How a sleepy Norwegian port city became the European Capital of Culture. And what's to discover there

Do you know Bodø? Half a year ago I would have shaken my head in confusion. Where is that? The small Norwegian town of Bodø (pronounced like Buude) is located 80 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle in an icy fjord landscape, has around 54,000 inhabitants - and is the European Capital of Culture 2024! I have just returned from there after a week of surprising exhibitions and performances, insights into private collections and underground museums, excursions in breathtaking landscapes, swimming in the ice-cold salt fjord, cocktails under the glowing midnight sun... In short: I am madly in love with Bodø! Not only because of the exciting cultural program, but also because of many unexpected things. For example, that you can walk from the airport to the hotel by the harbor in just ten minutes - with a rolling suitcase and a sea view. That everyone, whether bus drivers, waiters or lifeguards, are incredibly friendly (something you're not used to in Berlin). Or that in the Nordic province there is something like Craig Alibone's Pâtisserie & Champagneria, a cool café with homemade macarons and champagne that you couldn't find better in Paris.

In fact, I came to the far north because of the art. Bodø is the first city beyond the Arctic Circle to be named European Capital of Culture (it shares the title with Bad Ischl in Austria and Tartu in Estonia) and the EU festival is costing 310 million NOK, the equivalent of around 26 million euros. Over 1,000 events, concerts and film programs, land art projects, art exhibitions and the colorful Midsummer Mystery spectacle with trolls, elves and fireworks by the British performance troupe Walk the Plank on Breyvika Beach are planned. One focus is on the culture of the Sámi, the Scandinavian indigenous people. In addition to exhibitions by contemporary Sámi artists, the focus is also on Norway's inglorious colonial history. The indigenous peoples, who have lived in the Bodø area for thousands of years, were discriminated against, displaced and forcibly assimilated. Protests have been brewing since the 1970s, and today Sámi rights and confronting past injustices are a national issue.

There are currently two exhibitions on the subject at Bodø Museum. On the upper floor, the exhibition Creating the Right Space gives an overview of traditional Sámi handicrafts - fur hats, traditional costumes, carved drinking vessels, jewelry boxes made of reindeer bones. Downstairs, Joar Nango has set up shop with his nomadic Sámi library Girjegumpi. The Norwegian multi-media artist and documenta 13 participant researches indigenous architecture and invites post-colonial dialogue in his meandering environments. I experience how stimulating this can be at a sound performance in the evening. Nango has invited musician friends. First, Jason Singh is behind the mixing desk, a beatboxer and fantastic sound tinkerer from London. He made field recordings in Bodø, the sound of the sea, wind, birdsong, and mixes them with his vocal capriols. In between, he mixes excerpts from speeches by Global South activists. The second act features two Sámi women with black lipstick and an aloof attitude. Charlotte Bendiks, who usually dejays at Berghain club in Berlin, mixes hard beats and trance rhythms on the DJ controls, Marita Isobel Solberg grumbles and screams like a witch Diamada Galás style, but can also make her soprano sound like a goosebump-inducing vibrato.

A visit to the Bodøgaard Gallery, a wildly romantic private museum on the outskirts of Bodø, gave me a completely different kind of goosebump moment. The Bodøgaards are a local family of artists, Harald, who shows me around the exhibition with his daughter Selma, is a sculptor. His abstract stone sculptures are not only located between fragrant wild roses in the garden, but also in front of the new city library at the harbor. His father Oscar Bodøgaard was also a well-known Norwegian artist, and was called the "painter of light" because of his luminous, semi-abstract landscapes. In the spacious former studio there a currently paintings by Peder Balke on display, a long-unrecognized pioneer of modernism and contemporary of Casper David Friedrich, who traveled to the North Cape in 1832 to study the landscape for his art. His small-format, luminous foggy paintings bring to mind Gerhard Richter's blurry canvases. The Bodøgaard complex also includes a print workshop, where Queen Sonia sometimes prints her large-format woodcuts. But the underground museum is almost even more interesting: in the basement there is a wild collection of everyday objects from the area, money boxes, tools, sledges, knitted gloves, wooden spoons, pots, uniforms. The grandfather started this, apparently also to overcome his war trauma. The family was driven out of their farm by German occupiers in 1940, and the Nazis set up a camp for Russian prisoners of war there. When they withdrew in 1944, they left behind scorched earth. At the very back of the basement hang evidence of Nazi atrocities that Oscar Bodøgaard has collected: photos of bombed-out houses, of dead people, the prisoners' dishes, destruction orders, mine plans... Somehow Germany's dark history is never far away.

The Adelsteen Normann Collection also offers some surprises. The museum in a bourgeois villa is dedicated to an almost forgotten painter from Bodø: Adelsteen Normann (1848-1918) loved fjords, mountains, and glowing midnight suns. The Norwegian painter, who studied at the Düsseldorf Academy and later lived in Berlin, was extremely successful with these motifs. He exhibited at the Paris salons, attended all world exhibitions, and was a co-founder of the Berlin Secession. However, he went down in history as the protégé of another world-famous Norwegian. In 1892 he invited Edvard Munch to his first exhibition in Berlin. It was the talk of the town and kickstarted Munch's career. Normann himself remained committed to romantic realism, even though he admired the young avant-garde and the Impressionists in Paris. Kaiser Wilhelm II was a big fan, visited him in Norway on his Hohenzollern yacht and bought his paintings. Normann's works can still be found in museums around the world, but most of them are stored in storage. The artist, who died of the Spanish flu in 1918, posthumously became Adolf Hitler's favorite painter, who collected his fjord landscapes for the Führer Museum in Linz. Kjell Jenssen, a lovely gentleman who looks after the museum on a voluntary basis, tells me all this. As a fun fact, he also mentions that Michael Jackson's estate also included a Normann painting that was auctioned in LA for 276,000 NOK.

Finally, a hot tip for contemporary art: Atelier NŌUA, an ambitious gallery for contemporary photography founded by Marianne Bjørnmyr and Dan Mariner, a British-Norwegian artist couple, has set up shop in the high, bright rooms of a former community center. A great show by London-based photo artist Steffi Klenz is currently running there. Her abstract photo collages, which are inspired by Bruno Taut's architecture and are reminiscent of fine lacquer work, hang on semi-transparent paper walls. Klenz photographed one of the German architect's few surviving houses in Japan and researched the influence of local aesthetics on his architecture. An enthusiastic octopus and marbled Japanese paper also play a role in the image creation. Everything is so theoretically supported and precisely staged that it would easily fit into a gallery in London or Berlin. In fact, the exhibition was curated by Michael Raymond, an "Assistant Curator International Art" at the Tate Modern.