Translator: Hiroko Kawano Reviewer: Marleen Laschet
This is my home. It's Vardø.
My family has been here for 350 years.
There are 2,000 people living on this tiny island in the Arctic part of Norway.
When you come to my home,
the first thing you notice is it's half empty.
Over 60% of the population have left during the last 30 years.
We used to be 5,000 people.
Now we are only 2,000 left.
The reason for this is that the fisheries industry collapsed,
at the same time that the Norwegian government
started centralizing a lot of governmental state workspaces.
So we lost over 700 workspaces in a very short period of time.
Growing up under this kind of circumstances is kind of dramatic.
The things that you are proud of, the things that are your heritage
are suddenly things that you are ashamed of
and that you fear for other people to watch and discover.
For me, I wanted to get involved and try to change this.
So, I started out doing projects trying to help other people.
I started off with helping people to restore houses, to restore homes,
and get funding to do this.
But when I started working with these projects,
I discovered that in development projects,
very often people don't get empowered.
They actually ... the system makes them feel small.
because, for example, when we're restoring homes,
the system is not about empowering people.
It is about restoring houses or cultural heritage,
which is very strict.
So I got super frustrated by working with this.
So I think I had to change the way it was actually functioning.
So instead of doing formal meetings inside governmental offices,
where people dress up with silk scarves and bring computer and law books,
I moved the conversations into a lavvo, a traditional Sami tent.
And I cooked food for people,
and I started asking them,
"How should we do this? You know the answer."
And people start sharing stories.
They start sharing thoughts about why these systems don't work.
And we managed to change it, managed to design a new way
of working with restoring homes or cultural heritage
that actually empowered people.
The most important part of restoring a home
is actually not that the house gets restored;
It's that something inside the person doing it actually gets restored.
The process happens on the inside as well, not only with the house.
And this has grown into the work that I do today,
called Vardø Restored,
where we have over 50 restoration projects going.
where people are restoring their own homes and their own history in my hometown.
Some years ago,
Pøbel, a Norwegian artist, came to my hometown.
He had previously been working in Lofoten with an art concept trying to highlight
the consequences of depopulation and centralization processes using art.
And he wanted to come to our community
together with ten international artists and paint on the walls in our city.
At first, I was super skeptical of this.
He wanted to paint on the same walls
we had been working so hard to try to get restored.
And I was afraid the whole art project would actually ruin our work.
But when I met him -- when he presented his idea,
I also realized that it could be extremely important for my community.
And we chose to do it anyway.
Normally Pøbel works by himself.
He works incognito.
And he doesn't work with a lot of people.
When we started to try to work together, talking about this project,
we decided to do it the opposite way.
We chose to work trying to involve as many people as possible.
And the first thing we did was we jumped into my car,
because we had very short time,
and we just drove around the city, and we just met the whole community.
He introduced himself and his idea to basically everybody in our community,
even before we started.
This created a very, very strong positive attitude towards the whole project,
before we even had it started.
As an example,
this art piece you see here is called the "common wall."
It became one of the art pieces in the project,
where basically the whole community has signed their names
with white paint on the wall.
I will show some more of the art pieces I was creating in only four weeks.
[ETERNAL LIGHT, ETERNAL NIGHT]
[EVERYTHING IS A STORY]
[COD IS GREAT]
(Laughter)
And this art piece, which was maybe the most important art piece of them all.
Pøbel had seen this bus and he said, "Let's make it into an art piece."
I really didn't understand how that could be done.
(Laughter)
[(Norwegian) "Movers"]
But he said, "Just let's put it into the ground.
People will understand it."
And today this has become the symbol
of the stop of the depopulation of our community.
So what are the results of an art project like this?
First of all, it empowers people,
and Pøbel told me when he came that he wanted a project to spark people,
to become the little spark that creates a fire in people.
He wanted people to remove the art pieces and to restore the buildings.
And for me, I thought, "Well, that is not possible."
The only way is to do it the way we were,
but actually what happened, which Jørn here is a very good example of,
is he bought two of the buildings,
the one with "Cod is Great", and the one with the whale.
And he has restored both buildings today.
And this has happened with many of the buildings I got art pieces on.
Or like this, Tor Emil,
who is the chef in town, specialized in local food,
and he tattooed "Cod is Great" on his arm, using it as a part of his brand,
as "Varangerkokken", "The Varanger Chef."
After we did this project, which was very successful,
we got invited to Russia just across the border from where we live
to talk about our project in a place called Teriberka,
which lies a two-hour drive outside Murmansk.
Teriberka has bigger problems than Vardø has.
They have lost over 90 percent of the population.
And now the regional government are planning to demolish
the rest of the houses in the village.
This yellow note tells that the house is going to be demolished this year in 2007.
And the local community is getting relocated
out of their own community into apartment blocks.
While we were there,
Pøbel found this abandoned library
in an abandoned school.
And he painted the art piece "Closed Chapter."
At the same time, he got the idea about a new art project,
which can be a contribution to the situation in Teriberka,
called "New Chapter."
He wanted to create a mobile library self-service.
And while we were there, we started talking with local people
to just ask them, "Do you want this project?"
"Is this interesting for you?"
And one young guy told us,
"If you want to succeed here in Russia, in Teriberka,
you need to connect with the grandmothers.
You need to work with them.
They're the ones who decide in this village.
They are the ones carrying the culture.
There is the power."
And we listened and we did.
So, this summer, we set out to Teriberka.
And the first thing we did was to build a lavvo,
where we can have a social space,
where people can interact with our project,
and where we can share food, share thoughts and get involved.
And then we started involving local people.
We came very, how should I say, unprepared
because that's part of our strategy
so that the things that happen will happen naturally.
So one of the first people we met was Gennadiy,
a local carpenter and he came on board on the project
and basically built the whole library with us.
Ekaterina, a local artist, came on board in the project,
and painted the interior with traditional patterns.
Vladimir, a local welder,
came on board in the project, and custom-built all the ovens.
And there is Igor here, signing a book for the library
with a personal greeting.
He came on board and stayed with us the whole time
and gave us tips on how to work in the community.
An important part of the project, and the design of the project,
was to build it as local as possible,
not only by including local people but also using local materials.
So, we started picking materials from these houses
that were going to be demolished,
which basically are the culture of a place.
And we managed to collect materials from over 40 buildings
and incorporate them into the library.
And because we wanted the library to be mobile,
we built it into a good old truck,
which is basically the most common truck in Russia,
so people would identify with the project.
The project also becomes a viewpoint,
where you can sit inside the library, and you can have a nice view.
And the library is also a social space, where you can interact and share stories.
So -
what are our projects about?
What is our work about?
What is our idea?
I think our idea is people first.
It is to work with people.
It is to design the project from the bottom up
to get people involved.
In these communities that we work, that are threatened by depopulation,
many people think that the threats are actually like the government --
the threat is the politics.
The threat could be, for example, fishery politics.
But I believe it is not; the threat is in our minds.
It is how we think about our own situation.
And the only thing that can change the situation is ourselves.
So, by working with people and by empowering people,
and helping them succeed, we can create a better future.
So when we got people involved starting restoring homes,
it was because we treated people with respect and we designed it for them.
When we made the art project a success,
it was because we took time to talk with all the people
and get the whole village into the project and created early relationships.
And when we worked in Russia, if we succeed --
we don't know, because this is just the start of a three-year project.
And if we succeed, I think it will be because we did it with local people,
and we did it their way.
So thank you all for listening.
(Applause)