KNOWN
as the Border Crossing Festival, the Barents Spectacle is an annual cultural-political cocktail of contemporary arts and debates organised since 2004 by Pikene på Broen, a collective of Kirkenes-based curators and producers.
Established in 1996, the collective, named for the Edvard Munch painting Girls on the
Bridge, won the 2009 Eckbos Legaters Culture Prize for “art projects to challenge understanding of geopolitics, centre and periphery”.
A Transborder Café project hosts open discussions with audience participation and themed food and music.
Artist and storyteller Inge Rafaelsen said: “We call them ‘border-crossing exercises’ and this cultural exchange has continued for 20 years.
“We would love to work with Lefkoşa Municipality for our 2020 festival and our Bar International Artist-in-Residency programme is open.”
Each February the festival hosts art, music, theatre and performance, literature, architecture, seminars and debate. Last year, Mrs Rafaelsen’s husband, mayor Rune Rafaelsen, was one of a real-life cast at a three-day theatrical Trial of the Century.
The jury audience watched lawyers and public figures “on trial” in a 190-tonne ice arena to debate “what is perhaps the most fateful choice of our time: between economy and ecology, prosperity and environment”.
The award-winning production was inspired by a half-million-signature petition and unsuccessful court case by Greenpeace Norway, Nature and Youth and the Grandparents Climate Campaign against the Norwegian government’s handing out of Arctic drilling licences.
The Norwegian courts ruled in favour of licensing but noted the right to a healthy environment.
The mayor was a pragmatic witness. The mining sector lost 400 jobs last year and the Statoil union fears 10,000 more could go, were exploration halted in the Barents Sea. He said: “I intend to do everything I can to make our city the main port and hub for oil drilling on the continental shelf, which will create new jobs.”
The theatre project won the 2017 Norwegian Critics’ Association Theatre Prize as “one of the most important reference works in recent political Norwegian performing arts”.