THRESHOLD

Threshold is a Nordrom Kunst section dedicated to territories under transformation.

Through short critical essays, field notes and visual reflections, it observes how tourism, housing pressure, ecology, memory, local communities and contemporary art intersect. Starting from Northern Norway, Threshold looks at places not as images to be consumed, but as living environments shaped by desire, economy, movement, vulnerability and resistance.

This section does not aim to accuse, simplify or speak on behalf of local communities. It is a space of attention: a way to ask how landscapes are represented, how territories are transformed, and how contemporary art can help us see what remains outside the postcard.

Winter tourism, housing pressure and contemporary art in a city transformed by the desire for the Arctic.

Tromsø is not a postcard.

It is not only a winter image of snow, aurora borealis, huskies, reindeer, glass windows, warm lights and Arctic silence. It is a city where people live, work, study, pay rent, search for housing, wait for buses, move through darkness, raise families, and negotiate every day the distance between local life and global desire.

In recent years, Tromsø has become one of the most visible winter destinations in Northern Europe. The city is officially promoted through Northern Lights tours, dog sledding, Sámi experiences, whale watching, snowmobiling, fjord tours and other seasonal activities. The aurora season, presented by Visit Tromsø as running from September to early April, has become one of the strongest images through which the city is imagined internationally.

But when a place becomes desirable at this scale, desire itself becomes a form of pressure.

Pressure is not always violent. Sometimes it arrives softly: through bookings, photographs, short-term rentals, seasonal flights, hotel prices, tour buses, online reviews and the language of experience. It does not necessarily destroy a place immediately. It transforms it.

Recent reporting has described the growth of Tromsø’s winter tourism in concrete terms. The Barents Observer reported that winter hotel overnight stays in Tromsø increased from 188,464 in 2017 to 332,507 in the 2023–2024 winter season, while also noting local concerns around long-term rental availability and the increasing attractiveness of Airbnb-style rentals. High North News reported that Airbnb turnover in Tromsø reached NOK 665 million in 2024.

The question is not whether tourism should exist. Tourism brings work, movement, visibility and economic possibilities. The question is what happens when tourism becomes one of the main forces shaping the city. What happens when homes become temporary accommodation, when neighbourhoods become scenery, when local life becomes background, and when the Arctic becomes something to be consumed before returning elsewhere?

This is where the postcard begins to fail.

A postcard selects. It frames. It removes noise, difficulty, contradiction and daily life. It shows the mountain, not the rent. The aurora, not the worker. The reindeer, not the politics of land. The snow, not the housing pressure. The city lights, not the displacement that can occur when a place becomes too profitable to remain ordinary.

Living in Tromsø, even briefly, means understanding that the North is not empty. It is not a clean surface on which visitors can project escape, purity or beauty. It is inhabited by histories, economies, languages, weather, labour, memory and inequality. Its landscape is powerful, but it is not neutral.

This is also an artistic question.

Contemporary art can work against the speed of consumption. It can slow down the image. It can interrupt the postcard. It can return complexity to places that tourism often simplifies. Where the tourist image says “beautiful”, art can ask: beautiful for whom? At what cost? Who lives here? Who leaves? Who profits? Who is made invisible?

For Nordrom Kunst, Tromsø is not important because it represents a romantic idea of the Arctic. It is important because it reveals a contemporary condition that belongs to many places in the world. A small city becomes globally visible. A landscape becomes desirable. Housing becomes investment. Local life becomes increasingly exposed to external demand. Beauty becomes economy.

To look at Tromsø responsibly means looking beyond the aurora.

It means asking what kind of city remains when the season ends. It means asking whether a place can welcome visitors without losing its own everyday life. It means asking how houses, streets, landscapes and cultural symbols are transformed when they enter the market of desire.

Threshold begins from this question.

Not as an accusation, but as a form of attention.

Nordrom Kunst does not reject travel, beauty or encounter. On the contrary, it was born from the experience of being deeply moved by Northern Norway: by its light, its harshness, its sea, its distances, its atmosphere, its emotional force. But admiration is not enough.

To admire a place seriously means also to ask what pressures act upon it.

Tromsø is not a postcard. It is a living city, a fragile Arctic threshold, a place where beauty and pressure coexist. Contemporary art can help us remain with that contradiction, instead of removing it. It can help us see the North not only as an image, but as a field of relations: between land and economy, residents and visitors, memory and consumption, vulnerability and power.

The postcard shows us what we came to see.

Art can show us what we failed to notice.