Sanne Houby-Nielsen turns 67 in May and says she has always planned to retire then.
They say you should retire when the business is at its peak. I started work on “Nordbor” back in 2016, less than a year after I started, so it has been a very long journey.
One important goal has been to make Nordiska museet a museum about people rather than the objects in its enormous collections.
The objects are sources of knowledge about those who have lived here and those of us who live here today. The sentence that has stayed with me is “The Nordic Museum is about you, welcome home”. It is a huge shift.
Under her leadership, the museum has also been rebuilt to make it more accessible, including with a new elevator and an interior bridge, both of which were also important for building “Nordbor”.
I am incredibly proud of it, but also of the other exhibitions we have put on, she says, mentioning, among other things, the climate exhibition “The Arctic - While the Ice Is Melting” (2019) and “The Paris of the North” (2021), about fashion.
The public has flocked to the museum - since 2015, its public revenue has tripled.
Increasing revenue is not an end in itself, but if you are going to make such big investments, you have to take risks. It is ticket revenue that pays for the investments we have made. It was a risk, but if you feel you have a good idea, it usually works out well.
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