I am the boss!

We have had a meeting straightening out the lines of responsibility. We were all quite frustrated and by the time we met, all feeling that the project was not moving forward and not having the time to do anything about it. It was a long time since we had met due to Linda and Joannes workloads. After a short frustrated discussion we readily agreed that I need to be the project leader and must be aloud to make descissions. The two others will still be on board, but rather on concrete tasks, not as much in the daily running of the project. Which basically means that they decide what has to be done for the next meeting and I do it. They love it.

This is the reason...

This is the reason why "Fiskeboller" deals with an important subject; immediately after the first person with a background from somewhere further away than Scandinavia has been appointed Minister of equality, questions are asked about her loyalty to The Country. Her citizenship went through only two weeks before her appointment... and bright heads are questioning wether she wants to become Norwegian or to become minister...

She has lived and worked in Norway for 16 years.

When are you Norwegian enough?

Fred* located?

Had a good talk with Einar Wiig (the real dean of the design department :-)) yesterday. He will read through the exhibition evaluation and comment on structure etc. In addition he gave me a tip on contacting Runar Døving. From what I can see of his works he sounds... ideal! He will be called this week!

(*Fred is the codename Lykkejegerne put on the social anthropologist that we knew we had to get into the project. Could this be him?)

Plan for week 42

Every week

Keep the blog updated

Work

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process.
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft. (monday)
  

Meetings and seminars

• Stipendiatsamling - tuesday and wednesday
  
• Jack - friday
  

Summing up Week 41

• Had a good meeting with Petter, giving me good names to contact in different public institutions. He also had valuable input on the further develoment of Fiskeboller.
  

• The workshop with Kelly Davis was quite useful, in the sense that I realized I could not use the system he was teaching, but he still mapped out some tricks and tools that are useful in storytelling (storytelling not based on a character experiencing conflict that is...)

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process.
  
• Had a very good meeting with Linda, where we really got a huge step forward with the structure and the content. Dont know how I would have done it without her!
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
  
• First draft finished and given to Einar Wiik for a read through.

All cultures are dirty!

A-magasinet, the weekend magazine of one of the biggest newspapers in Norway, last Friday had a very good article about people from Somalia, apparently many have a hard time becoming integrated in Norwegian society. I will not discuss that topic as it is a bit too large a morsel to chew atm. It was the end of the article that made me think. It said "I remembered what a 19-year old I met outside the Somali mosque in Trondheimsveien had said. He was complaining in an aggressiv tone about how the media judges all Somali, before he said: -Kurds are rapists. But not Somali."

I think we have to be very clear in the exhibition about the fact that all cultures are mixes, are dirty so to speak (as opposed to the idea of national culture as something pure and uninfluenced), not only the Norwegian one. Otherwise we could get a situation where people could say; "Haha! You don't really have a culture, it is all a mix, nothing is Norwegian! It is not clean like our culture!"

All cultures are dirty, are mixes, are moving and growing. I like the description in "Blanke løgner, skitne sannheter" by Stian Bromark and Dag Herbjørnsrud. Loosely translated they write: "In the large perspective we are all immigrants. Nations and land areas are like circular tube lines: an eternal stream of people embarking and disembarking throughout history through thousands of years."

Plan for week 41

Every week

Keep the blog updated


Work

• Working on the exhibition script through a storytelling workshop with Kelly Davis.
  

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda. (monday)
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft. (monday)
  

Meetings

• Department of Design - Petter - monday
  

Summing up Week 40

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda.
• worked on it, will send it today
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
• will be finished Monday October 8th

"Review" Freedom of Speech exhibition

In Klassekampen yesterday Dagfinn Nordbø writes about the new freedom of speech exhibition at the Nobel Peace Center in Oslo. As it only opened last week I have not been able to see it yet, but will see it when I go to Oslo in two weeks. Nordbø is a text writer, mostly writing humorous texts for newspapers and radio. He has not set out to review the exhibition, but through his humorous comments he has made one of the better exibition reviews I have read in a Norwegian newspaper. ^^

Exhibition structure

I have sketched out a structure for the exhibition, and on a meditative walk on Sunday I managed to see a solution (at this stage anyway) for the last stage of the exhibition. I had mapped out that it would be an exhibition in three stages. The introduction talking about how culture never stands still, the main area using food culture to illustrate this point and the last part???? I hadn't come up with a solution, considering whether we should do scenarios for the future, not being comfortable about that; it can often become scary or cliched and not very constructive. I was also wondering how to bring the visitors themselves into the exhibition... So on the quiet walk I realised it would be perfect to have an installation in the end where the visitors can fill in their own connections to the world and have it printed out on a beautifully designed card. They could also become part of a map on the wall showing lines and connections.

This brings the element of visitor input (taken from Havlandet and the notes) and visibility in the exhibition, brings the large topic of culture to a personal level and gives us the possibilities of giving them something personal to take away from the exhibition.

In a talk with Jo-Anne yesterday she said that we have to make sure that we stress that there is allways a core that is you, your own personality, (not "You are what you eat" or "You are who you know" those sayings have allways bothered me...) and it is this core that has connections to the world.

Plan for week 40

Every week
Keep the blog updated

Work

• Evaluation of Havlandet - process. Send to Linda.
  
• Evaluation of Havlandet - the exhibition. Finish first draft.
  

Summing up Week 38
Good meetings with Søren and an interesting seminar, both already described in earlier blogposts.