As the flight for Kirkenes descends for the landing I wake up marvelling at the fantastic landscape with myriads of small lakes and pathways in-between small rocks, surrounded by the vast unforgiving sea. This is something else, I think to myself.

Cold, yet open, the immediate feeling of being freed somehow lands on me as I take my first steps on the airport. Kirkenes is a place where apparently nothing happens. The host of my hotel whose family seem to run most things in the small town, tells me that they prefer it that way, calm and relaxed. The binge drinking of other northern outposts in Norway does not seem to be as publicly prevalent here, even at midsummer people gather around the bonfire, mostly drinking some soda or other non-alcoholic beverages, there is not anything resembling a party, just an atmosphere of being caught in the frames of some slow motion picture, or rather a dream, as the midnight sun never sets and the deserted small town seems like something that does not exist for real.

I wander the beautiful night and the narrow streets without meeting anyone but shrieking seagulls.

A group of art students and I are huddled together in a maxitaxi driven by Alexander Vasilevič, who will take us over the border. He is the kind of warm and friendly figure you wish was your father, strong and compassionate with stories to tell about his family and motherland. He puts on a DVD with the history of the city of Murmansk which we will pass through, and even though I do not understand a word, the dramatic images are telling, about the immense struggle behind this stronghold of the north, and like all Russian history, it is about war, pain, losses and victories in an immense scale foreign to us Westerners, history in Norway does not hold much weight in comparison.

As we cross the border the landscape soon changes from the more familiar scenes of Norwegian nature to vast and solemn landscapes that seem to last forever under a mighty, almost threatening sky. There is a graveness to the landscape which in a way evokes the cliché or prejudice that you can not ignore your own insignificance here. These huge desolate areas are only dotted by old run down military installations, cold war leftovers, and then suddenly small but densely populated towns, most of them attached to some army base, which seem to be duplicated every 200 kilometers or so.

But I like it, this is a landscape where you can also forget yourself. And perhaps become aware of someone or something more important.

We make a stop in Murmansk, which suddenly appeared like a Fata Morgana on a distance. As it is thoroughly planned like a larger city it appears to be much bigger than it actually is. Here we meet several of the other participants coming from Murmansk and nearby.

Apatity is a city dedicated to the extraction of the natural mineral apatite, which is mainly used to produce phosphate used in the fertilizer industry. But like most heavy industrial cities of yesteryear, this one is also slowly dying as work has become more and more scarce. Snow-clad mountains and hilltops rise on the northeast of the city, lending the cityscape with the industrial fumes hovering something hopeful.

To the people here we are strangers, in the real sense, this is no place for tourists, and as we like well fed scavengers revel in the ruins of abandoned concrete factories, the inhabitants seem to watch us with more resignation than friendliness. It is as if they sense that to the young artists they are nothing but a canvas, or rather a scenic display where they are the extras in a play they never will watch. But the boys of Apatity are alright, vibrant and wild, like boys should be.

As we revel in the remnants of Soviet industrial might and progressive urban planning, we are aware that this is not the reality for the people living here, we just find the angles that interest us and underline them, but to the people here this is nothing special, nothing of particular worth.

This is apparently the periphery of the periphery, being here at a place no one outside would really know about, in the north, one of the most scarcely populated parts of the world, to us it is unknown, to them it is the whole world like any place you call home. But as we observe, most people do the same things these days, and we are not that much different anymore, though whether that really is good, is another question.

Periphery thrives in the absence of capital. There is thankfully not much idle talk about “what do you do”, probably the most boring and predictable mind numbing oral exercise there is. The propagated notion of the huge divide between East and West as a sort of permanent human condition has no resemblance to the reality we share in the here and now, we are offspring of the North.

In the night, back at our lakeside camp, I make a field recording of Elle Kokkonen together with the musician Ivan Afanasyev of Love Cult. W are standing on a pier by the lake out in the wind and rain. She sings a tune she made inspired by the day in Apatity, the concrete, the grey matter, it is like a howl in the wind, strong and vulnerable at the same time. The lyrics are a unique blend of English, Finnish and Lappish. The tiny being that she is, fills the void for a moment while the waves break.

The last day of UnCapitals we leave for Kirovsk, a former Olympic village and winter resort high up in the mountains. The atmosphere is strikingly different, from the suffocated environment of Apatity forgotten by the world at large. The air is refreshingly raw. The concrete buildings have a certain beauty here, as they hold the ground stubbornly underneath the cloudy cold peaks. People here are instantly more cheerful and relaxed, this is still a fairly popular spot for winter sports and seems to somehow have reconciled with the shadows of the old Soviet past and its demise, being more than a relic, but at same time a stylistic admixture of different stages of Soviet urban planning.