I would just like to give my deepest thanks to Konstnärsnämnden (The Swedish Arts Grants Committee) for giving me the support through the crisis found as well as a One Year Arbetsstipendium (work grant). I feel humble and grateful in these precarious times.
As well as being thankful and joyful for this honor I am simultaneously saddened and my heart goes out to all those artists that are struggling and to whom the money of the crisis fund and working grant did not reach. It’s sad to see and hear so many stories of what chaos this pandemic has created for our field and for people's personal economies. I wish there could be more support for artists in these uncertain times so that we won’t lose the many different voices in our community.
I hope that this crisis will also start a discussion and change to our current system to one that minimizes the amount of people that “faller mellan stolarna” (fall between chairs) of the different bureaucratic systems in the social safety net. So that we have a system which understands and supports artists both in surviving bad times as well as in the period of creating new interesting work.
Lots of love,
// Noah