Research trip to Vardø with Transmissions sound art residency

In Kirkenes, the artists met Karolin Tampere from the North Norwegian Artists' Center and made short visits to the Borderland Museum and Terminal B, a local art hub run by the artist collective Pikene på Broen.

This part of the residency was comprised of 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), 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).

Greek acte vide explains in their travel letter that every story in Vardø; Northern Sami: Várggát, Kven: Vuorea, Finnish: Vuoreija, the wolf island, ancient Thule, the gates of hell or the edge of the world, were conveyed by an almost mythologized sense of remoteness, both historically and geographically. And says that this was eerily relevant to the world they had left behind in the first part of the residency program: the neglected island of Gyaros, its irreconcilable past and darkened present.

By acte vide, Athens, September-October 2021

Transmissions is a sound art residency and exchange program that fosters spaces for encounters and promotes collaboration between Norwegian and Greek sound artists and researchers. The project emphasizes remote or geographically isolated landscapes and their audible and inaudible past.

Their joint, ongoing project is to explore traces of audial experiences and stories associated with two very distinct, but strikingly similar, locations: the uninhabited, Cycladic Gyaros Islands in the municipality of Syros in Greece; and Vardø, the easternmost town on the Varanger Peninsula in Norway.

The activity is organized within the framework of the Transmissions project, and is supported by EEA Grants 2014-2021.

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).