Notes from the Borealis Festival, Birgon 2024

by Paula Mikalsen | May 2, 2024 | Blog

My name is Paula Ryggvik Mikalsen, and I hold a postdoc position connected to Arctic Auditories situated at the Institute for Gender and Women’s Research at the University in Tromsø. I had the pleasure of attending the Borealis Festival in Birgon/Bergen, and I wanted to share my experience of the festival with you. The Borealis Festival celebrates experimental music from all over Norway and Sápmi, and this year it focused on Sámi experimental music, in collaboration with Sámi artist Elina Waage Mikalsen. From the Borealis homepage:

How does who you are affect how you listen?

Are you excited or tired, or both?

Are you with friends or alone?

Are you listening to something you know, or is it new to you?

What histories and structures are you assuming are “normal”?

The Borealis Festival team in collaboration with Elina Waage Mikalsen

These questions, I thought, resonated beautifully with what we’re investigating in Arctic Auditories. Over the course of three days and three panel conversations, we listened to artists, researchers, composers, and craftspeople talk about how they use their roots and traditions to connect with their art, histories, and culture. The journey began on Wednesday morning.

The journey south felt very apropos, traveling from one cold, dry hydrosphere and arriving in a wet, extremely humid one in Birgon. Winter still held Romssa firmly in its grasp when I left early on Wednesday the 13th of March, and I had to switch my wool coat for my long raincoat and seek shelter from the onslaught of rain. I traveled with my friend Ellen Marie Bråthen Steen (@new_sami_music_phd), who’d been asked to be part of the panel on Sámi experimentalism on Thursday. The kind folks at Borealis picked us up, and they told us they had hoped that the fine weather they’d enjoyed up until now would continue, but alas. It is curious how much cities and its people are shaped by their weather conditions, and the excess or absence of water. Ellen and I had packed more wool than rainproof gear, as we were perhaps more optimistic about travelling to a more gentle climate. Our idea, as North-Norwegians, of spring is that brief interlude between the grey-black of lingering snow and the bright green of summer. This spring in Birgon, on the other hand, was wrapped in mist, clinging to the evening air, obscuring our vision, and augmenting the sounds of wet tires on wet asphalt; the rubbing of jacket cloth as you bundle up tight to keep the moisture out; the heavy flow of the rain running down slanted streets into the harbour.

Thursday – Sámi Experimentalism

At breakfast on Thursday morning, Ellen introduced me to her co-panelists Jakop Janssønn (@jakopjanssonn & @sami_ritmmat) and Ánndaris Rimpi , and later by artist Johan Sara Jr., and Jalvvi Niilas Holmberg. We told stories over coffee and talked about music, about joik in academia, acoustemology (how to interpret the world through sound) and what we dreamed of last night.

Do you know who called me 35 min ago? It was Björk. She wants to work with me. The only problem is – it was a dream.

Some decades ago, temperatures dropped to almost -50 in Guovdegaidno/Kautokeino. This news reached the Norwegian broadcasting network, who sent a journalist to interview the inhabitants. He arrived, and struck up a conversation with a local man at the supermarket.

– Wow, it’s really cold now! says the journalist.

-Oh? You think so? says the local man.

-Of course, it’s -50 degrees outside!

– Yes, outside, sure!

After breakfast, we headed out to the library early. We borrowed umbrellas from the hotel – every shop and restaurant in Bergen has “umbrella parking stations” – and arrived in the cellar auditorium of Bergen Public Library. Multicolored orbs were artistically placed around the sofa where Jakop Jansønn and Ánndaris joined Ellen. Jakop is a PhD and a drummer, Ánndaris hails from Oalloluokta in Jokkmokk and is a Lulesami composer and sound artist (and the voice of Olaf in Jikŋon/Frozen). The lights dimmed, and after a brief introduction and welcome from a representative from the Bergen Sámiid Searvi/ Bergen Sameforening, Jakop introduced himself and his co-panelists.

On the question of his relationship to Sámi experimentalism, Ánndaris replied that it depends on who perceives it as “experimental”, and from there the answer lies in listening, and what we perceive as sound and what is perceived as music. Jakop played a short recording that was made about a hundred years ago, of a man playing a fatnu, a Sámi flute-like instrument made from Angelica root. The recording was made on a wax-roll, which affects the recording’s tempo, pitch, and ‘quality’. Does this qualify as Sámi music? Ánndaris replied in the affirmative and delved further into the idea of leaving room for improvisation as part of project planning. He imagined, using the recording as a point of departure, that at it’s core improvisation was a key component of that recording. Finding the plant, adjusting it, discovering what sounds you could produce, and then playing with these different sounds, are not only the same elements as modern composing but of experimentalism. The ephemerality of the fatnu also becomes part of the Sámi musical tradition. While the sounds produced have a limited lifespan in it’s current form, the melodies, the stories and rituals live on in the people who listen to them. The people travel, and so do the sounds. A hundred years later, this recording has made it’s way to us, for us to make new connections.

Ellen is also writing her PhD (Music Conservatory at UiT) on Sámi music and the use of Sámi culture in new musical forms. Her project is very attuned to the question of what Sámi music is, and who determines its parameters. She talks about listening as a full-body activity, and how during the course of her project, experimental music has cemented this idea for her. The “experimental” nature her PhD-corpus has had a physical impact; she feels it in her body as much as she hears it. There is no Cartesian mind/body division. Sami music is mind/body inclusive, they’re one from the beginning built on the premise that we listen with our bodies.

The panelist also discussed sounds as signals or cues. Different sounds mean and signal different things depending on the context in which they are heard. For example, the sound of antlers rubbing together, for a reindeer herder signals the end of September. Ánndaris explained that he intentionally removes himself from Western mindsets that aver that humans are “masters of nature”. His understanding of the world, based on his Sámi upbringing, situates himself as part of nature, and that all humans are part of, rather than set apart from nature. Working with concrete sounds, he has often experimented with trying to capture individual sounds – “How do I record one mosquito?” – which constitutes huge technical challenges, but I find his practice inspiring. I can only imagine the attention and focus it takes to single out particular sounds in environments of collective species.

Sounds from nature are subjects, not objects of nature and of the earth.

Ánndaris

The consensus among the panelist was that sound has a unique ability to transport listeners in time and space, a concept which permeates Ánndaris’ sound installation Birástiddje beljustallam (translation: Sharpened Listening to Your Surroundings). We went to the installation later during the festival, and it was a fantastic experience. Bergen Lydgalleri is a big rectangular space – decorated for the occasion with soft pillows, reindeer fur, sheepskin rugs and pillows in a circle. Speakers formed the outer square, bathing us sounds of mosquitos, old refrigerator sounds, winds, lo-fi beats of about 66 bpm, – the emulation of a human heartbeat. Ánndaris asked us to close our eyes, take a nap, or journey as far or as short as we wanted. I have never experienced anything like it, and I highly recommend experiencing his installations, as they are beyond words. They need to be felt, not described.

The Borealis festival seems very occupied with developing and cultivating listening spaces, and all the panelists throughout the festival were happy to have and share spaces where they could celebrate and engage with their culture, heritage, and diverse backgrounds. Nevertheless, I made a conscious effort to be aware of my own situated body in all the gatherings. My attendance was rooted in my role as a researcher, but in some ways, I had to leave my academic mindset aside; this was not a space meant for the mind alone. The works and recordings shared by the panelists invoked feelings, memories and places felt too personal to include in any field note or report. This was a small revelation, but a deep-seated lesson I brought with me into the following days. Listening is deeply relational, and more often it reveals information about ourselves as much as our environs.

You can listen to all the panels here.

Friday – Sámi Listening with Elina Waage Mikalsen, Liisa-Rávná Finbog and Jalvvi Niilas Holmberg

Before the talk began, Niilas Holmberg hit play, and the sounds of lapping water surrounded us. A dark voice gently joins the quiet susurrus of the wind and we heard a boat being launched and gently splashing into the Deatnu river. The sharp twang of a fishing-line accompanies Holmberg’s joik, a warm and almost familiar lilt. It was an excerpt of a new project, Luođik with sound designer Pekka Aikio, where Holmberg rows on the river and joiks his ancestors and other relations from that area. Picking up the concept from the last talk about ephemeral sounds, like the ones made by a fatnu, Holmberg takes inspiration from two cruel cultural and environmental realities. His album captures two ephemeral Sámi soundscapes; joik as a mode of communication and connection (historically demonised and suppressed by religious forces) and fishing regulations on the waters of Sápmi (land rights).

With him were Borealis festival Artist in Residence Elina Waage Mikalsen, and duojár, author, and curator Liisa-Rávná Finbog. Picking up the thread from the last panel on Sámi Experimentalism, Finbog iterated that listening happens in your body, a practice she learned from her grandmother walking the land every summer. Key among her grandmother’s teachings was the idea that whenever you walk in nature, you are never alone. To listen to the wind, the birds, and the sounds of the ocean, is to immerse yourself among many voices and you need to listen – as in take in and act on, the information they provide. If you enter a copse of trees and all the sounds of birds or small animals are gone, then you know danger is near.

Finbog explained that this is the situation for indigenous people living in non-indigenous societies, where these kinds of knowledges are devalued and ignored. Knowledge-making, especially in Western, academia or other knowledge-making institutions, equates “objective rationale” with truth, and therefore, it is the only way of understanding the world around us.

However, the act of listening in a Norwegian context has been completely fragmented, says Finbog.

A recurring aspect of the Borealis Festival was translation and fluency. Some panelists were fortunate enough to have grown up speaking one of the many Sámi languages, while others grew up speaking Norwegian for various reasons. Language is a carrier of tradition and connection, and many of the panelists spoke of the joy and pain of reconnecting with their languages that were stolen from them and generations past. One might ask if that seems counter-intuitive to the theme of this year’s Borealis festival to have English as the ‘common tongue’. I think it served as a rather poignant nod to the colonial systems behind the Norwegianisation of parts of Sápmi, and it was a constant presence in all the panels I attended. The panelist tried to articulate multifaceted concepts in a language so far removed from their own, back and forth, but there was a general understanding of that involuntary aphasia – it is not your fault that you have to formulate sentences in a language that does not understand the land and traditions that made you. Finbog shared her experience of the dissonance caused by speaking English in a group of indigenous people from different parts of the world, and struggling to find fitting words. Using a language shaped by the forces of capitalism for centuries is counter-productive. Borrowing the words of Linda Tuwahi Smith: colonization is not about land, but about changing what makes a people a people. Finbog circled back to the important connection between language, and land, as the respect for all living things is embedded in sámigiella [Sámi language], but not in Norwegian, Swedish, Russian or Finnish.

Davvisamigiella, for example, has several words to describe the different sounds water makes, Holmberg notes. In addition to his new album, he is thinking of collecting Sámi sound-words, and “different voices that water makes”. Waage Mikalsen also noted the richness and multiplicity of certain Sámi words, like “jietna” which means both ‘sound’ and ‘voice’.

They spoke about reciprocity of communication – the words for hunting/fishing also means “to ask permission”, meaning that action is enabled by mutual consent between agents. Similarily, as Finbog explores in her book It speaks to you: Making kin of people, duodji and stories in Sámi museums, working with sámi crafts and traditions is a constant collaboration and familiarity with different materials: the materials also determine how and what it wants to become.
This also applies to technological equipment, adds Waage Mikalsen. If her instruments or equipment stop working or experiences difficulties, she will stop recording. The ability to listen to the materials is essential to build proper relations with your surroundings.

If we start to listen to our surroundings and sounds as if they were voices, then we have to relate to them in a non-hierarchical way.

Elina Waage Mikalsen

I felt very grateful and humbled by their discussion, and I highly recommend listening to the full conversation here.

Stáinnarbánit – Elina Waage Mikalsen, Márjá Karlsen and Jalvvi Niilas Holmberg

Vapours rise from the stage as Niilas Holmberg boils water and place the coffebeans in his handheld grinder. The lodestones of the rátnu gently clack together as Márja Karlsen guide the thick and soft wool wefts, gently patting in an upwards motion with the back of her hand. A thin wailing joins from a self-made instrument as Waage Mikalsen drags a bow across a wooden structure.

Stáinnarbánit [Wolfish teeth] is a soundwork was performed by Márja Karlsen weaving on a rátnu, Jalvvi Niilas Holmberg joiking and brewing coffee, and Elina Waage Mikalsen using different musical and electronic techniques to manipulate and interweave sound. It was astonishing and mesmerizing. The nature of the piece makes it so that it will never be performed the same way twice, and enfolds materiality and different cultural practices forming an entangled, and complete whole. The sounds of the loom and the coffee grinder dissolves dimensions of time. As Niilas Holmberg stated earlier, these sounds make me travel through time: I feel as if I’ve been here a thousand times before, “and it’s the same with the loom, telling the story of thousands of hands, working – it hasn’t changed, it’s the same sound” (Waage Mikalsen).

Repetition, circles and weaving characterise this new performance commission Stáinnarbánit – Wolffish teeth, from Borealis Artist in Residence, Elina Waage Mikalsen. Taking as its starting point the very short and possibly endless form of the luohti (joik) Elina combines electronics, vocal performance and weaving to allow small repetitions to tell bigger stories, including that of the rátnu. A weaving tradition once practised all over Sápmi, today rátnu is a living tradition surviving only in the sea-Sámi village Olmmáivággi of Elina’s mother. Stáinnarbánit, reffering to the name of one of the patterns used in the weaving tradition, will be a performance about soft and repetitive work and how all objects speak, if we just listen closely. (From the Borealis website)