Meetings in Varanger landscape

Meetings in the Varanger landscape – Poetic conversation is a performance that is explored as an interactive performance sharing, where the artist is both a performer, but also a facilitator of an experience for the audience.

In the performance Meetings in the Varanger landscape – Poetic conversation, Katarina Skår Lisa will use her body as a living personal shape that carries stories. She will also work with the tactile narratives that are part of the landscape as well as address the perceptible and sensitive themes that arise through encounters with the audience and the inner and outer ‘body’ through dance and performance art.

” Meetings in Varanger landscape in the Drakkar landscape area. Last Pomorfestival we were lucky enough to get a break during our volunteerwork at Drakkar. Katarina Skår Lisa brought elements from Sea Sami culture into the Pomorfestivalen with her performance Meetings in Varanger landscape and beautifully incorporated landscape relations into the festival. In unique ways, Katarina Skår Lisa used her performance to create bonds and relationships between participants across age, gender, nationality, identity and background, artists, visitors, locals, young and old. This was based on the landscape and how the landscape and people are connected through time and space. What emotions it evokes. With braiding techniques, she used yarn threads that connected those who participated with others after the performance. It was stimulated to talk, to make friends with the simple question: Think of a place or a place that is your favorite landscape – tell each other where and why. There were many close moments and something completely outside our own pattern of action. – Pomor Festival, social media, during Sami National Day, February 6, 2025. Text translated from norwegian “

The work was performed at the 20th anniversary for Hamar International performance art festival, at Kunstbanken Hamar. The theme of the festival was Histories. The world is more complicated than our truths about it.   

Later the performance has been shared at Pomorfestivalen 2024, at the visual sculpture Drakkar- Leviathan made by Taibola Assembly.

The costume designer and scenographer Olga Regitze Dyrløv Høeg participated as costume maker for this work. I also reused a white pants from previous performance works made by long time collaborator clothing and fashion designer Ramona Salo. Photographer that documented the performance at Kunstbanken Hamar was Fruszina G. Berkes through Kunstbanken, and photographer for the performance at Pomorfestivalen was Torgrim Halvar.