‘Y ou make more noise when you buy curtains!” California blues singer England Brooks, a Bodø resident for 20 years, gently berates her audience for their typically Norwegian diffidence when asked to join in on a song. They laugh, and at the next attempt sing a tiny louder. This is the latest in a series of “Live Fridays” held at the PåPir library bar in this small coastal town.
One of three capitals of culture this year (the other two are Bad Ischl in Austria and Tartu in Estonia), Bodø (pronounced BOO-duh ) is also the first ever inside the Arctic Circle. If your first reaction to that is brrrrrrr , I’ve good news – my four late-April days of culture vulturing took place under sunny skies. From June to mid-July, the sun never sets and summer temperatures are usually in the high teens.
Between September and April there’s the added bonus of the northern lights. View image in fullscreen Reindeer herder Anne Margareta: ‘Sitting with them is my favourite therapy.’ Photograph: Dixe Wills Brooks’s gig is one of 1,000 or so capital of culture events planned this year for Bodø and Nordland, a county that covers nearly 15,000 square miles of Norway’s coastal north-west.
I focus on events in the town, heading first to Nōua , a relatively small gallery that co-founder Marianne Bjørnmyr says “attracts big names like Tate Modern assistant curator Michael Raymond”. He’s putting together the main summer exhibition, of works by German artist Steffi Klenz (.
