In their joint practice, Jan Danebod and Peter Olsen explore a number of mechanisms and processes in the public space with an in-depth interest in the city’s contemporary building culture, its biases and presence in a future that requires a radical change in our approach to the built environment; In climate and environmental issues in particular but also in the massive formative presence construction constitutes. For where and how is it possible in this all-encompassing urban space to carve a place out for oneself? They work sculpturally with materials found in these constructed environments and use the techniques of the construction industry in an attempt to mirror our surroundings and expose structures in order to draw attention to them.

To make this work accessible to the children and young people who move daily on and around the staffed playground in Bispeengen, they will take on the role of a kind of translators. They will move their studio to ANA’s mobile children’s studio for a period and through open artistic work processes try to equip the local children and young people with a sharpened view of their local environment.

With a hands on sculptural approach, the children will become acquainted with a number of materials such as cement, gravel, iron and brick, which form basic elements in the city’s many construction projects. They will come into contact with everything from redevelopment of green areas to the establishment of new construction. Urban planning that can generally seem elusive and out of reach. In Surrounded by Forest, Danebod and Olsen pull these issues down at a children’s level and make them available in new engaging and critically-creative formats.

During their stay in ANA Søssa Jørgensen and Geir Tore Holm will further develop the playful documentary, which they began in ANA in 2015. The film was based on interviews with people who were active in preserving and protecting ANA and the surrounding historic backyard environment. In the film, the characters’ statements about space took the form of a song, which lyrics represented a hope that artistic presence and activity can create unity and community in the local environment.

If you look around the city, you often see birds: pigeons, sparrows, gulls, crows and in between a raptor. Despite newly built hostile buildings and other measures to prevent the birds’ free activity, they fly around and settle down.

In interaction with the newly transformed surroundings around ANA, the two artists in collaboration with ornithologists and others with a bird interest in the city will study the bird life in the area. Inspired by the new housing complexes and traditional dovecotes, they will build a sculptural birdhouse of recycled materials collected on Ydre Nørrebro. The house will subsequently be the location for their new film.

Video: Geir Tore Holm & Søssa Jørgensen, Astrid Noack´s Atelier (2015)

The project is supported by the Embassy of Norway.

‘Lights-out manufacturing’ refers to a completely robotic production that, by virtue of its independence from human intervention, can take place in darkened factory premises. Around the world, several so-called ‘dark factories’ breathe daily life into the wet dream of the worker without needs, demands and senses. A dream of a sustainable future, where the workers’ time is freed up, work accidents averted, overproduction eliminated and, of course, energy saved in the dark. It speaks to a future of opportunities where we can innovate ourselves out of the challenges we face without giving up everything we have.

However, the robotic society, where manual labor has been made unnecessary, draws another darkness with it. The fully automatic production apparatus is already in the process of creating a divided society between the cognitive worker and the service worker. There is a certain blindness to what automation will mean for the citizen in a society where welfare and security largely depend on a place in the labor market. All the while, the basic materials of the robot factory are still mined in the impenetrable darkness of the mine shaft by invisible miners.

‘Lights-out manufacturing’ thereby balances between a future that promises unprecedented possibilities and at the same time seems blind to the need to rethink, redistribute and abandon certain established structures.

This delicate balance is the focal point of Lights Out Factory – an art project developed for ANA by the artist duo FACTORY WORKERS UNITE. Over the course of two days, ANA was transformed into a darkened factory floor, where artists and thinkers were invited to explore ideas about collective production, lighting of dark machinery and the potential of blindness, whilst labouring in the dark. Now the factory floor is abandoned – only the echo of workers in conversation takes up the space. Yet in the dim light work is still taking place.

FACTORY WORKERS UNITE is a collaborative factory space for working and thinking shared by Tina Helen and Soren Thilo Funder. It forms an ongoing investigation of the physical, cultural, cognitive and social factory, comprising factory floors of warehouses, archives, assembly lines, artist studios, museum spaces, reading rooms, shopping malls, lecture halls, sports arenas, political assemblies, nature experiences, holiday retreats, family structures, media platforms, game systems, cybernetic networks, playgrounds, love lifes, unions and friendships.

Friday March 11 from 16-20:
Opening of Lights Out Factory by FACTORY WORKERS UNITE
Sound installation (with: Signe Leth Gammelgaard, Eskild Halberg, Molly Haslund, Liv Nimand Duvå, Hannah Anbert, Tais Terletskaja, Ask Katzeff, Malte Starck, Søren Thilo Funder og Tina Helen.)

Thursday March 17 from 18-20:
Lights Out – FACTORY WORKERS UNITE in conversation with Kathrine Bolt Rasmussen and ANA.
An open conversation held in complete darkness. We’ll serve coffee and wine in ANA’s new ceramic cups that were produced in the darkness of the lights-out factory during the recordings for the audio installation.

Sunday March 27 from 11-16:
Funny Factory Floors – Film screening for kids and young souls.
A video montage of factories, conveyor belts and automatons from children’s movies served with popcorn and pillows.

It will be possible to visit the installation and hear the sound work on the following dates:

Sunday March 3
Friday March 18
Friday March 25
Friday April 1
Sunday April 3 – CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS
Friday April 8

All days from 11-15 o’clock.

The Exhibition is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation and The Municipality of Copenhagen – Council for Visual Arts.

Screenshot of Google Satellite Map, Kangerlussuaq area, 2021

Rikke Luther: Missing Atmospheric Ice Crystal, 2021

New, unpredictable weather, caused by the climate changes related to human activities, creates new, unpredictable muds. Older more stable habitats are threatened. In 2021 the journal “Nature: Geoscience” published a new study on the effect of climate breakdown on the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation. The AMOC is at its weakest for a thousand years, ultimately threatening the Gulf Stream that regulates temperatures in the northern hemisphere. Increased heatwaves in Europe and storms on eastern seaboard of north America will increase mud-flows in some areas, while hardening muds in others, effecting tree cover and vegetation vital to the carbon cycle.

To predict future patterns, scientists collect proxy data gleaned from ancient sedimentary muds and ice-cores in Greenland, as if the past is returning to regain control of an unpredictable future. Nations may be defined by their laws, but ecosystems and muds do not obey laws or boundaries. A new way of thinking is needed.

The unpredictability of The New Mud forms the basis of Rikke Luther’s exhibition project in ANA. The work stems from i.a. of a recent stay in Kangerlussuaq in Greenland and at Narsaq International Research Station. On the basis of a spatial presentation of Luther’s preliminary studies and a number of artistic outputs in the form of e.g. clay and mud as well as other material in process, film screenings and a conversation will be held from 11 December to 17 December. This program follows. A second part of the project will take place in ANA in 2023.

Program:

On Saturday, December 11 at 15-17, Rikke Luther talks about her preliminary research and presents the exhibited material. Subsequently, the film Concrete Nature: The Planetary Sand Bank from 2018 – which explores the changing ideological contexts of concrete buildings – will be shown. The film, which premiered at CPH: DOX in 2019, is part of Luther’s practice-based PhD project Concrete Aesthetics. From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy.

The film will be shown at 15.30 and 16.30 and there will be a limited number of seats. Valid corona passport is required to join the event. We recommend also having a negative covid-19 test.

Wednesday, December 15 at 17-18.30 Rikke Luther’s film Concrete: The Great Transformation from 2020, which gave concrete structures their initial set of references and meanings, will be shown. The film is still in process.

Valid corona passport is required to join the event. We recommend also having a negative covid-19 test.

Friday, December 17 at 17-19. The conversation “Mud Crystals” with Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London, Esther Leslie, is prompted by Rikke Luther’s artistic exploration of materials to examine how mud mingled with ice opens up longer histories of extraction and profit maximization. Esther Leslie’s research has explored liquid crystals, synthetic dyes, animation, mud, ice and milk. This i.a. in the book Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form from 2016. In addition to Esther Leslie and Rikke Luther, artist and researcher Lise Autogena as well as artists, teachers and co-founders of Urbonas Studio, Nomeda and Gediminas Urbonas will participate in the conversation, that will will draw on discussions from the seminar Transnational Mud: Swamps, Earth, and Transnational Trees, which was held at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in the spring of 2021.

Lise Autogena is the founder of ‘Narsaq International Research Station’, Professor of Cross-Disciplinary Art and Head of Research at Sheffield Hallam University. Urbonas Studio is an interdisciplinary research practice that facilitates exchange amongst diverse nodes of knowledge production and artistic practice in pursuit of projects that transform civic spaces and collective imaginaries. Nomeda Urbonas is a Research Affiliate at MIT, while Gediminas Urbonas is an Associate Professor at MIT’s program in Art, Culture and Technology.

Join the conversation on zoom:

https://kunstakademiet.zoom.us/j/64691680528?pwd=NG8yTUZvTWhVcWpDcWFHeFR6NFpoZz09

Passcode: 420824

The New Mud is part of an ongoing artistic research project Digital Materialities at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, which invites artists and researchers to think collectively from and about the materials on the basis of which we build our allegedly immaterial digital life.

Rikke Luther’s current work explores the new interrelations created by environmental crisis as they relate to landscape, language, politics, financialisation, law, biology and economy, expressed in drawn images, photography, film, and pedagogical strategies. Since her participation in the 32nd Bienal de São Paulo in 2016 she has been working solo. Prior to that, Luther worked exclusively in art collectives. She was a co-founder of Learning Site (active 2004 to 2015) and of N55 (active with original members from 1996 through to 2003). In 2021 Luther defended the PhD Concrete Aesthetics: From Universal Rights to Financial Post-Democracy. It will be published in 2022 with extended texts by Esther Leslie and Jaime Stapleton.

The exhibition is supported by the Danish Art Foundation and the Danish Art Workshops.