It’s the opening days of the 57th Venice Biennale , and I've spent the morning fighting crowds to see contemporary visual art in national pavilions. Now, at dusk, I'm relaxing in a sampierota , a typical Venetian rowboat . But atypically, I'm blindfolded, and guided by Giulia, who is blind. With the traditional gondolas and palaces now masked, every other sense is heightened. Sensing a motorboat in the distance, Giulia alerts me to “feel how the water changes.” She is one of 63 blind or visually

“When I moved here,” says Briony Cullin, from Melbourne, Australia, “my friends would ask me, ‘What do you do about eating in Glasgow?’ People had this idea that Glasgow’s food scene was terrible.” The Scottish city’s reputation as a hotbed of deep-fried culinary crimes has been transformed in the past eight years. Its reinvention is mirrored by the fortunes of the now bona fide foodie scene’s hub. Finnieston, squeezed between the city center and the Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum, was once

The Scottish island of Eigg has a precarious connection to the outside world – which I experienced first-hand when a storm forced the cancellation of my ferry and I had to wait two days for the next boat. But largely because of that fragility, the tiny island – 15 miles (24km) west of the mainland – has learned how to be self-sufficient. Remarkably, even in terms of energy. In 2008, Eigg became the world’s first community to launch an off-grid electric system powered by wind, water and solar –

North Ronaldsay, the most northerly of Scotland’s Orkney Islands, shares several properties in common with the country’s other remote northern isles. There’s the Neolithic-era standing stone, for example, and the lighthouse built by members of the famed Stevenson engineering clan. But look out to the shoreline and you’ll spot something altogether more particular to this island. Small sheep—wrapped in thick fleeces of brown, black, white, and gray—nimbly pick their way across sand and wet rocks.

The Lofoten International Art Festival is in the only part of Norway where drilling for oil is not currently permitted, but that could change. LOFOTEN, Norway — I took three flights to reach the Lofoten International Art Festival (LIAF) in the small fishing village of Henningsvær, high above the Arctic Circle in Norway’s Lofoten archipelago. Each leg of the journey — first to Oslo, then to Bodø, and finally to Svolvær — got progressively shorter and necessitated traveling on smaller and smaller

I arrived on Fair Isle, in Scotland’s Shetland Islands , intent upon buying a sweater. Fair Isle knitting has been replicated worldwide but the genuine article can only be found on the three-square-mile North Atlantic island. Yet I left empty-handed and my contact details with Hollie Shaw, who runs a knitwear company from her home, a brightly colored croft (or small farm house) backed by steep cliffs on the south side of the island. She said she would let me know, in around three years, when my

The Faroe Islands—an archipelago of 18 islands adrift in the North Atlantic between Scotland and Iceland—are home to people who have hunted the long-finned pilot whale since the days of their Viking ancestors. The opening scenes of the documentary feature film The Islands and the Whales make it clear why—the islands, rising tall out of a dark sea, are so forbidding and isolated that it seems extraordinary that any community could have survived here. An aerial shot lingers over them, then cuts

It has been exactly five years since Anders Behring Breivik murdered 77 people in Norway. First, he detonated a car bomb in central Oslo’s government quarter, and then he opened fire at the Worker’s Youth League’s (AUF) summer camp on the island of Utøya in the municipality of Hole. Last year, a memorial — a steel ring inscribed with the names of victims — was unveiled on the privately owned island, but three public memorials are still in development. Swedish artist Jonas Dahlberg was selected

Street art is a city's outdoor museum. Not just attractive to look at, it often functions as a gateway into the underlying social, cultural, or political concerns of the setting in which it appears. While it is easy, upon coming across a beautiful work of art on a city’s wall, to simply snap a photo, upload it to Instagram and move on, the best street art merits spending a few moments to think about what it wants to say. Here we take you on a tour of seven of the world’s best cities for seek

Rapper Nils Rune Utsi, a/k/a SlinCraze, hails from Máze, a near-abandoned village in the Norwegian Arctic. Despite the “nonexistent” hip-hop scene there, he’s trying to make it as a rapper. Utsi is also Sámi, part of the group of indigenous Scandinavians who, throughout the twentieth century, were subject to forced assimilation at the hands of the Norwegian government. Sámi culture barely survived this period, which is referred to as Fornorsking, and Northern Sámi, the language in which Utsi per

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“It’s very un-Aberdeen this,” a woman tells me as we walk through a dark tunnel. “I’m so excited, I’m almost tearful.” Long used only by delivery drivers and the odd pigeon, today the tunnel is home to two unlikely residents: classical-looking images of children, reproduced by street artist Julien de Casabianca. “These are places you would never normally go,” she says. “Dead spaces are coming alive”. The portraits – paste-ups of masterworks from the Aberdeen Art Gallery, reproduced by Casabianc