Aktivistisk Tegnestue Foreslår Byggestop ︎︎︎
Exhibition with The Green Youth Movement at Galleri Tese in Aarhus
Photograph: Iben Parum
What if all construction stopped today? Can we build our way out of the crisis? Denmark’s construction industry accounts for 38% of the country’s annual CO2-emissions and generates 30% of all waste. While we shape the world around us and create the framework for our high standard of living, we are depleting the earth of materials that are running out. At the same time, we are tearing down perfectly functional housing – blocks of flats and suburban homes – at an alarming rate. We are building ourselves into an uninhabitable future. The exhibition “Aktivistisk Tegnestue Foreslår Byggestop” proposed ways of executing a complete construction ban to secure a future free from failed developments. Philosophically, politically, and architecturally, the room thrives with solutions that both refine and concretise our vision for the building industry.
Photographs: Mads Hvidkær Christoffersen
Aktivistisk Tegnestue Foreslår Byggeplads
At the heart of the exhibition is the in-house building site where tables, benches, chairs, and pedestals for the artworks are being produced. Since the entire exhibition budget was spent on tools — so we can build more exhibitions in the future — building materials had to be sourced from bulky waste piles across Aarhus. Each time a material is acquired, a small receipt is placed on the map to mark its origin. An exhibition constructed from the physical remnants of collective overconsumption, sourced within a radius of 200 metres. And a reminder that when problems come knocking, we don’t always need to reinvent the wheel. The solution was right there on the doorstep.
Photographs: Iben Parum
Bermuda Triangles
Two years ago in August, I took the train to Aarhus to visit my friend Smilla, who had just moved into a new apartment. I noticed that the chairs from her old place were gone."Where did your chairs go?"
"I put them down in the Bermuda Triangle."
"The Bermuda Triangle? The geographic area between Miami, Bermuda, and Puerto Rico? That hole in the ocean where planes and ships mysteriously disappear?"
"Yes," Smilla said and pointed, "it's right down there."
A year later, I moved to Aarhus myself — only to my great horror, I found myself living on the very street corner Smilla had pointed to. The corner, or rather, the triangle, formed between Rosenkrantzgade and Fredensgade. And sure enough — every time I left my apartment, I was confronted with other people’s discarded belongings. Refrigerators, Christmas trees, chairs with and without legs, sticks and pallets. And when I came home, they were gone.
Who takes care of the worn-out and abandoned? Who is sitting on Smilla’s old dining chairs? Is it the construction worker from the site across the street? The sewer rat that senses the vibrations of bulky waste through Aarhus’ underground pipes? Is it struggling artists or desperate architecture students? Or is it The Green Youth Movement, whose need for chairs is constantly growing?
For the exhibition you are standing in now, we received a small grant. Instead of spending it on new wood to build with and paper to print on — only for it all to be thrown away afterward — we decided to spend every penny on tools. We dream of establishing ourselves as a real architecture studio, one that can build models and create large drawings. We are tired of writing meeting minutes in a shared Google Docs file.
So Tuva and I drove to Silvan — two new-rich climate architects in a fully fueled petrol car, loaded with brand-new screwdrivers, cutting mats, and a circular saw. When time is short, you resort to simple solutions.
But what about building materials? Every single material — stones, wood, boards, and sticks — was collected from bulky waste piles around the city. Benches, tables, and display structures were designed according to the design-to-disassembly-principle, held together only by clamps or belt straps. We deliberately avoided taking furniture or objects that could still be useful to others, sticking instead to things whose value lay in their raw material rather than their function. Each time we acquired a new material, we printed a receipt and pinned it on a map of Aarhus. It is all of Aarhus’ Bermuda Triangles — pulled out of the fog of mystery and onto a black-and-white map.
The mystery of the Bermuda Triangle's plane crashes was eventually explained – most likely the result of amateur pilots and unstable weather conditions. I discovered that the mystery of Aarhus' Bermuda Triangle could be explained by the bulky waste collectors, even though I have never seen them, by random passersby, or by Yu, the dedicated hoarder in the backyard who gathers things for a flea market.
It also turned out that no more planes crash in the Bermuda Triangle than anywhere else in the world. I found out that my street corner doesn’t hold more waste than any other place in Aarhus. It is something as simple as overconsumption that turns every street corner in Aarhus into a Bermuda Triangle — where things mysteriously come and go.
Photographs: Anton Bisgaard og Iben Parum
Participating artists:
Anne Kirsten Beck, Ida Kamille Kjær Braae og Jonas Skou Jonassen, Mathias Nymand og Sophie Bygballe, Ines Neidlinger og Constance Lee Krarup Belling, Mads Hvidkær Christoffersen og Clara Diab, Frida Nora, iovermorgen (Anne Bea and Stine Dines), Helene Søndergaard Jensen, Amanda Falck Weber og Ida Bølling Kongsted, Madison Lindsay, Johan Hvidtfeldt Rahbek, Laurits Evald Thingholm, Klara Thomasbjerg, Benedikte Hjort
Concept and idea:
Erik Valdemar Eriksen, Ida Kamille Braae and Mads Hvidkær Christoffersen
Curation and construction:
Ida Kamille Braae, Klara Thomasbjerg, Tuva Sveindal and Mads Hvidkær Christoffersen