Sotrasambandet

Rv. 555 Sotrasambandet. 2025-
Acrylic on transparent, mostly recycled panels

Gitte Sætre, 2025

118 x 74 cm

Beneath the surface of progress lies a tension between order and chaos, between human ambition and the living systems it reshapes.
The series invites reflection on how infrastructure, economy, and ecology are woven together — revealing both the power and the fragility of the world we build.

Gitte Sætre

2 x 74 cm x 100 cm

Gitte Sætre, 2025

120 cm x 80 cm

70 x 50 cm

Gitte Sætre, 2025

2 x 74 x 118 cm cm

Gitte Sætre, 2025

2 x 74 x 118 cm

5 x 30 cm x 42 cm 33cc cm x 42

2 x 30 cm x 40 cm

Rv. 555 Sotrasambandet

An artistic investigation into the massive infrastructure project that will connect Bergen to Sotra with one of Norway’s largest road constructions. The project critically reflects on how such developments reshape landscapes, communities, and everyday life, raising questions about the balance between progress, ecology, and human belonging. Through drawings, performative acts, and dialogue, Sætre probes the cultural and emotional layers hidden beneath the engineering plans, making visible the tensions between local identity, global climate concerns, and the political drive for growth

The project traces how the construction of Rv. 555, reshapes the landscape of Western Norway—and how the workers, through their daily gestures, meet and mould this environment. One of the region’s largest infrastructure endeavours, the road is designed to reinforce petroleum logistics by linking bases, suppliers, and industry; to prepare for a new container port at Ågotnes; and to weave local infrastructures into global circuits of capital and energy. With a contract value of NOK 23.1 billion—the largest ever awarded by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration—the project becomes a tangible expression of industrial priorities and society’s appetite for growth. Yet it also marks the continuing erasure of natural and cultural landscapes, revealing the tensions between expansion and the fragile terrains it consumes.

The work is also part of a larger study of how landscape, infrastructure and new climate-related technologies are interconnected in the region.

Paintings offer more than an aesthetic experience; they tell us something about how our surroundings have been perceived. You might think that Norwegians care for their nature, yet in the past five years alone, 44,000 natural sites have been altered for roads, housing, sports arenas, shopping centers, and aquaculture facilities. According to an NRK investigation, the country is losing 79 square meters of nature—every minute. Throughout history, artists have been fascinated by nature, depicting it—soberly or sublimely. The Rv. 555 Sotrasambandet painting series captures the dramatic transformation of Norway’s landscape through the construction of a 9.4-kilometer highway—4.6 kilometers of it through tunnels—connecting the oil and gas facilities at Kolltveit in Øygarden to Storavatnet in Bergen. Designed to accommodate industrial transport, oil, gas, and a new port to receive minerals from deep-sea mining—as well as a growing commuter population, including a planned coastal town of 10,000 residents—this project aims to reduce rush-hour travel by up to 20 minutes. It includes a new 900-meter, four-lane bridge with pedestrian and cycling lanes. With a total budget of NOK 23.1 billion (as of 2022), it stands as the largest single contract ever awarded by the Norwegian Public Roads Administration.

Through a series of paintings, Rv. 555 Sotrasambandet documents this massive infrastructure development. Visually striking and emotionally resonant, the works follow the phases of construction: earth torn open, mountains drilled and blasted, asphalt poured, bridges erected, stones hauled, and waters displaced—while nature attempts to recover. Plants and animals tentatively return, reclaiming fragments of their disrupted habitats. Beneath reason and territorial definitions lies a fertile chaos—a field of forces from which every system of order emerges. Infrastructure is one expression of this will to order. The Sotrasambandet transforms landscape into logistics, weaving itself into the everyday circulation of people, goods, and capital. Its bridges and tunnels are both technological and symbolic—a material narrative of progress, connectivity, and control. Yet every act of order carries a trace of violence. Wetlands are drained, habitats displaced, and light and noise reshape the rhythms of other species. The project mirrors a wider global logic: the merging of economy, technology, and ecology into a single system that sustains and destabilizes life at once. Sotrasambandet is thus not only an infrastructure project, but an ecological and cultural event—a manifestation of how human order continuously reorganizes the living world.

This project is done in a sort of collaboration with Guttorm Glomsås, he has a parallell foto project of Sotrasambandet rv 555. Link to his project her

Images from Den Uferdige Institusjon, Bergen 2026. Foto Guttorm Glomsås

Images from the exhibition Imagine New Stories, Write New Rules curated by Monica Holmen and Jessica Williams at Nitja senter for contemporary art from 17.January to the 1 of Marsh 2026.
Foto Tor Simen Ulstein