DEPARTURES 100 1 2 3 23 FOUR QUESTIONS a salt on the senses A conversation with artist and curator Helga-Marie Nordby, the co-founder of SALT, a year-long festival on Sandhornøya in Northern Norway that combines locally inspired architecture with international art, music, food and spectacular scenery. 4 What is the concept behind SALT? SALT is about bringing past, present and future together. We want to raise questions about what is happening with Arctic climate change, natural resources and geopolitics. Isn’t remote and Arctic rather less-than-user-friendly? SALT is not about feeding people with constant entertainment. Its elements are spread about a 2km-long beach. This means that people have to move, they have to walk. It is not an urban art gallery. It’s about spending time, taking time for reflection and just being – which is quite a rare thing today. What art is being shown now? Until February we are presenting a video project by Chinese artistfilmmaker Yang Fudong. The film is poetic and beautiful, and was shot here with local actors and dancers, but it also enters the landscape in a very different way. Norwegians are used to nature being represented in certain ways. Yang is an artist from the outside, and he really transforms the surroundings. What is SALT’s next step? We are working on a parallel project in Nuuk, Greenland for 2016, though we don’t know yet what will happen. Ours is a very organic project. Like nomads and people living on the coast, you have to be flexible. Things change in this environment. You can’t be a control freak. ♦ 1. The soulful contemporary Nordic folk music band Slagr serenades the crowd 2. Modern Norse architecture at its finest: the Amphisauna lit up by the northern lights 3. A black-and-white still from Yang Fudong's film installation The Light That I Feel 4. The breathtaking Sandhornøya coastline COUNTERCLOCKWISE FROM TOP RIGHT: DANILO AGUTOLI (ILLUSTRATION), KRISTIAN SIVERTSEN, MARTE ANTONSEN, YANG FUDONG, GUNNAR HOLMSTAD 46 DEPARTURES-INTERNATIONAL.COM CONTACT PLATINUM CARD SERVICE FOR BOOKINGS
