None of us escapes the austerity knife that swings over the large, government construction projects. It is therefore not realistic for the National Theatre’s chief Seltun to listen to Bøygen, who asked Peer Gynt to bypass it.
In the north, the knife has already swung over a new university museum, and the scaled-down plan has a price tag of less than two billion.
Send us the three billion that Seltun doesn’t want to smell. Then we will build a fantastic university museum for two of them, and send the last one back.
Nevertheless, we are still waiting for the government to give initial funding – 15 years after the National Audit Office determined that the state of the current museum does not make it possible to take care of northern natural and cultural history in accordance with law and regulations.
Statsbygg proposes three options for a new Nationaltheater. Of these it has cheapest a price tag of five billion more than the scaled-down plan for a new museum in the north.
The most expensive alternative, which according to theater manager Seltun is the only possible one, will cost eight billion more.
So: Send us the three billion that Seltun doesn’t want to smell. Then we will build a new – and fantastic – university museum for two of them, and send the last one back.
“This is a national theatre”, replies Kristian Seltun, when he in Dagsnytt 18 (October 29) must defend that this one state construction project must escape the austerity knife.
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Even without the word national with a capital N in the name, other institutions have national tasks. For Norway’s Arctic University Museum, the obligations in the Cultural Heritage Act and the Universities and Colleges Act relate in particular to managing and disseminating Sami and Kven culture and history.
Statsbygg has drawn up the new and cheaper plan for the only university museum north of Trondheim.
Here they write that Norway in light of the report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission must have a “clear expectation that the museum project takes responsibility for the dissemination of Sami and Kven language, culture and history”. We must take that responsibility.
We have a clear ambition that Norway’s Arctic University Museum will be one of many necessary settlements with 150 years of marginalization, invisibility and great injustice against national minorities and indigenous peoples.
Of course we will manage it, also within a scaled-down framework of just under two billion.
Theater manager Seltun, for his part, believes that the debate about a new National Theater for less than 10 billion has something “ambitious” about it.
Then I have to ask the theater director: Doesn’t the ambition lie precisely in the power that the theater has to settle, by setting people and society in motion? Look until you find the ambition there; then the spare knife will also be easier to deal with when it arrives.
Because we cannot bypass it.