TRANSBORDER CAFÉS – The Norwegian Cultural Highlight
Press Release
Wednesday 1 April 2009
The three TRANSBORDER CAFÉS being staged on the evenings of April 2-4, 2009 in the Mediendeck of the OK Center for Contemporary Art are the work of Pikene på broen, a northern Norwegian curator collective named after Edward Munch’s painting “The Girl on the Bridge.”
For 13 years now, these five women—three Russians and two Norwegians, one of them a member of the Sámi ethnic group—have been doing cross-border cultural work par excellence. In Norway today, they have come to be role models absolutely exemplifying the outstanding work curators can so. In the so-called Barents Region, Europe’s Great White North at Norway’s extreme northern tip on the Russian border, they annually stage various spectacles and festivals. Pikene på broen uses contemporary art and culture to build bridges within the Barents Region and beyond its borders. Their motto is: “Wherever we are, we carry the Russian-Finnish-Norwegian border along in our luggage.”
As Norway’s major contribution to the Capital of Culture’s EXTRA EUROPA festival, Pikene will be coming to Linz with more than 30 artists, musicians, performers and scholars from Norway, Russia and Finland and orchestrating three highly diverse, and fascinatingly offbeat evenings on the subject of borders, international cultural work and boundary conflicts in Europe. On Saturday, April 4, 2009, a tantalizingly titled production “SÁMI-SALAMI” will be dedicated to the culture of the Sámi.
The culture of the Sámi ethnic group is one of the focal-point themes of Pikene’s intercultural and trans-border work. There is virtually no “indigenous people” that has such an undisputed, established status as the Sámi do, especially in Norway. The Sámi have their own legislature in Norway, the Same-Ting in Karasjok. The Sámi’s situation on what might be called an ethnic spectrum is often juxtaposed to that of the Kurds—a people that is likewise dispersed in four different countries, but one that is not officially recognized as a minority and has had to struggle to achieve a modicum of autonomy, to secure basic human rights, and to preserve its language. NRK, the Norwegian public broadcasting company, even has a Sámi subsidiary. Sami-NRK, which is also headquartered in Karasjok, broadcasts an hour of Sámi-language programming every day.
Each of the three evening will culminate in a musical performance and offer culinary delights from region. The first evening will feature Mombus, an electronic musician from Murmansk, Russia; next up is the band Tequilajazzz from St. Petersburg; the third TRANSBORDER CAFÉ will conclude with a very special international musical production: “The Bridge” with Inna Zhelannaya, the queen of Russian World music, and the Link Trio from Norway. Plus, audience members are sure to enjoy the three very special soups that will be served up on the respective evenings: Norwegian fish soup, Russian borscht, and Sámi bidos.
WHEN // April 2-4, 2009, 7 PM
WHERE // OK Offenes Kulturhaus, Mediendeck, OK Platz 1, 4020 Linz
With questions, please call +43/ 0732/ 2009 78 or send an e-mail to carina.kurta@linz09.at!
