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Text and photo by Geir Egil Bergjord




The Sauda Experience
Click on the the pics for enlargment

Working for the Norwegian National Touring Exhibitions I arrived Sauda late one Sunday night in March 2001. At Klöver Hotel where I had booked a room I met a broken lift, no light bulb in the ceiling of my room, a strange sweet smell caused by a big pink bubblegum stuck in my sofa, some unidentified white spots on the toilet seat and a breakfast table so messy that it almost made me throw up the next morning. From the window of my room I had a perfect view of the pipes (chimneys?) and torches of Sauda Smelteverk; The big factory situated right across the river and the reason people live in this smalltown at the head of a fjord.

Inspired by the theme (staged photography) of «See You : See Me», the exhibition I was touring, and fuelled by the substandards at the hotel, the uncensored porn on the TV, the fact that I had to stay there a week and the ghosts of a thousand dead union workers, I went to buy one of the local brewery’s (Tou) recently launched 1,25 l plastic bottles of beer and put my cam on the tripod…