This is a play based on an event that took place in a village in the northern border region in September 2006. The event was initiated by the artist Yvette Brackman who lives in Copenhagen, after she had visited the village as part of one of Pikene på Broen’s projects.

Arriving home she contacted a global design company in the South (Camper Shoes). The manuscript is from the workshop where the designer from Camper comes to work with local artisans in the village in the North with a common goal and the good intention to develop a common product. The manuscript gives an insight into the negotiations between a local and global economy, in the challenges and difficulties the local society is facing due to the politics and in the tensions between local people connected to roots and rights.

With this event as a reference, the artist created The Catalyst as a performance and installation that is inspired by the methods Brecht used in his “didactic plays”. The actors each narrate various events in the story. While each actor tells their point of view of the particular event, the other actors perform the events described. Performed three times over the course of the exhibition, the final version is a culmination of performances followed by an audience survey from which comments and suggestions were later incorporated into the play. For the exhibition, documentation of the three versions were shown alongside one another so that the audience could compare the changes.

“I often wonder what it is that has drawn me to the North and to this border region,” says Yvette Brackman.“I am generally not interested in middles. I have always been attracted to edges, where things meet and what happens when things are forced to define themselves because of difference and how people in border areas are somehow always aware that these definitions are exaggerated and unyielding when identity is threatened, yet fluid and multifaceted when one’s guard is down.

I am so ambivalent about how I speak about this interest in identity because I don’t want to reify these experiences. My parents came from Russia to America in the early 1960s. In Russia they were not recognised as Russian but as Jews, even though their families had lived there for many generations. I think this is the kernel of my interest in borders and indigenous minority cultures. This is a jump, I know, but the link is a relationship between the dominant national identity and the minority identity and how that is negotiated, legislated and performed. I see the Barents region as a kind of container and possible key to learning how to develop an ethical approach to culture and development.”