Arna

Lying northeast of Bergen, Arna comprises some of the most rural parts of the municipality. Separated from the city by the Ulriken and Rundemanen mountains and flanked by the Sorfjorden, it is a place of places, comprising smaller village areas that total around 13,000 people. There are families that have lived and worked there for generations. In recent decades, the low cost housing has also attracted economic migrants and young families. All are close to magnificent landscapes – hills, mountains, fjord and river.

Our overarching goal with Arna, as with all our work, is to experiment with how culture and creativity could support community flourishing through creative engagement. Our specific intention in Arna, informed by the Bergen Salons, was to explore how we might:

  • embed artists in service to the community,
  • to support community-generated and community-driven initiatives,
  • and place power more firmly in the hands of the community through participatory budgeting.

Our process began where it always must, with developing a deeper, more human understanding of the dynamics of the place. How vibrant are the human ecosystems that operate there? Where are the desire lines and fault lines? Careful not to pre-empt the work of the embedded artist/s, we decided to embark on a light touch listening exercise called ‘Taking the Pulse’. This would help us set the broad trajectory of our work based on first-hand lived experiences of Arna.

Taking the Pulse

In the Autumn of 2021, Lisa Baxter facilitated three listening exercises with residents of three different population centres – Indre Arna, Trengereid and Espeland – carefully designed to explore people’s lived experience through the lens of social capital with the following line of enquiry:

  • What do they love and appreciate about where they live?
  • What do they notice about life there, good and bad?
  • How would they describe local community life?
  • What experience do they have of community care, kindness and altruism?
  • What social/community problems would they want to solve?
  • What are their wishes for the local community?

    • Each event was well attended although, once more, the group was not as diverse as we would have liked. Given that the call-out was from the City of Bergen cultural department, it’s not surprising that there was representation from those interested in developing the local arts and cultural scene. However, since none of the questions we asked were about that, the potential for airing cultural agendas was reduced, though not eliminated. The learnings from the event exceeded our expectations.

    We were able to identify commonalities and differences across the three localities that provided us with a much richer understanding of the degree of social interconnection. We identified the gaps, the cracks where ‘the light shone through’. We were able to perceive each locality as a field of opportunity, each with its own specific ‘flavour’ dependent on the intricate interweaving of social, environmental, infrastructural and generational factors. And we developed a more optimistic, nascent community of interest which we hope will play a part in whatever follows.

    “There is a crack, a crack in everything. 

    That’s how the light gets in.”

    Leonard Cohen

    Key Learnings

    A key learning outcome for us was that we need to be clear what we mean by ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’ within the context of Taking The Initiative.

     

    We realised how easy it would be for people to presume we were intent on supporting participatory and creative engagement for its own sake, thus enhancing the cultural capital of a locality. However, our experiment is more an exploration of how creative engagement can bridge communities and enrich the bonds that hold them together, for the greater good, as determined by the community. In this way, our approach is ‘relational’, dealing with the intangibles of community life as well as the tangibles.

     

    Taking the Pulse has given us our starting point, our intention. Next, we need to craft a framework that affords the fullest freedoms and creative latitude possible to the artists and the communities they work with, whilst operating as flexibly as possibly within the protocols and bureaucracy of the city authority.

    Dream trees in Arna / Drømmetrær i Arna

    Background
    It started with a dream. From the workshop in Ådnallen in Arna (27th of October 2021), Lisa Baxter asked the attendees: “What are your dreams for Arna?” One of the groups drew a Christmas tree on the working sheet with the text: “We are dreaming of a new tradition: a Christmas gathering for people living in Arna”.

     

    We wanted to respond immediately on the engagement from the attendees after the 3 workshops and decided to start out with the Christmas Gathering dream. But, it was already the end of October, and time was very short to find a Christmas tree, do some social bridging and make a social event around it. One of the attendees at the workshop is artist and composer Alwynne Pritchard. She lives in Arna and knowing the area from the inside, she has also done some art projects which involved the locals in Arna. On a very short time frame and with a huge willingness to take the risk, Alwynne decided to commit as a creative facilitator. She had 3 weeks to do a Christmas project that would connect and bring people together in a social creative event in Arna.

    The idea
    Instead of transporting a tree from the outside, Alwynne asked the question: “There are already so many wonderful trees in Arna, why not celebrate them and decorate the trees with dreams from the locals?” And the story of “Dream trees in Arna” began by asking people to nominate trees they loved in Arna.

     

    The process
    Alwynne started to set up a Facebook-page: “Trær vi elsker i Arna” (Trees that we love in Arna) – a place where people could nominate and share stories about trees they love and share their dreams for the future. In just a few weeks the FB-group had grown to over 100 members.

    She then contacted people living in the area, including the people behind the FB-page “Vi i Arna”, people who attended the workshops, local businesses, schools etc.
    Alwynne started then to collect people’s dreams for the future and cut them into brightly coloured wooden, leaf-shaped decorations in Arna Makerspace. People were invited to a celebration of nominated trees in different local surroundings and decorate them with dreams.
    • Lone School: Students, teachers, assistants and locals were involved in collating dreams for the future, singing songs and decorating their nominated tree out the school area.
    • Lindisens Venner (Facebook-group): The event brought people together to celebrate their nominated tree with music, speeches and refreshments and to decorate the old tree with dreams.
    • A final event brought people together in a restaurant at Øyrane Torg (the main shopping mall in Arna). All the dreams that had been collected were read aloud as an indoor tree was decorated by the guests and poems about trees were read. Music and refreshments were provided free of charge.
    • Indoor tree decoration at Oleana factory – a huge tree in the local historical fabric was decorated.
    •  Two events in private gardens were cancelled due to the covid situation.
    • Others: Ådnamarka school: an additional 35 children also provided their dreams for the future for laser cutting into the wooden decorations.

    Intention
    The intention was to make a creative social happening and bring people in the area together through a love of trees and a desire to express their hopes and dreams for the future for their own lives, of Arna, Bergen and the world. The projects wanted to help to raise awareness in the residents of the importance of environmentally sustainable and socially beneficial strategies to local urban development. The people taking part had an opportunity either to consider trees that might be important to them for the first time, or to share a tree they already value with other people. Those who organised events had a chance to bring people together to celebrate something they love, which was important for them. For the children to share their dreams for the future was a valuable experience – especially as they had the pleasure of seeing those dreams cut into the decorations and hung from trees.