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?
What would it mean to be a nation? A nation with its own institutions – regional and national. What infrastructure was needed? What energy supply? It meant building dams and bridges, theatres and universities. It meant building schools and sports halls. Industries, parks and museums. It meant supporting the farmers and protecting our forests and rivers. It meant writing laws and creating policies. Policies that made it possible for a small language-group to have its own literature, its own publishers, bookstores and libraries. It meant nationalizing our oil and building up a national broadcaster. It meant distributing wealth and sponsoring tickets to cinemas and concert halls, giving out grants and spreading incentives so that culture could be for everyone. And it meant building up our own armed forces, not a professional army of hired guns but an army constituted by conscripts – made up by our own citizens - to defend all this.
Today this is what makes Norway Norway – and the role that the artist plays in this fine ecosystem - this feedbackloop that constitutes and holds up this nation – might have become so built into to the very fabric of our existence, so ingrained in our education, our everyday life that we can no longer see it. To even make us think that we could do without it and that we do not need to defend it.
And many still, even we in Norway, think that good art is there to solidifie and settles our ideals, our language, our moral codes and ways of life. That we need to get rid of that which isn´t “good”. But maybe arts biggest superpower, is its resilience - lies in its resistanceagainst what is “given”. The fact that it can challenge the status Que – like we see inside the Sami art field today – an art field that grows, expresses itself, evolves and develops in relation to and through an ongoing discussion of what it really means to live inside a Norwegian reality – politically, economically, and culturally.
Here self-awareness, friction and criticisms are often built into the artworks themselves. Artworks that expose and brings to the forefront the relation between the powerful and the powerless.
These works remind us of the fact that the categories we use – like good, necessary, productive, viable etc. are not always given. It opens our eyes to things we would be blind to, and it gives voice to the voiceless. It reminds us that society is not something stable, but something continuously evolving. Even in times of emergency. It irritates us and entertains us. It is beautiful and terrible, and it keeps us on our toes and prepares for what’s to come.
All this brings back to me the words of the wonderful writer Ursula le Quinn: We live in capitalist times, its power seems inescapable - but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Often in our art, the art of words.
So that´s what I bring you today. I have armed myself with poetry, written an early morning last week, just before the sun returned Tromsø - and it goes like this:
You are born
and lifted – held and helped
You are cared for and cradled
supported and led
Read to and sung to as you point to a house
to boats and to bats
to a litter of kittens – as they become cats - you sit by a table
with a pencil in hand
eagerly trying to write it all down
The boats and the bridges
the busses you ride
for somehow you know - that this is the task
to answer all of those questions they ask
like what is that and who will you be
as you try to conquer – a miniscule bit of history
There are words to spell and words to pronounce
Here is an A and there is an E
And that which comes after - a K and and a B
and there´s where and why
and there´s when and how
As you dance
As you draw – as you walk, as you run to that place where you need to be
deep inside humanity
This is your house,
this is your street, your school, your language, your family
Your religion, your faith
Your politics
This is how to behave and how to be
that’s how they serve you your identity
But the streets are too narrow
This room is too small
And you struggle to learn, to grasp it all
And the rules cannot harbour all you´ve been told
As you fight as you love as you read as you spell
As you attach the S to O to the C
And that which comes after the I and the T
In the word constituting society
And then there is that morning where you insist on being free
That’s where you find it – formless, unfinished
helpless and coy
A flicker of pain – the ache that is joy
the awkward fragments of your first poetry
How many questions?
How many answers?
You are lost
You are found and you are lost ones more
There ar words like power and power-
Less
Like ce -
lection
Ex -
tintion
words like su -
render and homicide
matriocide
genocide
suicude
as the screens light up with numbers and fates
with columns and equations of details and dates
that only resembles love
resembles hate – and you scan the pages for gains and loss
in this battlefield
this homecoming this exodus – where childhood must yield
to a complex ecology that is named
id - e – o -logy
You take the word in your mouth
And you know what it means
You whisper it, you silence it – it populates your dreams
It is there when you wake – it hides in your sleep
It rests in the faces, in the people you meet
As cities tumbles and economies shakes
As the forestfire rages and hate fills the web
as the crowd descents
on the parliament
and you are as broke as a homeless
left alone in the dark
cold
void of meaning
in a derelict yard
You are like a brother that has no brother
a man without an identity card
You go to sleep in the innards of a derelict hull
your brain blunt and dull
You have lost your job
lost your future, your money – your mouth feels funny
it can no longer hold the R and the E
The A and the Y
the lingering E
as you stutter and shake
and you think you might break as you raise your fist against
the simplification of language
The muteness of silence
to all that which – aches
You lie in the leftovers of that which is you
Who … ?
And in that silence
In that empty place
the child is gone – as you hold on
to a fragment of a song
lingering
like a flicker
week but alive
the beginning of something long gone
And from the steel-walls of the shipyard
In the scraps of a broken hull
There from the inside your bonewhite scull
among the rubbish and the litter – in a night made of led
you find poetry – unfinished, unread
You retrieve the letters – the R and the E
the A and the L
The I and the T
and draw in the dust – R E A L I T Y
And down by the sea
the oceans curves
Rolling, swaying – licking the bay – binding the harbor
to the city with its parks and its shaks
its roads and its freeways – its trams and its tracks
Tying it all together
unfinished
like you
uncomplete
as you lay
stretched out at the edge of the bay
lost
deep inside those pockets of history
you start to restore
your dignity
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