RV.555 Sotrsambandet- Fra drøm til grus
Nonneseter Kapell, Bergen
Opening: 12.12.2025 18:00-20:00
Open 12.12.-21.12.2025 Wedensday-Sunday 12:00-16:00
In the exhibition at Nonneseter Kapell, I present four large-scale photographs and a publication from my work on the new Rv. 555.
The project documents how the construction of the new Sotra Connection Rv.555 is transforming the landscape of Western Norway, and how the workers shape and encounter this environment through their daily labor. The road is one of Western Norway’s largest infrastructure projects, aimed at strengthening petroleum logistics by connecting bases, suppliers, industry and enabling a new container port at Ågotnes, and integrating local infrastructure into global circuits of capital and energy. With a contract value of 23.1 billion NOK, the Norwegian Public Roads Administration’s largest single contract ever, the project becomes a physical expression of the industry’s priorities and society’s need for growth, but also for the destruction of nauture and cultural landscape.
This works is part of an ongoing collaborative project with Gitte Sætre documenting the Sotrasambandet.
The exhibition is supported by Bergen Kommune. Nonneseter Kapell is owened and run by Fortidsminneforeningen.
Beneath all reason, definitions, and territorial boundaries lies chaos. A delirious, confusing, and incomprehensible foundation from which any form of order emerges. Chaos represents not merely the absence of structure, but potentials, forces, and relationships that exceed human control and understanding. From chaos, systems arise that establish patterns in what would otherwise appear as infinite flux. Order is not a natural state, but the result of continuous work, regulation, and maintenance.
The drive for order takes tangible form in infrastructure, as seen in Sotrasambandet. Through its physical and technological presence, the project reshapes the landscape and weaves itself into daily life—commuting, commerce, and leisure. It materializes the processes that organize society: logistics, energy, mobility, economy, and communication. Sotrasambandet is both technological and symbolic, a physical structure and a cultural narrative of progress and stability.
The decision to build a new Sotrasamband, with a budget of 23.1 billion NOK, was made to strengthen connections between the oil industry on Sotra and the rest of Western Norway’s oil sector, as well as to enable a new container port. Of this, 19.8 billion NOK constitutes a public-private partnership (PPP) contract with the Sotra Link consortium, consisting of Webuild S.p.A. (Italy), SK Engineering Co. Ltd. (South Korea), and the Australian banking group Macquarie. This marks the largest single contract in the history of the Norwegian Public Roads Administration, reflecting how public and private capital merge in the realization of infrastructural megastructures.
Construction, which began in March 2023 after extensive geological surveys, represents a systematic reshaping of nature. Vegetation is cleared, wetlands drained, and a humus layer built up over thousands of years is removed. This is followed by blasting, stabilization, and the application of fill, steel, concrete, and asphalt. Through this process, a living ecosystem is transformed into a logistical surface optimized for frictionless flows of capital.
Yet every imposition of order carries a form of violence. Impacts on local ecosystems occur on multiple levels: some habitats disappear entirely, migration routes for deer, amphibians, and small mammals are broken, and water patterns change, creating new species compositions. Nitrogen emissions from increased traffic affect flora, while light pollution and collisions continuously reduce insect populations. Roadside vegetation acts as a corridor for invasive species, which displace local ecosystems. Sotrasambandet must therefore be understood not merely as an infrastructure project, but as an ecological event and an intervention that reorganizes biological relations.
The changes occurring through Sotrasambandet also reflect broader global patterns. The Norwegian transformation of natural and cultural landscapes is not an anomaly, but a manifestation of a wider logic linking economic growth, technological development, and resource consumption. Every car, emission, and logistics flow is part of a larger circuit, from local ecosystems to the global climate system, from individual actions to political and economic structures.
The scale of ongoing ecological collapse is difficult to fully grasp. In parts of Germany, insect biomass has declined by over 70 percent since the early 1970s; globally, it decreases by approximately 2.5 percent annually. About one million species face extinction, and more than half of the world’s agricultural land is moderately or severely degraded, directly affecting the livelihoods of roughly 1.5 billion people. Meanwhile, desertification spreads, extreme weather events grow in frequency and intensity, and ecosystems collapse at an unprecedented pace.
Yet these remain largely abstract. Catastrophe often seems impossible until it occurs. A pandemic, a war in Europe, a sudden collapse in biodiversity or food supply—such events break through abstraction and make the unimaginable tangible and immediate. Only then does the vulnerability of global systems become clear.
This is not about individual actions, but the systemic effects of human activity on the world. Human presence and production continuously displace other life forms. Agriculture, fishing, and industry are different expressions of the same underlying logic: transforming the environment for survival, security, and growth, making impact on the world an inherent part of human activity.
Norwegian prosperity rests on this logic. Oil and shipping form the backbone of the national economy, and even what we experience as individual—work, consumption, health, and leisure—is inseparably tied to petroleum-based infrastructure. Plastics, energy, transport, medical equipment—all trace back to the same material base. Our lives are thus woven into the systems we critique.
The geopolitical dimension further complicates this picture. North Sea oil production is part of a global energy regime in which economic, strategic, and moral considerations are inseparably linked. No one exists outside this system; all actions take place within a network of nature, technology, and economy. Human activity is therefore always part of the cycles shaping the planet.
Agency must be understood as situated within systems that both enable and constrain action. As liberal subjects, we participate through voting, consumption, and expression, but our capacity to act is inscribed within economic and infrastructural structures that maintain the status quo. Politicians are bound by re-election, party loyalty, and budget realities; investors follow the logic of capital; and workers remain dependent on jobs created by the very industries they theoretically aim to transcend. The result is a circular reproduction of dependency, where the desire for transformation is balanced against the need for stability.
Climate denial and political inertia are thus symptoms of a structural lock-in within a system that self-reproduces through economic,
political, and cultural mechanisms.
