The festival is home to the world’s largest open air sauna.
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At SALT the rich culture of Norway and the stunning natural surroundings of an Arctic beach invite you in for a few days of unparalleled experience. SALT is a nomadic initiative celebrating the environment, art and culture of the Arctic region. The festival was first constructed as an art and cultural project at Langsanden in the municipality of Gildeskål in 2014. The idea for it arose after the initiators Erlend Mogård Larsen and Helga-Marie Nordby used functional fish racks in an art project in Lofoten in 2010.
The concept was to create unique encounters between the landscape, art and the public. SALT also serves to explore Norway’s cultural inheritance and Arctic reality, highlighting a story that has received far too little public attention, namely, coastal- and nomadic culture.
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Now, on the remote island of Sandhornøya, in northern Norway, the organizers have incorporated the traditional fish racks, a symbol of Norway’s world class fisheries industry, to create stunning architecture. The temporary constructs are built in a way so as to not leave any footprint of the nomadic festival of art, music and food. The year long program will include performances by Norwegian musicians, as well as a movie shot on location using local actors, by filmographer Yang Fudong.
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The festival comprises three pyramid shaped buildings which contain a music hall, a 100 metre long exhibition space and a sauna for up to 120 people, all a product of the architectural genius of the firm Rintala Eggertsson from Oslo. There are also temporary cottages and shacks being constructed for attendees as accommodation is scarce.
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SALT will, among other things, be filled with children’s art and be the venue for Querini, an opera that is performed annually on the island of Røst in Lofoten. It is a dramatic story about shipwrecked Venetian sailors who washed ashore at Røst in 1432, and about dried fish, the difficult life at sea, solidarity, and love. The sea captain Pietro Querini’s report of his odyssey, which is archived in the Vatican Library in Rome, offers unique insight into daily life in a fishing village in northern Norway in the 1400s.