Transmission Notes #2
Vardø, 5–12 September 2021
At the edges of the known world
Crumbling stones and thawing stories
Mark the border between memory and oblivion
The town of Vardø spreads over two interconnected islands, situated at the eastern tip of the Varanger peninsula. Access to the town by car is only possible through a 3km underwater tunnel. Before the tunnel entrance, an old removal bus, planted erect on the ground by artist Pøbel, and a first view of the town, dominated by the Globus 3 military radar system. Just after the exit, a female sculpture by Nina Sundbye overlooking the beach and the now empty plot of land where 91 people were once trialed, tortured and sentenced to death during the infamous 17th-century Vardø witch trials.
Traveling from Athens to Vardø required a day’s journey across multiple climate zones. A gradual acclimatization from the Mediterranean to the tundra was made possible by landing at Kirkenes. There, we finally met with Karolin Tampere from NNKS and made brief visits to the Borderland museum and Terminal B, a local arts hub operated by artist collective Pikene på Broen. Eventually reaching Vardø in the same evening, we were joined by Maia Urstad and NNKS resident artist HC Gilje.
This second part of the residency was a deeply immersive and dense experience. It comprised a combination of visits to local museums and heritage sites (such as the Steilneset memorial, the Pomor and Partisan museums and the abandoned fishing village of Hamningberg), structured meetings with historians and representatives of local organizations such as the Coastal Riot, informal dinners and open discussions with residency participants and other artists and curators, and daily fieldwork in the form of interviews (Papaeti and Urstad) and peripatetic notes and recordings (acte vide).
For this part of the residency exchange, we wore our artist shoes. They had to be waterproof and sturdy. But to walk the tundra, our feet soon found out they ought to avoid anything that seemed like solid earth; each step was a plunge into a thick layer of berry-colored arctic heath and moss. The ground under the radars was alive, bottomless and uncertain. Much like the region’s multi-layered, frozen fictions; some thawing faster and faster, others continuously preserved in permafrost.
Wolf island; isle of cairns; ancient Thule; the gates of Hell; the world’s edge. Every story in Vardø was mediated by an almost mythologized sense of remoteness, both historical and geographical. Yet this was all eerily relevant to the world we had left behind: the neglected island of Gyaros, its unreconciled past and darkened present. Muted traces of perpetual violence, dislocation, abandonment and surveillance, swept by the changing tides, resisting monumentality, resounding with the most transient features of the landscape instead. A pulse, inaudibly transmitted.
acte vide
Athens, September-October 2021
The residency is co-organized by Syros Sound Meetings (Greece) & North Norwegian Arts Centre (Norway) and is part of the Transmissions project, supported by the EEA Grants program and the Norwegian Financial Mechanisms 2014–2021. Transmissions is coordinated by ONASSIS STEGI (Greece) in partnership with Ultima Oslo Contemporary Music Festival (Norway).
See also:
