Border Aesthetics and Cultural Distancing in the Norwegian-Russian Borderscape

The borderscape is a flexible entity that goes beyond the space of the border and the borderland. This article argues that art and literature can be constitutive elements in the borderscape, along with other kinds of bordering and demarcation. Art and literature can help create resistance through performative acts of “borderscaping”, taking place in different locations and involving different perspectives. The article uses definitions of the aesthetic to trace forms of “distance” or “distancing” as they appear in conceptualizations of the borderscape, through the aesthetic categories of the sublime, the postmodern and the defamiliarized. Artistic practices in the Norwegian-Russian borderscape are examined in an evaluation of their geopolitical significance, with particular attention given to descriptions of the Norwegian-Russian border in novels by John Fowles and Kjartan Fløgstad.