#stuffiwonderabout

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Today I saw a show about human relationship to plants called green modernity tha had an interesting approach to the display politics of sustainability. Trying not just to be about sustainability but also to make the show as sustainable as possible. Using 90% recycled wood, skipping vinyl text for hand painted wall text, using only works that were on already on site at the museum, as well as a whole host of other initiatives that made the show as much of a practical demonstration of sustainability in itself, as a show about sustainability. Furthermore the show was very candid about the fact that lots of these initiatives were attempts and in process experiments rather perfect examples. Rather it seem to propose the need to rethink sustainability from the ground up rather than top down. Combining the knowledge of those who work hands on there and their deep knowledge of local resource use and ideas of how to reduce it and reduce the harm the institutions does. The show featured a few really good works, even if its format and themes were somewhat Conservative, i really enjoyed the air of hopeful experimental material pragmatism that one sense along side its artistic and Curatorial aims. I for one could only wish to see the Danish art instutions go the route of practicing what they preach a little more and cutting down a little on the hyperbolic discours in favour of a dose of vulnerability and experimentation. Often the knowledge and ideas of might be accomplished and how are already there on the ground, but disconnected from from those who do the programming and organising. #stuffiwonderabout (at Museum Ludwig Köln) https://www.instagram.com/p/CluHDThsm6b/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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The house that Karl Marx was born in today serves as Karl Marx House Museum in Trier while the house he lived in today is a one eurostore full of cheap low quality goods. It is almost too ironic to bear, and i spend some time wondering to my self why i found it so satisfying. Why I enjoyed finding such a clear example of how critique and dissent is coopeted and commodified. Perhaps it is because so many self proclaimed marxist i have encountered over the years as an artist-cum-pseudo-academic have sought to claim purity of though and objectivity. Often portraying themselves as somehow situated outside of the streams of desire of capitalism, instead of acknowledging the complex of complicity and dependence on the structures that I think characterise both the artworld and academia. It is as if the glee that i felt as i saw the one euro store combined with the slightly stifling feeling of the orthodoxy of the hero worshipping museum and formed a more complete and nuanced portrait of the legacy of Marx. One that is much less about Marx himself, his writing or ideas, but instead about how he has become idealised and misussed in Perhaps unavoidable ways. How ideas such as those of marx are a part of a contested commons of mutating and impure ideas. A shared imagination where the ideas of the past might yet be a chance to repeat history not just as a farce of orthodoxy but as a new hope. So i a round about way the fact that marx legeacy is partially kept alive by a one euro store points to the fact that we might still hope for new and weird hybrid ideas of the future to emerge. Something as removed from Marxism as what is sold there, hopes fuled by the unrealised potential of old and unrealised utopian dreams of a better world, something that do not claim to be outside of the problems they are trying solve or that there is a predefined recipe one might follow to achieve the perfect society. #stuffiwonderabout (at Porta-Nigra-Platz) https://www.instagram.com/p/Clsmg5_surf/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Apparently when the ancient romans build the Black Gate of Trier in Germany the side of the gate were never abraded, and the protruding stones made it impossible to install movable gates. Rendering its use as a defensive structure null and somehow foreshadowing their abonnement of the city many years later. I wonder if the romans in their day also somehow sensed the end of their society and kept the gates open to welcome change, or if was just a gesture of incompetent complacency and corruption. And I wonder how future generations might see our current complacency and what in many ways seems to be the endgame of Liberal democracy and the struggle for a sustainable society. Did we leave the door open to welcome change? or because we did not consider change an option? #stuffiwonderabout (at Porta-Nigra-Platz) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClqROYLs-Sy/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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#ihopethestreetswilleatyou #stuffiwonderabout (at Copenhagen) https://www.instagram.com/p/ClL7T5UMStl/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Recently I have been thinking about the uses of text in instutional space and struggles for control they express. What activities and ideas are sanctioned and what is considered illegitimate and usefull. I might be mistaken byt it seems like the idea of including wider sections of society through text has had the paradoxical effect of limiting individual agency and narrowing the gamut of the spectators possible interpretations. by making cultural norms explicit and making them the unembodied utterances of a generalised instutional voice, wr are left with nowhere to turn if we want to interact with the instution in nonstandard ways or have other ideas than those we are told to have. Thus there seems to have been a turn away from the art as site of open interpretation and agency to a prescriptive and restrictive instutional format. Surely there must be many ways of engendering and inclusive communal understanding of art works for those who are not a part of its codes and subcultures, while maintaining the audience sense of relatively free agency and the right to make their own interpretation and have their own associations. Surely it is possible to write texts that are not prescriptive but open up associations and possible readings without monopolising the production of meaning and restricting how art is used. Or perhaps even to find less text heavy approaches to give art context and historical legitimisation. Surely it is possible to have the enjoyment and understanding of art be an open, collective and democratic process in itself, rather that a prescriptive and didactic push towards a single predetermined and instutionally based interpretation. It must be possible to make instutions that are inclusive and democratic, not just show works about democracy and inclusion. #stuffiwonderabout https://www.instagram.com/p/ClBOz9Dsf9k/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Uncertain times call for uncertain opening hours? (Closed for now) #stuffiwonderabout (at Copenhagen) https://www.instagram.com/p/CkIF7lQsT0X/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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These are 4 perfectly fine if a little old, android phones found in the trash by my old friend Jan and donated to me. It is incredible to me that these have been thrown out without a second though including lost of private data and some of them even had sim cards that were still able to make calls. I have now wiped them and made them ready to be used as screens in my solo show at @bonamatic early next year. Probably one or two will have some issue that make them unusable in this specific use case, but i am sure they will come in handy at a later date. The choice to work with outdated technologies comes from my attempts at developing a way of workig that is sustainable both in terms of environmental and societal impact. I am looking for a way of working as an artist that does less harm and facilitates working on small budget outside of the mainstream. This approach means a lot of extra work and trouble trying figuring out how to get depreciated technologies, that have been left to rot, a "useful" afterlife. Even though for example the phones are free (or very cheap) the time expended getting them to work as they need to, is far greater than what i would need to work to earn enough funds to by something new and functional. So the question becomes how do i get time to work like this, to spend my time and resources more sustainable, when the economic support structures and instutions that i depend on for funding are reluctant to fund my time, but more than willing to support me buying new stuff or hiring others to do the work for me. How can i move from a fast economy of new stuff, to a sustainable slower one? How can i move towards an economy that expends less on materials and more on time? How can I hold on to a material practice, build on experiments with physical matter (fyi: i also consider software and digital work physical) while doing less harm? #stuffiwonderabout (at Captive Portal) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjpSqL6sATW/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

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Post apocalyptic vibes in the last remnants of Copenhagens industrial past. Improvised shops selling the mixture of nick-nack and mid century modern furniture in that you might find in any danish second hand shop. A messy, repuposed and temporary space put up Inside of an an old shipyard next to some unidentifiable industrial products stacked up the ceiling. Many languages spoken under a tarp canopy that covers where original buildings outer shell has begun to leak and let in water and cold air in from the putside. There is something hopefully about the unplanned and improvised reuse of something that originally served an quite different purpose. A feelings of possibility in that hints at how our build environment is only ever ours for a short while, bound as it is for future uses and ideas once we longer inhabit them. what now appears purposeful and inevitable will i time loose it meaning and become repurposed and misussed. For a time Become full of activities that have little social or monitary value ascribed to them, before some one yet again shapes them into something useful, or they become ruinous homes for other lifeforms whoes intentions and values we have little access to. Before gentrification fashioned its many possibilities futures into a single and profitable one it might become almost anything. A building situated between what it will become and what it has been, it remains full of untapped and undirected possibilities. It could yet become almost anything and house any kind of activity, and what happens here does so knowing that does so only for a limited time. This as yet undifined and malleable space carries its history as a promise that the future might still hold the hope of something new. A fragile feeling of a possible future, that is perhaps doomed to always be washed away by the tides of political grandstanding and rentier capitalism. Bit as long as it exists at least it reminds us that we might collectively have chosen to created another kind of city and made possibel another kind of life. #stuffiwonderabout (at Copenhagen) https://www.instagram.com/p/CjdE79cskA4/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=