Arts and Culture Norway’s Annual Museum Conference

Arts and Culture Norway’s Annual Museum Conference

Conference: Arts and Culture Norway’s Annual Museum Conference, Oct. 31st– Nov. 1st, 2024, Bodø, Norway.

An annual museum conference organised by Arts and Culture Norway. The title for this year’s conference was “Good museums - better local communities” and took place from October 31st to November 1st 2024, in Bodø, Norway. The conference’s target audience was the cultural sector, in particular museums and government management agencies. The conference program is translated to English, and a conference report in English will subsequently be published on the Arts and Culture Norway website to ensure information exchange and encourage international cooperation.

The conference aimed to explore the role of museums in creating a better future. With the 2003-convention as a framework, and with inspiration from the movement “The Happy Museum,” the conference facilitated a discussion on how we, together and individually, can create more resilient and inclusive local communities, and how the cultural sector can become an even stronger participant in this work. The working language of the conference was Norwegian, with speakers from various institutions in Norway, and with two program posts in English. Tony Butler is the Executive Director of Derby Museums and founder of the Happy Museum Project. Butler advocates for regional city museums and their impacts on local community and economies and gave an introduction on how museums can work to build resilient communities. Hanna Schreiber is a professor, consultant and UNESCO Chair on Intangible Cultural Heritage in Public and Global Governance at the University of Warsaw. Schreiber explored, based on the role of museums in society, intangible heritage in an urban context.

The conference also highlighted how local communities in Norway with traditions inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity (RL) actively work to ensure the dissemination of these traditions to younger generations. Program posts included museums that work with the Nordic clinker boat traditions (2021) and the practice of traditional music and dance in Setesdal, playing, dancing and singing (stev/stevjing) (2019). While not inscribed on the RL, other tradition bearers, like artist Nina Vestby and the Roma people (one of five national minorities in Norway), discussed their methods in conveying their culture to the youth.