in collaboration with Jaakob Solla

Naust group show was part of Bergen's Cultural Capital of Europe 2000 event. Naust is a Norwegian word for a traditional local boat house. Besides being storage and work spaces these boat houses were also important social meeting points since boats were earlier practically the only form of transportation in the Norwegian coastal area.

The organizers invited artists from different fields, architects, conceptual artists, landscape artists, musicians and video artists, to do a project in one of these boat houses or its surroundings. Each artist was given a chance to choose a site fitting his or her project from island called Oygarden near Bergen.

The building itself and its surroundings were the starting points for our project. The building groups and their relation to their surroundings interested us more than the building type as such. We were also especially interested in the strong tide typical for this area.

We chose a bay surrounded by boat houses as the site of our project. We cleaned the dirty bottom of the sea during low tide and covered it with shell sand which is produced in the island. The shiny white sand made the bay stand out from its surroundings. We stretched a wire from bottom of the sea outside of the bay to the front of one of the boat houses. A shiny
stainless steel ball floating in the sea was moving along this wire from one end of the bay to the other with tide twice a day. The surrounding boat houses reflected from its shiny surface. The tide slowly moved the sand further and further out of the bay giving another, slower temporal element for the art work.