eivind_280This is another Norway. Not the traditional beauty of fjords and spring-images of blonde girls. Clichés. This is the beauty of everyday life and dull realities. Something hard to define, it’s an outsider’s view, like window shopping. Frames stolen from a movie about Norway that’s never been made. If you take a look and freeze it, there is a lot of beauty there. It’s full of things so normal that they’ve become invisible to us – as individuals. As a culture. It is about the little things. To stop, look and engange your surroundings. Absorb what you see, the place you are. You Are Here. Present.

What I show is my Norway. I hope that we can learn to see, see the obvious, details, excerpts. Not just the bold letters at the newsstand. But our own time’s complex simplicity. Old nostalgic black and white images from our own time, in colors and emotions.

This is a dive into the exotic world of the everyday. These are the views of an insider, an introvert view of the known, but a foreigner’s account of his homeland after years of traveling in other continents and cultures. It is about a wonderful exotic and strange society, even for a Norwegian.

Eivind H. Natvig

www.youarehere.no

I’m nowhere else
than here
where the grass pulls away
making way for my feet
in between the trees
through the woods,
this narrow path,
hardly more than animal tracks,
hardly more than a slight change of colour,
a lighter shade of pale.

The orange pine needles, the yellow straws of grass,
the dark green moss
which gives this day
a meaning.
This wind, this murmur of air,
which lifts the day an inch or two.
And the trunks of the trees
move in relation to each other,
the branches creaking,
the leaves whispering,
telling each other
what it is like being here
just here, just now
at this moment of time,
following the thin line
of a path
through the dark forest.

-Poem by Gro Dahle