The NATUR project was instigated as part of the European Union’s Year of Cultural Heritage in 2018 and build on the partner’s work connecting Nordic Artists with one another and the UK to creatively explore shared stories, culture and heritage. It delivered a series of new artworks, across music, visual and performing arts to activate archives and promote our shared culture through major festival presentations.
The first NATUR project broadly interrogated 7 themes through the archives of each country that shaped and continued to forge a shared Northern identity - folklore and language, merchants, fisheries, industrialisation, conflict, oil, and women's history. Establishing the NATUR network through both narrative and working partnerships enabled the archives to more efficiently work with creative industries and support communities in accessing and creating international identities from the shared heritage of five deeply connected countries. By enabling the artists from each country to undertake residencies with overseas partners it traced the stories that fall between the gaps where one set of archives, memories and tales ends and another, over the water, begins.
