Da en ny beredskapsplan ble utarbeidet skulle det vise seg at kunst og kultur ikke var nevnt. Men hva er kulturens rolle i et sivilt samfunn og hva slags rolle spiller den for vår forsvarsevne.
Samtidig har kunst og kultur blitt en salderingspost.
Kunst utdanninger legges ned. Teatre trues med nedleggelse og kunst og kulturtilbud blir salderings-poster i en trang kommuneøkonomi.
Hva skal vi egentlig med den? Denne kunsten?
I Næss keynote forsøkte hun å løfte denne problem-stillinga opp på et overordna plan, både eksistensielt og politisk.
Hun skrev også et dikt som forøkte å bevege seg inn i dette på kunstens egne premisser.
På bildet her ser vi publikum og kunstprosjektet Nordting vise at kunst kan være både motstand og beredskap.
Les diktet og talen her under:
Arctic Frontiers KEY NOTE by Tale Næss
The way I see it, art functions as a container for knowledge, history and identity - even self-awareness. It can contain and reproduce a status quo, but it can also explore it, expand it and shape our ideas about who we are and what a society can be. As such – art functions as a kind of laboratory for alternative modes of being in the world, both as existential and societal exploration - as the French philosopher Paul Riceour once said: art is to humanity what the model is to mathematics. Through it one can explore alternative narratives and dive into ethical and moral - even political dilemma's.
And in times of crisis such as war and civil unrest – we know that there is a tendency to redraw, to settle for what is known. “The familiar or the old way of doing things”. In a polarised society were war is a fact, both in the discourse that goes on around us, and on the world stage - even acting out deep inside the innards of our economy, it is easy to cry for simple solutions – Artistic expressions offer tools for ways of escaping this mode of thinking. In the arts one is free to challenge those solutions, and resist them. As such art – free and at the same time financed by a state – adds too and takes part in a nations emergency preparedness. And since - even in dark times all art production stands on the shoulders of thinkers, painters, writers, theatre makers and composers that thought, painted, wrote- and made theatre in other dark times – we can find knowledge and even hope there. We find it in the works of others who speculated, experimented, thought out – and even “found” other worlds. A world free of slavery, a world where women could vote, a world were farmers could own their own land - where battles were prevented and love played out in ways that transgressed racial divides, religious differences, class and gender. Here Romeo and Juliet met and kissed, here Don Quixote fought his windmills, here music was made in the concentration camps, in the ghettos. Here van Gogh placed his crows in the cornfield and Pablo Picasso painted his “Guernica”. Under siege the poets dreamed of angels, and in the late 1800´s Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson drew up the foundations of that which was to become a new secular and democratic Norwegian state. What would it need?
