Geopolitics, 20:35–55, 2015

Copyright © Taylor & Francis Group, LLC

ISSN: 1465-0045 print / 1557-3028 online
DOI: 10.1080/14650045.2014.884562

Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing

in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape

JOHAN SCHIMANSKI
Department of Culture and Literature, UiT The Arctic University of Norway,
Tromsø, Norway

The borderscape is a flexible entity that goes beyond the space

of the border and the borderland. This article argues that art
and literature can be constitutive elements in the borderscape,
along with other kinds of bordering and demarcation. Art and
literature can help create resistance through performative acts of
“borderscaping”, taking place in different locations and involving
different perspectives. The article uses the aesthetic categories of the
sublime, the postmodern, and the defamiliarised to trace forms of
“distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualisations
of the borderscape. Artistic practices in the Norwegian-Russian
borderscape are examined in an evaluation of their geopolitical
significance, with particular attention given to descriptions of the
Norwegian-Russian border in novels by John Fowles and Kjartan
Fløgstad.

BORDERSCAPES

The borderscape concept is a way of thinking about the border and the
bordering process not only on the border, but also beyond the line of the
border, beyond the border as a place, beyond the landscape through which
the border runs, and beyond borderlands with their territorial contiguities
to the border.1 The borderscape functions along the lines of Appadurai’s
ethnoscapes, technoscapes, mediascapes, etc. These terms help deal with
the “global cultural flow[s]” and the “imagined worlds” in which people live.2
As such the borderscape is a flexible concept, following interweaving flows
and connections, and an inclusive concept not necessarily limited by any

Address correspondence to Johan Schimanski, Faculty of Humanities, Social Sciences and

Education, UiT The Arctic University of Norway, NO-9037 Tromsø, Norway. E-mail: johan.
schimanski@uit.no

35
36 Johan Schimanski

clear spatial border. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr privilege the concept of the
borderscape as indicating “the complexity and vitality of, and at, the border”,
emphasising its status as a landscape of resistance to the simple exploitation
of territory by the nation-state.3 The fact that the borderscape is partially
deterritorialised, “not contained in a specific space”,4 and more wide-ranging
in its material practices of demarcation than any specific borderline of ter-
ritorial sovereignty, gives the borderscape an inherent resistance to state
demarcation. The borderlands concept may sometimes be used metaphor-
ically in a way similar to borderscapes, for example in Anzaldúa’s seminal
conceptualisation of a “mestiza consciousness . . . of the Borderlands”.5
However, borderscapes avoids confusion with a term which primarily gives
focus to actors living in zones adjoining the national border.
One could say that a borderscape is the border, disseminated or dif-
fused across space, defined by what it involves. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr
focus on bodies and actors, but mention also histories, solidarities and dis-
courses.6 To connect it to another comparatively new term in border studies,
bordering,7 the borderscape includes anything involved in the bordering pro-
cess. Bordering is used to envisage borders as dynamic processes, constantly
changing. While bordering is often connected to ordering, also processes
leading to alternative, non-binary and transnational concepts of the border
can be called forms of bordering. If “anything involved” in a bordering pro-
cess can be called part of the borderscape, this means that the borderscape
is not just a question of what happens on the border or in the immediate
borderlands, but also of what happens at any spatial distance from it, at any
scale, on any level, in any dimension (including the aesthetical). Borders
happen at a distance, as well as at the borderline itself; borders are “in
motion”.8 It remains then to ascertain when and where bordering happens,
over which spaces, and to what effect.
To investigate the borderscape is to return to the question of who
decides where the border is going to be and what it will mean. The
bordering process involves various individuals, groups, and institutions on
state and local levels. Newman talks about bottom-up and top-down actors.9
Sahlins framed this as a centre-periphery problem in his historical studies of
the Pyrenees, challenging the perception that the border and the national
differences it represents is purely a state concept forced onto local popu-
lations.10 Indeed, in modern nationalism, the power of central state actors
cannot function fully without the compliance of larger populations. The rule
of the law instated by the border is supplemented by cultural performance
taking place in the borderscape.11 Power requires hegemonic discourses
to work, and always opens for the possibility of counter-discourses from
the margins and the rescaling of geopolitical relationships. The border
is not a stabile entity, fixed by a border commission. Rather is it under
constant negotiation, also by many everyday actors, borderland populations,
border-crossers, immigrant communities, artists, authors, etc., often with
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 37

perspectives on the border at variance with one another.12 The border is

susceptible to the trickery of its quotidian flâneurs.13 Brambilla points out
that “borderscape” shares with a still current meaning of “landscape” a
connotation of seeing things from a specific perspective – which may be
exchanged for other perspectives.14 The borderscape adds to bordering the
spatial and sensible components of power.
Today the border is increasingly becoming the subject of various works
of literature, cinema and art, reflecting border experiences and negotiat-
ing the border on aesthetic terms. Art can both perform and thematise the
distances involved in the borderscape. In an article analysing various site-
specific artworks on the Mexican-USA border wall by Tijuana, Iglesias Prieto
differentiates between works of art which relate to the wall and which are
actual interventions on the wall. She notes that Betsabeé Romero’s work
Ayate Car (1997) belongs to the former category.15 Romero’s recycled, found
art, site-specific installation of a car a few metres from the border wall – half-
buried as if it had crashed into the ground after hopping over the wall from
the USA side – is indeed located at a (short) distance from the wall. It is
clearly a border work and part of the borderscape even if not located on the
wall or on the border itself. Like many of the other seemingly very located
artworks discussed by Iglesias Prieto, Ayate Car also plays on different forms
of mobility across the border: recycling, the colonial gaze, tourism and above
all the often deadly realities of migration. As Amilhat Szary emphasises, the
wave of border art that follows the hardening of the Mexican-USA border
through the border wall responds by focusing on mobility,16 also implying
an element of distance in the borderscape.
In this article I will argue that literature and art can potentially create
resistances by articulating an aesthetics of distancing. I will be examining one
specific borderscape – that relating to the Norwegian-Russian border – and
the geopolitical role of art and literature in that borderscape. There is, I sug-
gest here, something unmanageable about borders, which makes them both
sublime and graspable only from a distance. Sometimes this distancing may
become one of critical defamiliarisation. More generally, my argument sup-
ports a view that the materiality and practices of the borderscape constitute
a network held together by strategies of rhetorical, symbolic and discursive
signification. It will become clear that artistic and other forms of deterritori-
alisation can equally well be used to reinforce, as to subvert, the territorial
logic of states; the borderscape can be an ambivalent space of both power
and resistance.

THE RUSSIAN-NORWEGIAN BORDERSCAPE

The contemporary borderscape of the Russian-Norwegian border is an

assemblage of any number of disparate elements, brought together by their
38 Johan Schimanski

MAP 1 The Norwegian-Russian borderlands with places mentioned in the text. Noatun is the
basis for Fowles’s Seidevarre (see note 85). Map: Frøydis Strand.

implication in the bordering process. Most obvious of these within the realm
of geopolitical and social analysis are the historical conditions and social
effects of the border as a marker of territoriality, a delimiter of sovereignty
and a barrier to mobility installed between different successive versions of
Russia and Norway in the far North. Niemi has identified three historical
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 39

continuities in Norwegian-Russian borderland: 1) the mirroring of national

concerns (and I would add, those of larger power blocs), 2) a dynamic fron-
tier (the Barents region as a “wild north”) and 3) the desire for and need of an
open border landscape on the part of local populations.17 The border is not
only part of local, but also global and national discourses of rebordering and
debordering; this border was once a Cold War border, and is now an exclu-
sionary Schengen border crossed by the inclusionary Barents Euro-Arctic
Region (BEAR, the “Barents Region”). The relative softening of the border
has allowed a less absolute East-West divide to continue to exist alongside a
renewed “frontier” interest in oil and gas resources in the Barents Sea. The
Barents Region, involving parts of Russia, Finland, Sweden and Norway, was
conceived as a geopolitical project with strong cross-border economic and
cultural components.18 A framework has been created for development to
the economic benefit of both central elites and local communities, with cross
border contacts encouraged on many levels of scale.
Political negotiations can have many effects, all becoming part of the
way the border functions. Access to the border zone on the Russian side
has been restricted both for travellers from outside and inside Russia: Special
permission must be applied for in advance from an office far from the bor-
der itself. However, the permeability of the border has steadily increased,
and in 2010, Russia and Norway signed an agreement allowing holders of
a “local border traffic permit” multiple stays within specified areas on both
sides of the border.19 This increased permeability is visible in the successive
increases in the numbers of border crossings20 and the large proportion of
Russians living in the Norwegian border town of Kirkenes21 and other coastal
settlements.22 Political arrangements are thus also manifested in everyday
experiences, such as the sight of Russian women working at the market on
the square in Kirkenes, one example of the spatial and symbolic de- and
re-borderings going on between Russians and Norwegians within local com-
munities.23 Such experiences are woven together with historical and cultural
memories of the border, for example, of Russian Orthodox pilgrimages to
the Boris Gleb church, located in a pene-enclave on the Pasvik River, or
the fact that from 1920 to 1944, the border was in fact two borders, with
the Finnish Petsamo corridor in between. The corridor was the site of a
now erased Finnish settlement, and in its last years the arena of a protracted
armed conflict between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Also part of the borderscape is the technical apparatus of the bor-
der, much of it situated physically on or adjacent to the border itself,
the signs detailing special regulations, the colourfully painted border
posts, the border rivers of Jakobselv/Vuoremijoki/Vorema/Vuorján and
Pasvikelva/Paatsjoki/Patsooki/Paaččjokk,24 the Norwegian-built crossing
point at Storskog-Borisoglebsk, the security fence further in on the Russian
side with its maintenance and surveillance road; but also, spreading across
the globe, standardised technologies of border control all along the Russian
40 Johan Schimanski

border, passport and visa technologies in consulates and embassies, the

production and distribution of maps, databases, etc.
Parallel to this technoscape of the border we find the mediascape of
the border, again maps, reference works, guidebooks, histories, exhibitions,
websites, television and newspaper reports. We also find two spheres,
which in the contemporary context may have the potential to provide crit-
ical alternatives to hegemonic discourses: science and aesthetics. Especially
Kirkenes has become a magnet for researchers doing fieldwork in the
social sciences either at the Barents Institute or independently, with some
humanities scholars joining them, and for artists and artist groups doing
residencies or shows, including many invited by the cultural production
and curator collective Pikene på broen (founded 1996), often in connection
with the yearly Barents Spektakel arts festival (since 2004).25 Other groups
such as Samovarteatret are also representative of artistic activities in the
Norwegian-Russian borderland, and the region has also been host to the
Finnmark International Literary Festival and to the Sámi Arts Festival.26
Notably, this presence of researchers and artists on the border comes at a
time when research in border studies is experiencing a cultural turn,27 and
when art is experiencing a research turn, with artists incorporating politically
informed field research into their projects.
Many of these activities are carried out with the support of state funding,
mainly Norwegian or European, and are often arranged in conjunction with
trade conferences and political meetings.28 Social constructivist international
relations scholars played a role in forming this new, culturally orientated
Northern policy29 from a local perspective, border art does have a role in
international relations, confirmed by the channelling of funding through the
Norwegian Barents Secretariat.30 Economic and cultural links have under-
gone slow and not always easy processes of consolidation, strengthened
today with perceptions of the Barents Region as a resource bonanza and in
a radical revisioning of the region as in itself a form of aesthetic product.31
These political, social, economic, technical, experiential, media-driven,
scientific, and aesthetic negotiations of the border take place, to the extent
that they can be located to specific places; on the border itself, in borderland
towns such as Kirkenes and Nikel, in regional centres such as Murmansk
and Tromsø, in national capitals such as Oslo and Moscow, and indeed
elsewhere.32 What the extended, woven, partly deterritorialised space of the
borderscape allows us to see are the connections (and tensions) between
agents, practices and discourses both in and beyond the local contiguity
of the borderland or the material visibility of the border landscape. The
borderscape is not purely an external effect of the border, but an assemblage
in which bordering takes place. It thus allows us to see aesthetic works not
only as representations of the border, but at the same time as part of the
bordering process. Aesthetic works do not provide, as an older positivist
paradigm would suggest, purely secondary representations of the border.33
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 41

The concept of the borderscape implies that they participate in the same
field of play as (say) a border fence or a border commission. In addition to
this, literary texts and other artistic practices have the potential to demarcate
demarcation itself, that is, to reflect upon and negotiate the very notion of
bordering and thus to have impact on the Begriffsgeschichte (“history of
concepts”) of the term border.

AESTHETICS OF THE BORDER

To understand the relationship between aesthetics and distancing in the

borderscape we must call on the rich history of aesthetics, which like the
concept of the border, is contingent and changing. Welsch suggests that the
ways in which we have used the term aesthetics form a family of defini-
tions which falls roughly into three groups, having to do with perception,
beauty and art.34 Looking at these in turn, we can suggest ways in which
the aesthetic may play a role in the borderscape.
First aesthetics, a term derived from the Greek verb αίσ θ άνoμαι (“I per-
ceive, feel, sense”), is defined as that having to do with sensory perception.
Larsen has argued that a border must have a sensible or aesthetic component
in order to give it meaning; and if it did not have meaning for somebody or
something, it would not be a border.35 The Pasvik and Jakobselv rivers, the
border posts, maps, documents, land use, personal appearances and prac-
tices, language, and artworks, are sensible or perceptible elements that can
be connected to the territorial and symbolic differences between Russia and
Norway, and it is aesthetic impact that makes such differences into a bor-
der. This sense of the aesthetic is immediately applicable to questions about
the visibility of borders.36 Can, for example, avant-garde or postmodernist
art increase cognition, by making us go beyond conventional perceptions of
borders, through an aesthetics of distancing?
Second, both for philosophers like Kant and in everyday usage, aesthet-
ics has to do with judgements of beauty. As Welsch reminds us however,
“beauty” alone will not suffice as an aesthetic category.37 There are indeed a
wide variety of aesthetic effects, and the aesthetic vocabulary must be wide
in order to cover them. Borders may be beautiful, attractive objects of desire.
It is difficult to deny that the Russian-Norwegian border landscape, like very
many other remote border landscapes, is a place of natural beauty, encom-
passing the picturesque churches of Boris Gleb and King Oscar II’s Chapel.
Border tourism is a growing industry on the Norwegian side, with boat trips
on the Pasvik river, visits to the Borderland Museum,38 and coach trips to
the Russian town of Nikel – the latter including “study visits” by groups of
politicians, researchers and artists.39 The instrumental aspect of state border-
ings and of tourist attractions threatens the disinterested nature of beauty
posited by Kant, and a widening of the vocabulary of aesthetic categories
42 Johan Schimanski

exacerbates this tension. The aesthetic attraction of polluted and ravaged

landscape around the nickel mines and plant of Nikel, part of the tourist
itinerary, is more properly defined as sublime or grotesque.40 Here I refer
to the technical sense of the “sublime” common within aesthetics, a quality
which paradoxically attracts us to something more powerful than ourselves
(e.g., borders) and which allows us to find pleasure in the destructive when it
is observed at a safe distance. “When danger or pain press too nearly,” writes
Burke, “they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but
at certain distances, and with certain modifications, they may be, and they
are, delightful, as we every day experience.”41 While the border is unman-
ageable in its power, it seems graspable at a distance. Some border region
art, and the novels I will be looking at here, engage with the sublime.42 With
its mixture of danger and pleasure, the sublime is a deeply ambivalent expe-
rience. The sublime, appearing when we paradoxically approach and keep
a distance to the borders of our being, bears similarity with liminal narratives
of transition, which combine transgression with social integration. Its sense
of locational distance relates both to the distances implied in the borderscape
concept and to an aesthetics of distancing.
In the case of the tourist experience of Nikel, it is human activities which
take on the role of vast and implacable forces of nature commonly appreci-
ated as being sublime. Nikel is a reminder that aesthetical judgements often
come bundled together with other axiological judgements: the ugliness of the
blighted landscape quickly leads to ethical judgements about the environ-
mental impact of human actions, and political judgements about what is to
be done. Conversely, the fact that the beautifully raked gravel of the Russian
border control fence roadway is there to make it easier to see the traces
of illegal crossings will for some make the gravel more ugly than beautiful,
because of what they perceive as negative ethical implications that it entails.
Different groups use aesthetic judgements in different ways. Viken has
argued that the crossing of the border itself with its accompanying paperwork
and sometimes long waits in a state of uncomprehending disempowerment
on the part of the tourist, along with the mysteriousness of the militarised
zones connected with the border, gives the border an authenticity which
some tourists demand.43 This suggests a desire for the sublime precisely
connected with the otherwise negative traits and memories of this post–Iron
Curtain border, but also the power of the present-day border: Tourists taking
river boat trips are invited to walk right up to the border, but warned that
even crossing the imaginary line between two border posts with your hand
could lead to an arrest; they are also regaled with grotesque stories of African
migrants being found drowned or frozen to death in the borderland.44
Third, aesthetics has become a way of talking specifically about artistic
production, be it painting, literature, film, music, or whatever. A consider-
able number of artistic activities are connected to the Norwegian-Russian
borderlands, often set in motion by Pikene på broen and their artistic
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 43

partners. Their activities may truly be called forms of borderscaping, in the

sense that they actively attempt to modify the borderscape (cf. the term
landscaping). They involve many utopian visions of future forms of bor-
dering, and “transborder” acts of connecting the local borderland with the
rest of the world, with artists coming in from many different places and
cooperation with similar initiatives in other borderlands. However, the term
borderscaping is not necessarily reserved for intentional borderscape design.
Strüver’s use of the term is inspired by Butler’s theories of performativity,
in which representations and indeed artistic works are acknowledged as
practices.45 Strüver includes in borderscaping in effect all kinds of border-
ing practice, be they “through representations, through performative acts,
through acts of narration, visualisation and imagination, including their inter-
pretations”.46 Borderscaping is thus bordering and vice versa, though by
using the term borderscaping we emphasise the spatial dimension of all
bordering activities and their potential for distancing.
The activities of Pikene på broen and similar groups based in the
Norwegian-Russian borderlands are by no means unique in a global per-
spective. In some cases they are paralleled by cultural activities which place
less weight on contemporary art practices, but all the more on the local cul-
tural heritage of the border and on the border as part of cultural memory.47
This is also the case of aesthetic treatments of the Russian-Norwegian border
in fictional narratives.

ARTISTIC DISTANCING

Many of these artworks – installations, videos, performances, etc. – produced

in relation to the Norwegian-Russian border are eminently mobile, with few
being located on the border itself or on border fences. Indeed, to locate them
on the actual borderline would involve jurisdictional problems. The multime-
dia and multi-artist participatory site-specific performance Border-Crossing
Exercises III – Pikevannet was produced by Pikene på broen and held dur-
ing the 2008 Barents Spektakel festival in Kirkenes. It involved soundscapes,
Norwegian and Russian choirs and contemporary dance, Siberian ethnic
singing and Sámi joiks, ice sculptures and lightwork simulacra of the bor-
der, all taking place on the frozen surface of the Pikevannet lake, a lake
crossed by the Norwegian-Russian border just by the main Storskogen cross-
ing point, not far from Kirkenes, east of Boris Gleb.48 But the performance
had to be held a few metres away from the actual borderline. For Aagedal,
the fact that the border control might have threatened the performance is part
of what made the performance an attractive event,49 giving it some of the
same authentic uncertainty and sublimity that the tourist seeks in the border.
Aagedal argues that the choice of venue differentiates the Pikevannet
event from more traditional provincial spectacles in Norway (history plays,
etc.). The border implies both local, regional and global identities in a
44 Johan Schimanski

way typical for Pikene på broen’s productions.50 Other art relating to the
Norwegian-Russian border is more distant from the border, though it often
involves representations of the border or the border region. The main
location of artistic activities is in the border town of Kirkenes, located some
7.5 km from the border. But most of these activities are highly mobile and
like the Pikevannet performance, invoke a cosmopolitan scale.51 Pikene
på broen have arranged a series of Transborder Cafés and Concerts in
different locations (Kirkenes, Murmansk, Linz, Istanbul, Harstad) and the
Pan-Barentz Triennale, which included a travelling art exhibition and highly
mobile books and catalogues.52 Artworks by artists and artist groups curated
by Pikene på Broen are shown and performed widely. Samovarteatret
productions focussing on the border and the borderlands go on tour in
Norway and Russia: The collectively written 2011 play Radio Barents 111
was performed in Kirkenes, Tromsø, Oslo, Petrozavodsk, St. Petersburg,
Arkhangelsk and Murmansk.53
Morten Traavik’s 2011 site-specific, recycled art installation Borderlines
illustrated how the materiality of a border artwork can perform the distances
involved in the borderscape in a very direct manner. The time-limited
piece consisted of two simulacra of the Norwegian-Russian border set up
in the border town Kirkenes and the Norwegian capital Oslo (outside the
symbolic seat of power in Norway, the Norwegian parliament building).
In each location, the installation was made up of parallel lines of Russian
and Norwegian border posts – indeed, including actual border posts,
decommissioned and moved from the border itself.54 Subsequently, the
installation also appeared in Murmansk. Like many of the examples here,
Traavik’s installation is both part of the distances of the borderscape and
represents or stages those distances.
Contemporary art distances the border through the utopian and
the ironic. Artistic director Luba Kuzovnikova accepts the label “Barents
Liberation Army” for Pikene på broen and sees the role of art in the region as
a form of resistance against both geopolitical exploitation and the continued
selective permeability of the border:

Barents Liberation Army (BLA) is liberation from geopolitical discourse

and from raw-resource scenario – the North as a Periphery providing the
Centre with resources. We represent cultural politics that removes the
Barents discourse from a political context and builds grass-root border
dialogue and understanding, thus creating grounds for conflict-free and
compromise-orientated dialogue and networking. Simply, back to basics
– to culture, to human communication across borders.55

As Viken, Granås and Nyseth write, Pikene på broen places more weight
on “inclusion, integration and mutual understanding” than on an “inter-
nationally strategic location”.56 In a foreword to an anthology of “border”
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 45

stories from the region, Marit Bjerkeng appeals to local interest in an open-
ing of the borderlands, suggesting an implicit understanding of performative
borderscaping in border art and literature: “We want these stories to be like
border crossings – to assist in showing us what we share, what our common
experiences from the past are and perspectives for the future”.57 A recurrent
motif in contemporary art practices in the Norwegian-Russian borderscape
is the appeal to an earlier circulation of nomadic indigenous peoples (the
Sámi) across what are today state borders.58
Well-meaning cultural bridgings of geopolitical divides may however
have unexpected consequences. The synchronisation of new resource-
orientated perspectives in Barents cooperation with the transnational flows
of contemporary art gives Phillips some cause for alarm; ethical demands in
contemporary art for a borderless world fit not only the mobile nature of
art in the art market, but also the mobile nature of resources and capital in
a globalised world.59 Some postmodernist border art ambivalently appeals
to the circulatory power of consumerism as a popular way of fragment-
ing the borders of the Barents region, thus resisting what has been called
“Barents rhetoric” and “Barents euphoria”.60 This is notably the case in Oslo-
based Amund Sjølie Sveen’s performance and website USB – United States
of Barents (2007–2009), in which he posits the establishment of the world’s
northernmost IKEA store on the Finnish-Swedish border in Haparanda as the
beginning of a future Barents nation, while slowly fragmenting five IKEA din-
ner plates representing Sweden, Sápmi (the Sámi nation), Norway, Finland
and Russia and reforming them into a map of the Barents Region.61 Olga
and Alexander Florensky, based in St. Petersburg, use with similar irony a
Russian fin-de-siècle (end of the nineteenth century) advertising aesthetic in
order to brand the “eternal values” which the border towns of Nikel and
Kirkenes potentially have in common.62 These humoristic and ironic devices
create a form of heightened perception of the ambivalent nature of the
borderscape through aesthetic distancing. In Sveen’s work in particular this
distancing helps construct a cosmopolitan, “transborder” borderscape which
may resist a border subject-positioning as “peripheral” in the geopolitical
complex – in a way typical for many of the artistic practices connected to
the Norwegian-Russian border.
Ironic border art is perhaps closer to a logic of borderlander networking,
using its carnevalistic logic in order to break with the top-down, technocratic
scenarios of cross border cooperation.63 However, local populations, influ-
enced by what Espíritu calls the “hegemonic masculinity” of the region64
(the gendered form of Niemi’s “wild frontier” continuity), are likely to look
in askance at what direct benefits such art brings to them. Viken, Granås
and Nyseth suggest that the artistic practices curated by Pikene på broen
influence local political and commercial actors and aid in building border
identities, but that “their focus on contemporary arts projects delimits the
accessibility of the Barents Spectacle for the average Kirkenes inhabitant”.65
46 Johan Schimanski

With geopolitical arrangements changing, it will be interesting to track the

artistic negotiation of the borderscape now that the visa arrangements of this
Schengen border have been loosened for local residents.

THE POSTMODERNIST SUBLIME

Novels are aesthetic works which are highly mobile, located in bookshelves
in many different places, often at a great distance from any borders they
might depict, and reaching readers across both space and time. As such they,
like films, are somewhat of a test case where the material location of artis-
tic production in the borderscape is concerned.66 John Fowles’s The Magus
(1965) and Kjartan Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv (2009, “Border Jakobselv”)
are novels with wide public receptions. In 2003, The Magus was placed at
sixty-seventh place in the BBC’s major Big Read poll of favourite novels, indi-
cating its impact. Grense Jakobselv was welcomed as a major new novel by
an equally canonised Norwegian author, became the subject of a protracted
public debate about Fløgstad’s acknowledgement of historical sources,67 and
has been translated into Danish, French, Bulgarian and Albanian. Both nov-
els partake in the wider dissemination of the Norwegian-Russian border.
Constitutive parts of the Norwegian-Russian borderscape, they also thema-
tise the flexibility and inclusiveness of the borderscape in their narratives
and rhetoric, and foreground the distancing effect of the sublime. Neither
author is from the Norwegian-Russian borderlands, though Fowles visited
them in 1949 and 196468 and Fløgstad lived for a while in the Norwegian
border municipality Sør-Varanger.69 The fact that they cannot be called “local
voices” or “borderland authors” does not prevent their novels from being
part of the Norwegian-Russian borderscape, according to the definitions of
the borderscape concept above.
Fowles and Fløgstad are commonly characterised as prominent post-
modernists.70 Postmodernism is a body of art, architecture and literature,
but also an “aesthetic category” along other such categories as beauty and
the sublime in Welsch’s second grouping above. Whether postmodernism
is (or was) an affirmation or an ambivalent critique of the postmodern
condition is debated. For Lyotard, both postmodernism and the earlier exper-
imental avant-garde deny any pretence on the part of mimetic realism that
we have access to what we are portraying. Such art presents the unrepre-
sentable, or rather; it makes us aware that some things are unrepresentable.
Consequently, Lyotard identifies postmodernism as a form of the sublime.71
An awareness of borders in general in a fragmented world, and a self-
awareness about the borders between the fictional text and the world, is
part of the postmodernist aesthetic. Indeed, the constant shifting of concepts
of representation caused by this self-reflexivity leads to a fragmentation of
the border between reality and representation itself.
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 47

The geopolitical import of postmodernist novels lies in their formal frag-

mentation; in their postcolonialist variant, they focus on national and cultural
hybridities. Postmodernist novels can be contrasted to the established tra-
dition of realist novels, which tend to present themselves as artistic wholes
and well-bordered narratives presenting whole societies. In Anderson’s
formulation of the nation-state, realist novels are a privileged way of rep-
resenting and naturalising the unfragmented solidarity of the nation safely
within its boundaries.72 In the ideal nation-state, borders are taken as implicit
necessities rather than explicit themes. Where realist novels tend to focus on
what is typical for a particular society, they also tend to avoid and repress
the uncanny tensions and conflicts involved in both national and ontological
borders.73 Moretti suggests that the parallel genre of historical romances, in
contrast, focuses on external and internal national borders.74 Fowles’s and
Fløgstad’s novels can be characterised as postmodernist historical romances,
or to use the genre label established by Hutcheon, historiographic metafic-
tions.75 In line with Moretti’s observations on historical romances, both
novels engage with the external border through an increased “figurality”
in their descriptions and with internal borders through the motif of hidden
histories.76 The need for figurality and metaphor at the border, states Moretti,
is a product of the encounter with the unknown which takes place at
the border:77 another version of the sublime at the border. However, in
both novels, the sublime is self-reflexively performed and critiqued from a
distance.
Fowles’s The Magus is the story of a young man, Nicholas Urfe, who
undergoes a process of initiation according to a plan carried out by the
manipulative Maurice Conchis. This so-called “God-Game” takes place far
from the Russian-Norwegian border, on a Greek island. During the pro-
cess Conchis tells Nicholas stories of his own transition to a higher plane
of consciousness. One of these takes place in the far north, on the Pasvik
River, in 1922, at a time when the river marked the border between Norway
and Finland’s Petsamo Corridor rather than between Norway and Russia.
Fløgstad’s Grense Jakobselv, named after the now depopulated place on the
Norwegian side of the border where it meets the Barents Sea,78 also describes
two generations of men and women whose lives mirror the twentieth cen-
tury. Alf Magne Mayen is a Norwegian surveillance officer who is engaged
in editing the diaries of his mentor Otto Nebelung, once part of a group of
educated, bourgeois German officers who for parts of the war were stationed
on the Northern Front, in Kirkenes, which during the Second World War was
on the border between the German Reich and the Soviet Union. These men
saw themselves as “good” Nazis, in the (for us ironical) sense that their func-
tion is to protect Nazism from its “vulgar”, “barbaric” “sides”. After the war
they continue to see themselves as good citizens with a mission, this time
to save civilisation from the Eastern “barbarism”. This political novel based
on historical sources aims to bring to light Nazi continuism in Europe and its
48 Johan Schimanski

influence on stay-behind organisations set up during the Cold War in case of

a communist takeover.
In The Magus, Conchis tells how he once visited a remote farmstead on
the Pasvik River, owned by Gustav Nygaard, previously a veterinary surgeon.
Conchis initially envisaged the border as an isolated and beautiful periphery,
“a place where nature was triumphant over man”,79 “in the heart of the vast fir
forests that run from Norway and Finland into Russia.”80 This heart, placed
on the limit to an almost limitless space, was a threshold onto something
unreal: “Endless forest. Huge, dark firs for mile after mile after mile. The river
as broad and silent as a lake in a fairy tale. Like a mirror unlooked-in since
time began.”81 The border opened onto fantastic and deterritorialised spaces.
According to these figurations, it was paradoxically both on the periphery
of national and civilised spaces and in the centre of a natural wilderness, a
sublime space related to the border. Similarly, in Grense Jakobselv, Nebelung
aestheticised Kirkenes as an attractive and exotic place, writing that “the Sub-
Arctic borderland was not as I had imagined it. Wide valleys, old pine forests,
ice-free harbours, warm summers. The Sámi had been mine workers for
three generations. The women were dark and exotic. The aurora flamed.”82
As in The Magus, the border was the beginning of something limitless: “Here
we were on a border, an absolute border. On the other side of the border
something new began, something completely different. Asian in its power,
as was the fear.”83 Nebelung refers to Nietzsche’s quest for a “metaphorical
icy wilderness”, in which he finds “the wild, raw power of a nature that was
destructive and inhuman. Now this was a metaphor no longer, we were right
in the middle of the real Arctic wilderness.”84 As in The Magus, “margins”
became “middle”, with the border opening onto a sublime space.
The Nygaards in The Magus had a secret: Gustav’s crazed brother
Henrik, who lived on a spit of land reaching into the river. This spit points
towards the other side in more senses than one, since it also evokes a his-
torical layering in which it is revealed as an ancient Sámi holy site. Gustav
explains that Seidevarre, the name of the farm, means “Hill of the Holy
Stone”.85 Henrik Nygaard communes with god, shouting to him in to the
mist across the river. The meeting with the mad Henrik Nygaard creates a
liminal border space, bringing about life-changing transitions in Conchis’s
personality, expanding his perspective on the world. In his role as nar-
rator, Nicholas comments in retrospect on the “interrelationships, threads
between circumstance” which he has been meant to see through Conchis’s
telling of the Seidevarre story.86 Through the telling, the border becomes
a borderscape, bringing Seidevarre together with many of the other loca-
tions described in the novel. The border episode is connected to – or
has folded into – the rest of Conchis’s life, and thus, by his retelling of
it thirty years later, also the life of the object of his teachings, Nicholas.
In a self-aware fashion, Conchis’s story makes connections across distances
even as it describes them. In Grense Jakobselv, Nebelung and his friends,
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 49

like Conchis, learnt something. The Wehrmacht never managed to cross the
border and take Soviet Murmansk, but for them, being bogged down in
Kirkenes is not a story of failure. It is in this borderland, in the Russian
consulate in Parkkina (within the Petsamo Corridor, by Pechenga), that they
find the Russian codebook that would secure them their post-war careers
and mission, folded out through the rest of the novel. Both novels present a
similar structure of the border, wherein the border from a Western perspec-
tive opens onto a sublime and liminal space which transforms or seems
to transform characters; characters who then go on to create a Western
borderscape across space and time on the basis of this experience. Each
novel is a performative part of the Norwegian-Russian borderscape, but also
presents us with reflective representations about how the borderscape can
function.
In terms of Niemi’s continuities, these two novels are mostly con-
cerned with national confrontations and the “wild frontier” nature of the
Russian-Norwegian borderland. The Magus sets individual development on
the geopolitical frontlines of the twentieth century, while Grense Jakobselv
frames these geopolitical frontlines in terms of individual development.
Characters in the novels have in common stereotypes of the Norwegian-
Russian borderlands as a peripheral wilderness, and also an orientalist
Western perspective whereby Russia is seen as an extension of that wilder-
ness, as an “other” to the Western self. They figure the borderscape as a
geopolitical sublime located outside the self/the West, and a network of inter-
connections across internal borders and distances penetrating the self/the
West. While written from two different temporal perspectives in relationship
to the Cold War period, one internal and one external, both novels negoti-
ate that period through a form of temporal distancing, placing their crucial
actions in a pre–Cold War period in which the border is held in the grip of
the sublime forces of nature, rather than in an impenetrable, technological
regime of border surveillance and control.
Both novels ascribe ethical or political values to border sublimes, seek-
ing out paradoxes on the Norwegian-Russian border by staging the sublime.
Conchis in The Magus seeks to teach Nicholas humanity and respect for the
other, but he does so through a constructed series of theatrical masques
and narratives which do not respect Nicholas’s integrity. Nebelung and his
comrades in Grense Jakobselv represent for Fløgstad not fascism threatening
democracy from the outside, but fascism threatening democracy from the
inside,87 over an infolded, internal border. In both cases, the borderscape
that forms around the Norwegian-Russian border, an external border, also
manifests itself as an internal border. The novels thus reveal the palimpsest
of hidden histories and geographies of the border.88 By folding the border
across the distance between the external and the internal and to the centre
of personal or historical narratives, they both seek to make the invisible
visible.
50 Johan Schimanski

GEOPOLITICAL CRITIQUE

Contemporary artistic production around the Norwegian-Russian border

shifts the emphasis on the sublime in line with changes in the geopolitical
status and physical demarcation of the Norwegian-Russian border. The
plot in Fløgstad’s novel is partly set within the post-communist period in
which it was written, but creates a negative borderscape of Nazi continuism
which addresses technocratic scenarios of exploitation in a dialectical fash-
ion. The negative form taken by this critique constitutes a third alternative
alongside contemporary artistic borderscaping connected to the Norwegian-
Russian border region, the latter placing more weight either on creating
utopian cross-border identities in line with Niemi’s “open border” continuity,
or on ironically subverting the neoliberal commodification of cross-border
cooperation.
Many of the artworks and novels examined here are postmodernist cri-
tiques, both staging the border as a sublime object and structured so as
denaturalise our concepts of what the border is, distancing in a way similar
to the historical avant-garde.89 Using aesthetic-as-art they activate aesthetics-
as-sensory-perception. The aesthetic becomes a form of cognition in which
perception is heightened through distancing – or to use the Russian for-
malist concept, ostranenie (defamiliarisation), later developed by Brecht in
his aesthetic of Verfremdung (often translated as estrangement or “distanti-
ation”). These mechanisms suggest that within certain aesthetic discourses,
the aesthetic-as-sensory-perception is a spatial category that can be structured
by much the same removes and folds as the borderscape. Common to the
borderscape and to defamiliarisation is an element of distance or distancing,
pointing to the possibility of resistant defamiliarisation in the borderscape.
However, other formulations of postmodernism do not trust in its abil-
ity to engage critically, implying that border art can also align itself with
the borderscapes of economic and state power. In Jameson’s critique of
postmodernism as the “Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (to quote his title),
he modifies Lyotard’s characterisation of the postmodernist sublime, contrast-
ing what he sees as its “hallucinatory exhilaration” to the historical avant-
garde’s alienated critique.90 For Jameson, “distance in general (including
‘critical distance’ in particular) has very precisely been abolished in the new
space of postmodernism”,91 a sentiment certainly not shared by Hutcheon.
I prefer to see this disagreement as part of the discursive structure of the
borderscape. Returning to Brambilla’s perspectival take on the borderscape,
an aesthetics of distancing, whether through negation, utopia or irony, can
potentially provide an alternative perspective and take part in performa-
tive processes of “borderscaping”. Such resistant borderscaping is not a
given, however. Amilhat Szary, who proposes studying border art “as a
borderscape”,92 states that “making landscapes, whether by picturing them
or by building a wall through them, consists of projecting one’s intention
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 51

over a portion of space that has been defined by the sight of it.”93 As
Iglesias Prieto points out, the border can be marked by practices that both
offend and please.94 This paradox points both to a problem concerning aes-
thetic practices connected to what are institutions of power and potential
violence and to the mixture of danger and pleasure in the sublime. A ten-
sion between repulsion and attraction structures borderscape as an affective
dynamic of approach and distancing on both individual and geopolitical
scales. Empirically, postmodernist forms of art and literature inflected by
an avant-garde aesthetics of distancing can make it possible to address this
dynamic in a self-conscious and critical way by staging the borderscape,
but as Jameson might suggest, they run the risk of commodifying and
reterritorialising northern borderlands in the process. Perhaps however the
borderscape allows us to entertain Jameson’s alternative to his negative ver-
sion of postmodernism, namely an “aesthetic of cognitive mapping”, which
raises “spatial issues as its fundamental concern”, and allows us to see our
“place in the global system”.95

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

The research for this article was made possible partly by funding through
the Border Aesthetics project (Research Council of Norway KULVER pro-
gramme 194581), and addresses central themes of the EUBORDERSCAPES
project (FP7-SSH-2011-1-290775), financed by the European Commission.
Minor fieldwork was made possible through the activities of the Narrating
the High North research group. Pikene på broen, which figures in the arti-
cle, has been an external participant of the Border Aesthetics project, though
not directly involved in my research. I would like to thank audiences in
Rome, Catania, Uppsala, Potchefstroom, and Kirkenes, along with Ulrike
Spring, my project colleagues, other contributors to this special issue, and
my two anonymous reviewers for their detailed comments and useful ques-
tions. I would also like to thank Anniken Telnes Iversen for unwittingly
leading me to the episode from Fowles’s The Magus read here.

NOTES
1. Without using the term borderscapes, Paasi gives reasons for the need of such a concept in an
appraisal of recent developments in border studies. A. Paasi, ‘Border Studies Reanimated: Going beyond
the Territorial/Relational Divide’, Environment and Planning A 44/10 (2012) p. 2304.
2. A. Appadurai, ‘Disjuncture and Difference in the Global Cultural Economy’, Theory, Culture &
Society 7/2-3 (1990) pp. 296–297.
3. P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr, ‘Introduction’, in P. K. Rajaram and C. Grundy-Warr (eds.),
Borderscapes: Hidden Geographies and Politics at Territory’s Edge (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press 2007) p. x.
4. Ibid., p. xxviii.
52 Johan Schimanski

5. G. Anzaldúa, Borderlands: La Frontera: The New Mestiza (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books
1987) p. 77.
6. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 3) p. xxix.
7. H. v. Houtum and T. v. Naerssen, ‘Bordering, Ordering and Othering’, Tijdschrift voor
Economische en Sociale Geografie 93/2 (2002); D. Newman, ‘On Borders and Power: A Theoretical
Framework’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 18/1 (2003).
8. R. Zapata-Barrero, ‘Borders in Motion: Concept and Policy Nexus’, Refugee Survey Quarterly
32/1 (2013) pp. 4–5, A. Mountz, ‘Border’, in C. Gallaher, C. T. Dahlman, M. Gilmartin, A. Mountz, and P.
Shirlow (eds.), Key Concepts in Political Geography (London: SAGE 2013) pp. 206–208.
9. Newman (note 7) p. 15.
10. P. Sahlins, ‘State Formation and National Identity in the Catalan Borderlands during the
Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries’, in T. M. Wilson and H. Donnan (eds.), Border Identities: Nation
and State at International Frontiers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998).
11. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 3) p. xiii.
12. K. D. Madsen, ‘Barriers of the US–Mexico Border as Landscapes of Domestic Political
Compromise’, Cultural Geographies 18/4 (2011).
13. Cf. M. d. Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by S. F. Rendall (Berkeley, CA: University
of California Press 1984) p. 96.
14. C. Brambilla, ‘Borders Still Exist! What Are Borders?’, in B. Riccio and C. Brambilla (eds.),
Transnational Migration, Cosmopolitanism and Dis-located Borders (Rimini: Guaraldi 2010) p. 83.
15. N. Iglesias Prieto, ‘Le mur à la frontière entre le Mexique et les États-Unis: Flux, contrôle et
créativité de l’esthétique géopolitique’, Outre-Terre 1/18 (2007) p. 136.
16. A.-L. Amilhat Szary, ‘Walls and Border Art: The Politics of Art Display’, Journal of Borderlands
Studies 27/2 (2012).
17. E. Niemi, ‘Grenseland og periferi: Møtested for stat, nasjon og etnisitet’, in E. Niemi and C.
Smith-Simonsen (eds.), Det hjemlige og det globale: Festskrift til Randi Rønning Balsvik (Oslo: Akademisk
publisering 2009) p. 446.
18. G. Hønneland, ‘Identity Formation in the Barents Euro-Arctic Region’, Cooperation and Conflict
33/3 (1998); O. Tunander, ‘Geopolitics of the North: Geopolitik of the Weak: A Post-Cold War Return to
Rudolf Kjellén’, Cooperation and Conflict 43/2 (2008).
19. S. V. Lavrov and J. G. Støre, AGREEMENT between the Government of the Kingdom of
Norway and the Government of the Russian Federation on Facilitation of Mutual Travel for Border
Residents of the Kingdom of Norway and the Russian Federation (Oslo: Justis- og beredskapsde-
partementet 2010), available at <http://www.regjeringen.no/upload/JD/Vedlegg/Grenseboeravtale_ENG.
pdf>, accessed 22 June 2012; T. Nilsen, ‘First opening in the Schengen-regime with Russia’,
BarentsObserver (Kirkenes: Norwegian Barents Secretariat 2010), available at <http://barentsobserver.
com/en/first-opening-schengen-regime-russia>, accessed 26 July 2012; A. A. Espíritu and A. Viken,
‘Accommodation and Negotiation at the Frontiers of Schengen: The Norwegian and Russian Border
Region’, in M. Lesińska, E. Matejko, and O. Wasilewska (eds.), Migrations from Eastern European
Countries to the European Union in the Context of Visa Policy (Warsaw: Stefan Batory Foundation
2012) p. 137.
20. Espíritu and Viken (note 19) p. 136.
21. A. Viken, B. Granås, and T. Nyseth, ‘Kirkenes: An Industrial Site Reinvented as a Border Town’,
Acta Borealia 25/1 (2008) p. 31; V. V. Tevlina, ‘Migration of Children from Northwest Russia to Northern
Norway in the 1990s and the Beginning of the 2000s’, Polar Record 48/3 (2012) p. 236.
22. M. Aure, ‘Borders of Understanding: Re-making Frontiers in the Russian-Norwegian Contact
Zone’, Ethnopolitics 10/2 (2011).
23. Ibid.
24. The names in Norwegian, Finnish, Russian and Sámi (in that order) indicate something of the
cultural complexity of the borderlands.
25. <pikene.no>; <barentsinstitute.org>.
26. <samovar.no>; <finnlitt.org>; <samiartfestival.org>.
27. J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe, ‘Cultural Production and Negotiation of Borders: Introduction to the
Dossier’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 25/1 (2010).
28. O. Aagedal, ‘Kirkenes: Når lokalt kulturliv blir utanrikspolitikk’, in O. Aagedal, H. Egeland and
M. Villa (eds.), Lokalt kulturliv i endring (Oslo: Fagbokforlaget 2009) p. 52.
29. Tunander (note 18).
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 53

30. Aagedal (note 28) pp. 62–63.

31. A. Phillips, ‘Making It Up: Aesthetic Arrangements in the Barents Region’, in H. Methi and
K. Tårnesvik (eds.), Hotel Polar Capital (Kirkenes: Sámi Art Festival 2008–2011, 2011).
32. K. Karppi, ‘Symbolic and Functional Balance on Europe’s Northern Borders’, in D. H. Kaplan
and J. Häkli (eds.), Boundaries and Place: European Borderlands in Geographical Context (Lanham, MD:
Rowman & Littlefield 2002).
33. Cf. R. Bleiker, ‘The Aesthetic Turn in International Political Theory’, Millennium: Journal of
International Studies 30/3 (2001).
34. Welsch calls the three groups the aisthetic, the callistic-sublime, and the artistic. W. Welsch,
Undoing Aesthetics, trans. by A. Inkpin (London: SAGE 1997) pp. 34–35.
35. S. E. Larsen, ‘Boundaries: Ontology, Methods, Analysis’, in J. Schimanski and S. Wolfe (eds.),
Border Poetics De-limited (Hannover: Wehrhahn 2007).
36. Amilhat Szary (note 16) pp. 219–220.
37. W. Welsch, ‘Aesthetics beyond Aesthetics’, Action, Criticism & Theory for Music Education 2/2
(1997) pp. 8–9.
38. The Borderland Museum (Grenselandsmuseet) is now part of Varanger Museum
(<varangermuseum.no>).
39. U. Wråkberg, ‘The Quest for Authenticity in Narratives of Northern Borderlands’, Nordlit 22
(2007) p. 204; A. Viken, Celebrating the Cold War: Tourism Related to the Norwegian-Russian Boundary
(Helsingborg: Lund University Campus Helsingborg 2007) pp. 10–11.
40. I will here focus on the sublime. For the role of the grotesque in border aesthetics, see J.
Schimanski, ‘Pronouncing it the Porder: Ascribing Aesthetic Values to External and Internal National
Borders in Frank A. Jenssen’s The Salt Bin’, in H. Viljoen (ed.), Crossing Borders, Dissolving Boundaries
(Amsterdam: Rodopi 2013).
41. E. Burke, ‘Of the Sublime’, On the Sublime and the Beautiful (New York: Bartleby.com 2001),
available at <http://www.bartleby.com/24/2/107.html>, accessed 22 July 2012. For a discussion of the
sublime in northern borderlands, see Wråkberg (note 39).
42. Arntzen writes on the installation Norway Memoria by the Berlin-based artists SpringerParker,
shown at the Barents Spektakel festival in 2010, that it is a “videoelectronic” (my translation) version of
Caspar David Friedrich, one of the most iconic nineteenth-century artists of the sublime. K. O. Arntzen,
‘Grenseløse Kirkenes! En kommentar til en tverrkunstnerisk festival i Kirkenes, Barents Spektakel, 3.-7.
februar 2010’, Norsk Shakespeare- og teatertidsskrift 1 (2010) pp. 58–59.
43. Viken (note 39) pp. 13–14.
44. Field observation, 21 June 2013.
45. A. Strüver, Stories of the “Boring Border”: The Dutch-German Borderscape in People’s Minds
(Münster: Lit Verlag 2005) pp. 164–170.
46. Ibid., p. 170.
47. K. Kiiskinen, ‘Border/land Sustainability: Communities at the External Border of the European
Union’, Anthropological Journal of European Cultures 21/1 (2012) p. 33.
48. Pikene på broen, Border-Crossing Exercises III – Pikevannet (Kirkenes: Pikene på broen 2008),
available at <http://pikene.no/projects/border-crossing-exercises/5>, accessed 28 May 2013; Aagedal
(note 28) pp. 33–35.
49. Aagedal (note 28) p. 46.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid., pp. 47–48, 54.
52. E. Røyseland and Ø. Rø (eds.), Northern Experiments: The Barents Urban Survey 2009 (Oslo:
0047 Press 2009); Pikene på broen (ed.), Pan-Barentz: III Barents Art Triennale (Kirkenes: Pikene på
broen 2009). See <pikene.no> for more details.
53. Samovarteatret, ‘Radio Barents 111’, Samovarteatret (Kirkenes: Samovarteatret 2012), available
at <http://samovarteateret.com/projects/radio-barents/>, accessed 28 May 2013.
54. A website (<borderlines.info>) was also part of Traavik’s installation. For more details and
discussion, see J. Schimanski and S. F. Wolfe, ‘The Aesthetics of Borders’, in K. Aukrust (ed.), Assigning
Cultural Values (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang 2013).
55. L. Kuzovnikova, ‘Pan-Barentz: Identity. Energizer. Urbanity’, in Pikene på broen (ed.), Pan-
Barentz: III Barents Art Triennale (Kirkenes: Pikene på broen 2009) p. 8.
56. Viken et al. (note 21) p. 36; cf. Espíritu and Viken (note 19) p. 148.
54 Johan Schimanski

57. M. Bjerkeng, ‘Forord: Grenser’, in Barentsforlag (ed.), Grenser: Fortellinger fra Barentsregionen
(Kirkenes: Barentsforlag 2008) p. 8 (my translation).
58. Phillips (note 31) p. 60.
59. Ibid.
60. Hønneland (note 18) p. 288.
61. <usbarents.org>. Pikene på broen, Pan-Barentz (note 52) pp. 44–47.
62. Pikene på broen, Pan-Barentz (note 52) pp. 124–135.
63. J. Häkli, ‘Re-Bordering Spaces’, in K. R. Cox, M. Low, and J. Robinson (eds.), The SAGE
Handbook of Political Geography (London: SAGE 2008) p. 480.
64. A. E. Espíritu, ‘Re/En/Acting Masculinity’, in E. Røyseland and Ø. Rø (eds.), Northern
Experiments: The Barents Urban Survey 2009 (Oslo: 0047 Press 2009).
65. Viken et al. (note 21) p. 37. For a detailed overview of critical local perspectives on artistic
practices in Kirkenes, see Aagedal (note 28) pp. 75–81.
66. I have not addressed films of the Russian-Norwegian borderscape here for reasons of space.
Cinematic features relating to the border, by both Russian and Norwegian directors, emphasise the
border’s status as a distanced space of the sublime. Cf. T. Kudrjavtseva, ‘Cultural Boundaries and
Intercommunication in Two Films from the North-West of Russia’, Journal of Borderlands Studies 25/1
(2010); H. Pötzsch, ‘Aspects of Liminality in Knut Erik Jensen’s Stella Polaris (1993)’, Folklore 52 (2012).
67. On the debate on Fløgstad’s novel, as well as its reception by literary reviewers and other
public intellectuals, see K. Haugane, ‘De rene og ranke’, Samtiden 3 (2009).
68. T. M. Wilson, The Recurrent Green Universe of John Fowles (Amsterdam: Rodopi
2006) pp. 163–164.
69. F. Stenstad, Fram fra de hundrede mile: Nordnorsk litteratur fra 1945 til 1992: Tendenser,
temaer, portretter, tekster og bibliografi (Oslo: Universitetsforlaget 1992) p. 125.
70. J. I. Sjåvik, ‘Norwegian Literature since 1950’, in H. S. Næss (ed.), A History of Norwegian
Literature (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press in cooperation with the American-Scandinavian
Foundation 1993) p. 330; S. Onega, ‘John Fowles’, in H. Bertens and J. Natoli (eds.), Postmodernism:
The Key Figures (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers 2002).
71. J.-F. Lyotard, ‘Answering the Question: What is Postmodernism?’, in The Postmodern Condition:
A Report on Knowledge, trans. by R. Durand (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1984) pp. 77–81.
72. B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev.
and ext. ed. (London: Verso 1991).
73. H. K. Bhabha, ‘DissemiNation: Time, Narrative and the Margins of the Modern Nation’, The
Location of Culture (London: Routledge 1994).
74. F. Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800-1900 (London: Verso 1998) pp. 33–40.
75. L. Hutcheon, ‘Historiographic Metafiction: Parody and the Intertextuality of History’, in
P. O’Donnell and R. C. Davis (eds.), Intertextuality and Contemporary American Fiction (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press 1989); L. Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism: History, Theory, Fiction
(London: Routledge 1988).
76. Moretti (note 74) pp. 33–47.
77. Ibid., pp. 46–47.
78. Jakobselv means “Jacob’s River”. The name Grense Jakobselv (“Border Jakobselv”) differentiates
it from Vestre Jakobselv (“Western Jakobselv”) outside the town of Vadsø.
79. J. Fowles, The Magus (Boston: Little, Brown 1965) p. 261.
80. Ibid., p. 260.
81. Ibid.
82. K. Fløgstad, Grense Jakobselv: Roman (Oslo: Gyldendal 2009) p. 150 (all translations my own).
83. Ibid., p. 172.
84. Ibid., pp. 183–184.
85. Fowles (note 79) p. 263. North Sámi Sieiddevárri, from siedi, “holy place” (often a stone) +
North Sámi várri, “mountain/hill”. There is a hill called Sieiddevárri on the present Norwegian border to
Finland south of Guovdageaidnu/Kautokeino, far from the Pasvik valley. Seidevarre is based on the farm
Noatun on the Pasvik River; Wilson (note 68) pp. 63–64.
86. Fowles (note 79) p. 273.
87. Fløgstad (note 82) pp. 330–331.
88. Cf. Rajaram and Grundy-Warr (note 3) p. xix.
 Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing 55

89. For the “both/and” logic of postmodernism, see Hutcheon, A Poetics of Postmodernism (note
75) p. 49.
90. F. Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (London: Verso 1991) p. 33.
91. Ibid., p. 48
92. Amilhat Szary (note 16) p. 217.
93. Ibid., p. 215.
94. Iglesias Prieto (note 15) p. 123.
95. Jameson (note 90) pp. 51, 54.
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