Participating artists have returned from Connecting Barents, the two-week cultural expedition in Scandinavia’s far north. The expedition was organised by four Nordic Art committees – NIFCA, NordScen, NOMUS and NordBok and the Norwegian art institution, Pikene på Broen – and led by Ong Keng Sen, the director of TheatreWorks Singapore. It involved twenty-five leading performing artists, painters, sound artists and writers from all five Nordic countries, as well as Japan, Indonesia, and Lebanon, and four of the Baltic states. For two weeks, the artists played with ‘new creative raw material’, exploring ‘the tensions, differences and changes due to changing circumstances, the potentialities and possibilities. At the core (was) a conversation between perceived ‘insiders’ and ‘outsiders’, between the specific and the global, between the evolving local traditions and the urban contemporary.’ The cultural cross-border collaboration, will have helped ‘to strengthen future Nordic artistic co-operation and leave a cultural fingerprint in the Barents Region for the benefit of the local people’, said NordScen Secretary General, Anne-Sofie Ericsson. ‘The aim is to explore and interact with the community of the Barents Region and the different cultures of the area; forming new networks and relations between artists and experts working in different artistic disciplines and geographical areas (was) the focus of the project…The international artist and performing world will be the creative travel guide on this expedition.’ For more information, CLICK HERE