter between local wisdom and modern international art. A meeting of music, the performing arts, literature and visual art. And selected artists. It’s happening in June this year, when the four Nordic arts institutions under the Nordic Council of Ministers will be mounting a major artistic project with the title Connection Barents – a practical arts laboratory followed by a symposium, to be held in the northernmost part of Norway, in the small town of Kirkenes, situated centrally in the Barents region, north of the Arctic Circle.
In the Barents Region the sun shines at night. The light is simply on around the clock when it’s summer. On the other hand the darkness reigns supreme in the winter – day and night.
The light, the people and the many cultural encounters in the Barents region will form the setting for two weeks of intensive workshop activity where the participating artists will be exploring boundary lines along with local artists and guides.
The artists come from the five Nordic countries Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Iceland. Others are coming from the east: from Russia or the Baltic states Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania. The aim is to develop cooperation among the arts and to leave a footprint in Kirkenes that will benefit the local population.
MUSEUM WITH A PULSE
The outcome of the workshop will be that artists will together generate ideas for a living, pulsating museum of everyday life in the local area. How this will look no one knows yet.
The workshop and the subsequent symposium are to be a laboratory for cultural work. And in a laboratory, as we know, we don’t know in advance what happens when we mix the elements.
During the workshop Connection Barents, local experts will share their knowledge of life in the region with artists who will among other things be immersing themselves in the identity and subcultures of nomadic peoples like the Nordic Sámi and other minorities in the local community.
Other themes will include important historical events in the region: on the one hand the opening of the border with Russia and on the other the demise of the local iron mine, which until its closure in 1997 employed large parts of the population; two major, socially significant changes that have taken place within the last twenty years and which the area has not yet fully absorbed. Larger contexts like political border issues and the exploitation of natural resources will also be on the drawing-board in the artistic laboratory.
Historically, the Barents Region and Kirkenes have been greatly influenced by borders and wars. Many different groups live there, modern urban and rural populations as well as indigenous peoples. Cultural boundaries between east and west and between new and old dominate the culture and geography. And there are national boundaries too, between Norway, Russia, Sweden and Finland.
Anne-Sofie Ericsson is the Secretary-General of NordScen, the institution for the performing arts under the Nordic Council of Ministers. She sees the boundaries as an important focus for the project Connection Barents – boundaries between countries and peoples, but also between artists from the different sectors of the artistic scene. Because artists have traditionally been grouped in terms of the particular art they practice, they rarely move in the same circles, so they often lack the dimensions that arise in encounters between the arts.
WHEN FAR AWAY IS CLOSE UP
The collaboration requires great courage and willpower from the participants, Anne-Sofie Ericsson thinks.
“After all, it’s risky to cross boundaries. You expose yourself and your way of working to outsiders, and see yourself with their eyes. But that makes you strong – perhaps you also notice the elements that don’t work so well.”
Finally, there is a breaking-down of the boundaries between the visitors and those who live and work in Kirkenes and the Barents region.
“You could also talk about giving and getting back – as we hope will happen between the locals and the visitors. We couldn’t have located this project just anywhere. The Barents region is an important element in the totality that will give the project colour,” says Anne-Sofie Ericsson.
With the project the four arts institutions will also be turning the focus on the concepts of centre and periphery – far away and close up.
“People in New York or Beijing probably see Kirkenes as a town that lies out on the periphery of the world, where Europe ends. But for those who live here the town is of course the centre. Moreover, the big new finds of oil and gas in the area probably mean that within a few years the area will experience a considerable economic boom, and this will transform the region and the town into an important financial player globally,” explains Anne-Sofie Ericsson from NordScen.
Bo Rydberg is the Secretary-General of NOMUS, the Nordic Council of Ministers’ arts institution for music. He formulates his perspective on the project as follows: “Besides creating networks across national boundaries and across the boundaries of the arts, we hope that the project will be a model for the way future projects of this kind can be implemented.”
PIONEERING NORDIC PROJECT
The collaboration of the four arts institutions is the first in the history of the Council of Ministers. It might seem paradoxical that it is succeeding at this point in time in involving all the arts in the same project, inasmuch as the Council of Ministers, as part of a major organizational restructuring, is closing down the separate institutions at the end of 2006.
“The type of collaboration that we are looking for in this project has no natural meeting-places in the existing Nordic arts scene. So it feels natural that the four arts institutions are now, as a last hurrah, demonstrating the strength that lies in a project for all the arts,” thinks Bo Rydberg of NOMUS. Anne-Sofie Ericsson personally entertained the idea of a big inter-arts collaboration in the Nordic countries long before she became Secretary-General of NordScen in 2003. That is why she is really pleased that the institutions are now – a hair’s-breadth from the finishing-line – achieving the coveted goal of gathering artists from all sectors of artistic life. Last year NordScen implemented the project Break the ICE, which took place in Iceland, and there it became clear to the participants what networks can accomplish.
“In that project, performance artists and visual artists with different backgrounds and interests went out in pairs in a jeep and gathered material for new, stimulating projects. Many of them are still using the contacts they managed to establish on Iceland, and many feel they have expanded their horizons both outwardly and inwardly,” says Anne-Sofie Ericsson.
LINKING ART AND EVERYDAY LIFE
The artistic director behind Connection Barents is the international director and curator Ong Keng Sen from Singapore. He leads the theatre company TheatreWorks in Singapore and was behind the farreaching pan-Asiatic artistic laboratory The Flying Circus Project. Ong Keng Sen is active in Europe, and in parts of the USA and Asia.
Ong Keng Sen’s ambition for Connection Barents is to link aesthetics and everyday life. “One is no more important than the other, and the one doesn’t exclude the other either. We artists have to realize that the world is changing before our eyes and that we have to tie our activities in with this eternally mutable reality. Not that we need to produce social realism. In fact I believe the more fantastic and the more conceptual art is, the more it enriches and rejuvenates dialogue,” explains Ong Keng Sen.
He hopes that the participating artists will see the value of local wisdom and research as an integral part of the artist’s work. He also attaches great importance to consideration for the local environment and insight into how the artists themselves influence the place where they work.
About his own role Ong Keng Sen says: “I’m the one who brings the best possible people into the project. And I’m the one who gives the participants a push, and then they react to my provocations. And then I ask them again and again why, how and for whom we create our art.”
Looking at the overall aim of Connection Barents, Anne-Sofie Ericsson talks about the wish to develop the artistic milieu and raise its quality: “... and then to find the international voice of the Nordic region. By opening up the artistic environment so that the Swedish musician meets the Finnish visual artist, we create an opportunity for the participants to find new partners and think up Nordic projects that none of us knew were possible. Globally, the North is a small region. It’s harder for us to make an impact as individual countries; together we can do more. If we want to develop art in the North, we have to open up our borders to one another.”
Mette Bender is a Danish freelance journalist from the agency Redaktionen.dk.