Can music exist between worlds? Between Sami and Norwegian, between tradition and modernity, between heaven and hell? This new listening work for Jiennagoahti by Norwegian/Sami composer, musician and joiker Sondre Närva Pettersen recorded through a special collaboration with Bergen Cathedral, brings together ancient joik, Sámi hymn traditions, and modular synths, inviting us into a borderland where sound seeks to explode established categories and explore new connections.

We live in an increasingly polarised world, with two camps set irreconcilably against each with no room for an in-between. In conversations about colonisation, Norwegians as colonists and the Sámi as indigenous people are often juxtaposed as completely separate groups and categories. But Närva, who comes from a Sea Sami and Kven family subjected to harsh Norwegianisation policies, finds himself between Sami, Norwegian and Kven identities. In the same way, whilst the Sámi joik has been demonised by the church for centuries, we also hear the sound and ornamentation of the joik existing in the Laestedian hymn tradition. Närva asks what kind of music can arise in this in-between space between the hymn and the joik? And if joik and the church organ really are two opposites, who represents heaven and who represents hell?

Vi som er máilmmiid gaskkas // Mii geat orrut mellom verdener was commissioned and recorded especially to be played in this unique listening room on Fløyen. With the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s report from 2023 as its background, the work examines, among other things, the role of music and art in reconciliation efforts and is part of Borealis’ ongoing commitment to exploring Sámi sonic experimentalism today, and how new forms of sound and music can explore the resurgence of culture and language in the aftermath of colonial policies of erasure.