Happy New Year, and welcome back from the holidays!

The new year is off to a bang with freezing temperatures and a great deal of activity. The orchestra pit is under construction and is set to be inaugurated with the Academy of Opera’s New Year’s Concert on 2 February. The Artistic Research Week, or KUF Week, will take place in the penultimate week of January, and the announced programme looks very promising indeed. I look forward to seeing how the KUF Week will succeed in bringing together academic staff both socially and across artistic genres. The four-day event seems to be a great opportunity to strengthen the aim of a single, unified KHiO.

In many different contexts it has become apparent that there is need to create opportunities for people to meet. A new concept this spring will be informal get-togethers in the Vrimla area, initially once a month for coffee and conversation. Everyone is welcome – bring a cup with you and come on over!

The budget for 2024 was adopted at the board meeting this December. Although the budget is balanced, we still do have some way to go before our budgets give us breathing space in the squeeze between tighter financial constraints and KHiO’s artistic and academic ambitions. This requires a long-term and concerted effort on our part. The leadership group will already start on the budgetary work for 2025 in January, where the aim will be to develop principles of prioritisation that can be submitted to the board before the summer. At the end of January, the chair of the board and I will also meet with the Ministry of Education for updates and a mutual exchange of information.

On 17 January, the leadership group and employee representatives will meet to discuss KHiO’s organisational development on the basis of the helpful consultation responses we have received. We would like to express our thanks for all the work that has been put into this. We are still waiting for the final response to be submitted, but as soon as it arrives, we will publish a summary of the feedback along with a plan for how the further work is to progress.

Thanks to both the preliminary investigations that have been carried out and the detailed consultation responses, we have gained insight into various aspects and have thus been enabled to think more concretely about an organisational model. It is unlikely that we will achieve a full consensus, but I believe that together we will arrive at a model that won’t be too controversial. The Agenda Kaupang report  highlights certain areas that we need to address. We must improve our efforts to connect the administrative with the academic, and we also need to increase our flexibility and collaboration. Efforts to solve the workshop problem are also well under way. As noted in the Agenda Kaupang report from 2022 (pp. 3–4):

Our investigations also reveal that the way the workshops are organised presents some challenges. The workshops belong organisationally to the administrative line, a solution that hardly meets the intended goal, namely that the workshops should be able to be used by students across the various programmes. According to the evaluations from both the departments and the workshops, there is a clear desire for the workshops and workshop managers to belong instead to the academic line in order to ensure that the teaching at each individual department is as coherent and high-quality as possible. Our conclusion is that the organisational division into four sections, as well as the organisation of the workshops, should be evaluated in any new organisational structure.

In any event, I think it is important to repeat here that KHiO is not facing overwhelming changes. We will not be ending up with the type of challenging transformational processes that can be soul-sapping, time-consuming and distractive. If you feel apprehensive about the situation and have questions, my advice is that you shouldn’t hesitate to ask your immediate superior, or simply just listen to what I’m saying here.

We are also currently engaged in recruiting deans for the Academy of Fine Art and the Art and Craft department. There are solid applicants to both positions, and we have conducted a good first round of interviews, which bodes well. The plan is to make our final decision at the board meeting in March.

With this January newsletter, I wish you all the best for the beginning of the spring semester, one that will offer a series of graduation performances and exhibitions. May you all gain new insights and make new realisations.

I’ll end with the New Year’s wish I gave to the Khrono website: “I am fundamentally worried about the consequences of the ongoing climate change and loss of nature. What I therefore want at the start of a new year is a powerful, new commitment to developing enduring sustainability, where the entire field of knowledge – including both scientific and artistic methods, both academic and artistic research – is activated in order to solve the challenges that face our society.”

See you all around!
Marianne