How does hope sound in minus 30 degrees?

When a few thousand people clap their thick mittens in minus 30 degrees, it sounds like the softest techno. The arctic cold in Kirkenes, 400 km north of the Arctic Circle and a stone's throw from the border with Russia and Finland, steals all sounds. We are standing by an inland lake on the outskirts of the small northern Norwegian town and looking down on a makeshift stage out on the ice, where performers in white suits are building a kite. Local horn musicians play, and actors from Russia, Ukraine and Hungary slam poles into the floor and sing ritualistic chants.

Is this a prelude to something? Who are they calling to? Are they warning anyone? During the opening of the cultural festival Barents Spectacle (15th-18th February 2024) – the 20th edition – the ears are flared like the down jackets that everyone here in Kirkenes wears as protection against the harsh nature. 

When a few thousand people clap their thick mittens in minus 30 degrees, it sounds like the softest techno

The scratchy soundscapes – created by the composer and sound artist Mattia Bassi, Italian but living in Finland – are sent out onto the ice. It sounds like a mashup of many worlds at once. Musicians at all times and in all parts of the world have sent out signals so that some could seize them. The land on the other side of the frozen lake has once again become a hostile land. But a little boy in a massive thermal jacket smiles as a snowmobile drives out onto the ice with a white kite on a long string behind it, and the kite rises into the sky. 

Where is the hope?

Soon after, in an art center on the main street in Kirkens, the politician Amy Brox Webber gives the opening speech for this year's Barents Spectacle exhibition, which bears the very slightly aesthetic title Guarantee of freedom, security and intergenerational traumas. Webber talks about the spiral of armaments, weapons production, community trust and about deep traumas in local history. This festival challenges the logic and brutality of war, and it is important to support Russian exiled journalists and artists who are actively opposing Putin's autocracy:

»We, who are at this festival, probably hardly agree on everything - but through our participation in art, we become something more than just passive spectators.«

»I don’t know of any festivals that could invite a Russian curator to talk about the sensitive topics«

The Barents Spectacle is organized by Pikene på Broen, an association from the 1990s that functions as an »Arctic laboratory« with artist-in-residency programs for cultural workers, architects, artists and researchers. This year's theme is Soft Shields.

Sør-Varanger municipality has been for years a shield between east and west. Kirkenes was the first place in Norway to be liberated at the end of the Second World War. The locals here don't even take the sun for granted. The locals have developed a relationship with their neighbours, and the cultural pluralism is seen everywhere. The signs are written in different languages, so that Sami, Finns, Russians who live here or visit Kirkenes can find their way around.

»The sounds are almost absent and the cold itself is one border-experience«

It is not the sounds that you orient yourself by. The churches are reminiscent of a frozen western town with just 3,500 inhabitants. The sounds are almost absent and the cold itself is one border-experience. Tourists from China, Taiwan and Europe visit the city by plane and cruise ship. In the middle of Kirkenes stands a Lavvu, an original dwelling form of the Sami reindeer nomads. Opposite the town hall is the Russian Consulate General. The Russians have always been here. 

In front of the consulate you can see the photo exhibition Faces of the Russian Resistance. And in Kirkenes’s main street Norwegian artist Siri Hermansen's work lights up, letters which are projected onto a wall:

I WILL LISTEN FOR DANGEROUS WORDS  

I WILL BE REFLECTIVE IF I MUST BE ARMED

I WILL BE AS COURAGEOUS AS I CAN

I WILL BELIEVE IN TRUTH

I WILL BE CALM WHEN THE UNTHINKABLE ARRIVES

I WILL DEFEND INSTITUTIONS

I WILL BE WARY OF PARAMILITARIES

I WILL (2021) is an artistic manifesto consisting of 20 statements, which reflect on how to react in a time of injustice and tyranny. The work is inspired by historian Timothy Snyder's book On Tyranny, Twenty Lessons to Learn from the 20th Century (2017). 

In the art center opposite, there is a pile of books, including Anne Applebaum's book Democracy's swan song – Politics that fail and friendships that end. Bianca Hisse's film installation is shown here, The New Theater of Operations with two performers exploring a desolate landscape. They communicate with precise, military-like hand gestures and with lights. The film's soundtrack exudes distress – electronic sadness, spaced drone sounds and footsteps in the snow. During an artist talk, Hisse tells that the work, recorded in Kirkenes, is inspired by Theatre of the Oppressed, where performance becomes reality and bodies communicate through signals in a border area.

The Kirkenes Library is the most peaceful place on earth

Invisible friends

In the central John Savio square, piano notes are heard from a self-playing piano placed in a weatherproof display case. A Ukrainian girl and her mother have activated the piano and are listening to Ryuichi Sakamoto's meditative music accompanied by squeaks from the piano. The work is called Music on Display and was created by the Tromsø composer and pianist Benjamin Mørk with inspiration from a Japanese sect of monks who played in the streets for alms. 

The Barents Spectacle offers ice bathing, a fermentation workshop, and an animation exhibition with small skiers created by the Russian artist group Invisible Friends, artists Polina Medvedeva and Anja Eline Danielsen together with locals. The Kirkenes Library is the most peaceful place on earth when storyteller Kouame Sereba entertains with the djembe drum. 

The Barents Spectacle also organizes a series of debates. The event »896 pages of Norwegian security« is based on a gloomy report which mentions Russia 388 times in almost 900 pages. How serious is it? a panel is discussing. Because the Russian security service FSB is just on the other side. A musician asks what does the axis of evil mean? Because it's about people. People who live here. And there have always been American bases and submarines. Can we talk about disarmament?

The evening ends with Russian OLIGARKH: Breathtaking visuals and electronics seek »connections and empathy in a torn society«.

Soft power

The next day, one of the concerts takes place in the company Kimek's huge industrial hall, which rises in the middle of Kirkenes. Kimek has previously, before the sanctions, repaired Russian ships, and many are curious to see the hall from the inside. Over 80 singers from five local choirs stand on a scaffold and sing with a strong Norwegian accent from Giuseppe Verdi's hit Nabucco, »Go, thought, on golden wings«.

Later there is another debate at the Transborder Café. How do you live so close to the border and with the neighbors Kirkenes has? »100 km from here there are nuclear weapons,« says Ellen Katrine Hætta, head of the Finnmark police district. 

Afterwards, the Department of Peace plays. The orchestra's guitarist is a philosopher, and writer and slam poet Ingvild Augustgulen sings "If we want peace, we'd better invest in peace". Artists have always been able to contribute to soft power. Among the audience there are also people in military clothing.

The Sami singer joikes and shapes with her voice a howl that howls through history and contains generations of pain

Mari Boine, the biggest name on Barents Spektakel, makes her band breathe like a whale. The Sami singer joikes and shapes with her voice a howl that howls through history and contains generations of pain for people in the high north. But Boine also dedicates a song to the women and children of Gaza. All her songs sound like hymns to life, nature and people who live on borders. 

Finnish Jaakko Eino Kalevi sings »I forgot all my dreams« over sharp synths. But in Samfundshuset, new dreams are also dreamed when the Sami artist collective Article 3 and DJs Alice Jektevik and Petra Laiti play under the slogan »Indigenous people have the right to self-determination on the dance floor.«

Outside, the snow softens the slow techno beats. Oleg Khadartsev who used to organize sound art festivals and now as part of Pikene på Broen is one of the curators of the Barents Spektakels art exhibition – came to Kirkenes from Murmansk. So the heavy snow is nothing special.

»Oslo has an info bubble, Copenhagen has their own bubble and we here in Kirkenes have another info bubble. As for me, as an inhabitant of Kirkenes and art-curator in forced migration, I feel comfortable here in this bubble right now. I don’t know of any festivals that could invite a Russian curator to talk about the sensitive topics that are uncomfortable for Norwegian context as well. It’s not about provocation. I’m not pessimistic. I’m a realist. The invited artists are accumulating a quintessence of painful and mutated reality reflections. Such discussions would be impossible even in Oslo,« says Oleg Khadartsev.

»These are some of the US and NATO's most important ears and eyes against military activity on the heavily armed Kola Peninsula«

The most important ears

On the plane from Kirkenes to Oslo sits Jan Gunnar Furuly, investigative journalist at the Norwegian Aftenposten, who has also taken part in the Barents Spectacle. Radio jamming is normal in this arctic airspace, Furuly says, looking out the window. In the first months of the war, the residents of Sør-Varanger experienced a Wagner soldier fleeing across the border. Below us is the Trifon tunnel, named after the Russian monk Trifon (1495-1583), who was a missionary in the North. When Furuly visited Vardø, Norway's easternmost city, where the Pentagon-funded Globus radar system monitors the Barents Sea and neighboring Russia, which lies 28 kilometers to the east, he wrote: »These are some of the US and NATO's most important ears and eyes against military activity on the heavily armed Kola Peninsula.«

Kirkenes disappears beneath us – a small town, some call it a Western town. But it has a community center, a luminous bivouac, churches and a cultural festival. Many languages ​​are spoken here, and people are prepared if the worst happens.

Barents Spectacle, 15.-18. February 2024, Kirkenes, Norway

English translation: Andreo Michaelo Mielczarek. Proof reading: Seb Doubinsky