Art can open up the world – A portrait of Eline Sigfusson

“A man. And preferably a Finn.” That’s what they said they were looking for at the Nordic Culture Fund when a senior adviser position was advertised in 2013. Eline Sigfusson was neither of these, but she applied for the job anyway – and got it. In August 2013, she swapped her job as a consultant at the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces for a position at the Fund. With her she brought her experience in consulting, project management and communication. Moreover, she had her feet firmly planted in the world of music, which she herself believes was a crucial factor in winning her the position.

Her intuitive sense of art had been finely tuned from childhood. Art was not just something she merely administered, or with which she had a theoretical relationship: Her heart beats warmly for art, and has been beating for it ever since she was born, because Eline Sigfusson comes from a home full of art, music and musicians. Her father is from a musical family, and is a cellist with the South Jutland Symphony Orchestra. Eline also played the violin as a child and sang in a choir: “My childhood home was strongly influenced by musical expression. I attended concerts, even as a child, with music of a high standard, performed by professional artists. I received a very clear sense of art, even back then.”

It seemed likely that Eline would follow the musical path and become a singer herself, but instead she applied to study Musicology at the University of Copenhagen. This was followed by a position as Promotion Manager at the music publisher Edition Wilhelm Hansen, where she worked with some of the great composers of the time and was very close to their creative processes. From there she moved to the Danish Agency for Culture and Palaces, and then to the Nordic Culture Fund, first as senior advisor, and later as deputy director.

Since 1966, the Nordic Culture Fund has worked to strengthen cultural co-operation between Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. During her eight and a half years there, Eline Sigfusson has worked to make the Fund more visible, more outgoing and more proactive. “I wanted us to be more than just an administrative body. The Nordic Culture Fund should be a value-creating organisation, not just an office where we sit and process applications,” says Eline of her vision, which she also incorporated into the strategy that she formulated and presented to the Fund’s Board for the first time in 2019.

The strategy stated, amongst other things, that culture is borderless and must remain so. “It has been my firm conviction from the start that although the Fund’s starting point is the Nordic region, it is the Nordic region in conjunction with the rest of the world. Art, by its very nature, is borderless. It is wrong to shut it in. We must not just operate nationally, but create the best conditions for international artist mobility and artistic freedom. This is an important signal to send from the Nordic region: That we are open to the whole world.”

From thought to action

For Eline Sigfusson, it’s not just a matter of words and declarations of intent. Colleagues describe her as practical, hard-working and enterprising. She puts ideas into action straight away, and she makes things happen with great humour and energy. Nordic Culture Fund Director Benny Marcel says: “Eline has many strengths. One of them is that she takes a simultaneously strategic and operational approach to the developmental tasks that she leads. Eline masters the art of being an architect and an artisan at the same time.”

One example is the Fund’s thematic programme Globus, which aims to give artists and cultural practitioners new opportunities to apply for funding for projects that go beyond the Nordic region. Benny Marcel says: “Eline is well versed in what artistic processes, science and modern research mean for the challenges that face our society in a Nordic and global context – for example in relation to the UN Sustainable Development Goals.”

Benny Marcel also highlights Eline’s ability and creative talent in making local stakeholders feel and understand that they are part of a larger, meaning-creating context. This has strengthened the Fund’s meetings at local, regional, national and global level with various players who work with Nordic cultural co-operation. “In interplay with her colleagues at the Nordic Culture Fund, and with great understanding of the Board’s forward-looking vision, Eline has created balance in the work of the Fund and has helped to make it possible for the Nordic Culture Fund to be at the forefront.”

It is not only through her work at the Nordic Culture Fund that Eline Sigfusson’s story is interwoven with the Nordic Region and its art. Her great-grandfather, the Icelandic composer Sigfús Einarsson, is buried in a cemetery in Reykjavik: “My great-grandfather composed music, wrote hymns, taught, founded several choirs and helped to shape cultural life in Iceland. When I looked for his grave and said that I was his great-grandchild, I was greeted with respect and great joy. He married a Dane, and later my grandfather moved to Denmark to attend the Royal Danish Academy of Music. I think he would have been pleased with the work I’m doing,” she says, adding: “We Nordic peoples have our core in the Nordic Region – an ancient and profound community that allows us to grow together. That’s a fantastic thing, but we must not become complacent about it. We must not become too inward-looking and Nordic nationalistic. We must not shut ourselves in and lock ourselves inside the Nordic space. We must ask ourselves how the Nordic Region can develop in co-operation with the rest of the world. That’s what’s really interesting.”

New ways for art and culture

She wants to expand art and break down not only international borders, but also the borders between the insideness and the outsideness – two concepts she has coined for the purpose. “There’s a lot of art that we don’t see, and which is not detected by the usual systems. There are cultural entrepreneurs who work artistically, and artists who may operate in the social field or in the health system. They’re not part of the insideness, but those are the ones we must reach. I’ve worked a great deal to make the Fund more venturesome towards the arts. Not many people dare to support something that perhaps only exists as yet at the level of intention, but we decided in the Fund that we wanted to take the lead. Because if we did that, then perhaps others would follow suit in the hope of getting more artists invited in,” she says.

Art and artists must be given the best possible conditions, Sigfusson believes. Borders must be broken down. We must do away with habitual thinking, exclusive clubs and petty officialdom. Eline Sigfusson would like to see extreme openness, and aims to support the conditions in which art can flourish. “If art and creativity enlarge our world, why is the room for manoeuvre of artists and cultural institutions constantly growing smaller?” she asks on the website of Anordic, which is the first Nordic think tank for knowledge, debate and action in the arts and the project she will start on next, after the Nordic Culture Fund.

There is something about our times and the role of art in society that needs to be rethought, she says: “Traditionally, art has played an important role in building up society, but now it’s more of a tool, a competitive parameter – something we use to attract tourists. We have a cultural policy that often ends up being all about efficiency and measurable parameters. We have created all kinds of cumbersome systems around art, and we try to measure it. But this is impossible, and so its funding is cut.”

One of Eline Sigfusson’s goals for Anordic is to invent a new way of talking about art, and different units to measure it with, and to bring the practice of art and the political reality closer together: “We shouldn’t just try to document things with numbers. Numbers are retrospective – they deal with what has already happened. Numbers can’t describe what’s going to happen. We need to be unconventional, and to shake up cultural policy so that it becomes relevant to the art and the artists of our time.”

Passion is the first word that comes to mind when Eline Sigfusson is asked about her work – and it is also the first word you think of when you hear her talk about it. She is known for her zeal and enthusiasm, and she is an ambassador for artists in a world that does not always function on their terms. She is aware of this, because she knows their world inside out: “All my life I have seen artists doggedly working on their creations: with infinite concentration and tiny subtleties, for hours, days, weeks, years on end. We have an expectation that these artists should also be proactive and outwardly-directed. I think that’s wrong. It’s the systems that should be that way.”

If anyone were to say that art and culture are boring, Eline would whirl through the room, removing any speck of dust. Art is living, essential and necessary for us human beings, she believes: “Art offers a space for reflection. It can broaden our horizons and invite us into an unexpected community with people from the other side of the globe. It can show us something we didn’t expect to see – in contrast to Facebook, for example, where we are just presented with what we already know and like. Art can also point to the future, because it is constantly experimenting and questioning what is established. It can offer us a new way to venture out into the world, and show us different ways of doing things. Everyone should experience art. Art can open up the world.”

By Signe Wulff