Do you live in Lofoten? Are you visiting, for a holiday or work? We’d like to hear your thoughts about the area and tourism’s impacts on it. How does it affect this place, its communities and its environment? In your view, what needs to happen next?

Located in the gallery of North Norwegian Art Centre, this pop-up research station and exhibition is run by Arrival Studies, a recently-formed, internationally-based collective of artists and researchers who investigate the impacts, opportunities and questions tourism generates in and for its host locations. This September, alongside travelling across Lofoten to talk with people directly, the team is running it as a follow-up to a year of earlier online meetings with Lofoten stakeholders — inviting people to drop in and share their views and experiences of Lofoten tourism.

The Arrival Studies team will feed what they learn into a dynamic, freely accessible public resource: a living, changing atlas of people’s views of Lofoten tourism. What strengths and opportunities does the area’s tourism offer? What are its weaknesses? What threats does it pose? What do the archipelago’s residents and visitors most care about, and how would they like the area to develop?

The research process hopes to cover everything: planning processes and regulations, visitor policies, housing and infrastructure issues, seasonal work, landscape, ecology, culture and heritage. It will ask who benefits from the region’s tourism, who carries the cost, and what alternative models of tourism might be possible or desirable.

The idea is simple: the more people who share their views, the more fully representative and useful the resource becomes. Whatever your age, job or interests, and whether your Lofoten roots run deep or you are just passing through, your perspective represents valuable data. Please come and share it: for example by stopping for a coffee and chat with the friendly people of Arrival Studies, or using materials provided in the gallery to write, draw or upload information, opinions and ideas. Information about the programme will be released.

Beyond the gallery
If you have something to show the team or a perspective to share, wherever in Lofoten you are, please get in touch. hello@arrivalstudies.org / Message us on Instagram @arrivalstudies.

About Arrival Studies
Featuring multi-disciplinary expertise in community theory and practice, art, design, research and education, the Arrival Studies team is able to apply diverse research methods to its enquiries into tourism’s realities, potentials and problems. Listening first is key: it aims to pass the mike to as many different people as possible, from young people and seasonal workers to planners and policymakers, and ensure that the views of those most affected by decision-making processes are heard and acted on. Its flexible approaches, and its position outside existing local networks of business and politics, enable it to ask open questions without the constraints, or expectations, that come with a stake in the outcome.

Members include: Charlotte Teyler (Norway), Cynthia Burgos López (Puerto Rico), Don Lawrence (Norway), Elise Hoebeke (Belgium), Gabriella Manurung (Indonesia), Gatari Surya Kusuma (Indonesia), Hyungyu Park (South Korea/UK), Ketut Karya (Indonesia), Nicholas J. Jones (UK/Norway), Stephanie Florence (Canada), Truls Ramberg (Norway) and Victor Mutelekesha (Zambia).