Related to its main business of research the Barents Institute takes an interest in cultural issues. The regional cultural interest is well established in the Barents north. It has been successful in bringing people together crossways borders and language barriers for planning and collaborating on common projects such as: exchanging visits of musician and artists, organisations of sports tournaments, learning from each other on handicraft, and in reviving and sustaining folk and indigenous culture.
The BAI cultural programme emphasises the borderland not only geographically but also in knowledge forming processes in field work and during travels, e.g. while participating in an expedition. While scientific field research, creativity of artists induced by experiencing unfamiliar environments, and research by travelling journalists as a rule are seen as disciplined processes characterised by professional administration and evaluation of information, by participant observation during expeditions several anomalies can be observed. The process of “sorting out the facts” may well consist in rituals of disinformation, denial of ambiguity and the unknowable, the guide’s ways to control the observations of others and the temptation of telling the reader or viewer afterwards what they like to hear. The weight of the cultural baggage of any travellers is often underestimated; any piece of information is hard to separate from implicit interests and preconceived ideas. Artists, scholars and journalists travelling across borders in regions remote to Western centres of culture and science thus forms knowledge in a process that offer ample instances of biased communication between the travellers themselves and the local settlers/informants/guides. This theme is a focal point of the BAI cultural programme. It is engaged in this problematic of epistemology in various ways and has furthered studies of it in the Barents Region and on Svalbard.
As part of the BAI cultural programme fellowships for visiting artists will be announced. The result/form of communication in the cultural programme will be works of art, or performing art. In its cultural programme BAI presently cooperates with the Kirkenes art society “
Pikene på broen” and has participated in various ways in its most recent art festivals and events: Barents Spectacle 2006, Connection Barents 2006 and the up-coming Barents Spectacle 2007 in January-February 2007. BAI cultural programme collaborates with Morten Torgersrud whom has been elected holder of a three years stipend of the
National Norwegian Programme for Research Fellowships in the Arts. Torgersrud will be mainly active at Bergen National Academy of the Arts with his project “
Northern Sites” which is a visual and textual study of landscapes in the Barents Region. It will among other things result in photographic exhibitions and various forms of montage on the themes of local culture, global processes and post-national landscape change.
The epistemological complexity of the culture laden claims to authenticity that underlie, or are made explicit, in artistic, touristic but also scientific products and reports from explorative journeys and fieldwork are discussed in:
- Urban Wråkberg, “The Quest for Authenticity in Narratives of Northern Border Lands,” Nordlit 22 (2007) Autumn, pp. 193-209
In 2006 BAI commissioned the artist Katarina Eismann to create a audio-visual document based on DVD called: “
Connection Barents: A work lab during two weeks June 2006” it is about the travelling art workshop Connection Barents.
Below: "Margaritinskaya Yarmarka" St. Margaret Fair Gala Show & Concert, Arkhangelsk, September 2006. Photo Urban Wråkberg.
