Memoirs of the Abyss: Liquid Ground
Samtalekøkken, Koncertkirken, Blågårds Plads
27 November, 18.00-24.00
Organized by SixtyEight Art Institute and Malou Solfjeld
In extension of and addition to the exhibition and research project Memoirs of the Abyss: Three Ecologies and More, curator Malou Solfjeld and SixtyEight Art Institute hosted an ambitious one-day exhibition in which performances, film screenings, conversations, and dinner and drinks all reflected on historical, contemporary and future mechanisms in the relation of human beings to the earth’s resources. The event took place on 27 November 2021, in Koncertkirken on Blågårds Plads, Copenhagen.
Line Up
Screenings and Artist Talks:
Enar de Dios Rodriguez: Liquid Ground
Madeleine Andersson: Dirty Coal
Mette Riise: The Less Unsustainable Talkshow
Works in the space:
Georg Jagunov: Chrysalis
Signe Vad: Placenta Rugs and Death to the Death Star
Sound piece:
Morten Søndergaard: Speos
Reading and talk:
The Caribbean Housewife aka Jamain Brigitha: Where are you from?
Black Girl on Mars aka Lesley Ann Brown: Decolonial Daughter
Food: Send Flere Krydderier
Wine: Oinofilia
Video documentation showing highlights from the event will follow in due course.
Bios
Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a Vienna based Spanish artist, concerned with mapping as a timeless tool of control. She examines how human actions change and radically alter land and seascapes, often leading to invasive operations that destroy biodiversity. Liquid Ground is a video essay composed as a set of riddles. Throughout 30 minutes, the award-winning artwork talks about colonialism, ecology and representation through found footage of historical and contemporary deep-sea explorations: from illustrations of the first worldwide oceanographic expedition with HMS Challenger (1858) to current technologies and visions related to mapping the ocean floors with the prospect of mining the seabed.
Lesley-Ann Brown is a Brooklyn-born writer with roots in the Caribbean. She writes from Trinidad and Tobago, Brooklyn, New York, Møn and Copenhagen, Denmark. Her book “Decolonial Daughter: Letters from a Black Woman to her European Son” (Repeater Books, 2018) focuses on matrilineality, and its relation to land and sea. In 2021 “Black Girl on Mars”, a collection of essays, will follow. For the Samtalekøkken on Nov 27th she will perform her own interpretation of H.C. Andersson’s The Little Mermaid – a Caribbean Version, deconstructing the fairytale in favour of a decolonial story exposing the history of Copenhagen Harbour, the Danish involvement in human trafficking across the sea, and the mythical Mama Wata making justice.
Jamain Brigitha aka The Caribbean Housewife, is an artist, curator, and creative entrepreneur who realizes projects and events worldwide. Besides her incredible hot soul soup kitchen, she is known for her spectacular pricelist, indicating a price range between 500 and 1 million kroner for questions like: “Where are you from?” “How long have you been in Denmark?” “How did you get here?” Asking for her recipes will cost you 5 million DKK. You can right now visit her and taste the renowned Housewife Roast at Sønder Boulevard 53, Wednesdays only. For our event at Koncertkirken, she will take a break from cooking and instead engage in a conversation about the question: “Where are you from?”
Madeleine Andersson is a Swedish artist currently enrolled in the master program of the Royal Art Academy in Copenhagen. Her research project Petrosexuality examines sexual connotations within an industrial discourse. Her video work Dirty Coal was shown at SixtyEight Art Institute earlier this year, hidden away to surprise visitors in the most private space of the ladies' and mens' room. As part of the exhibition Memoirs of the Abyss: Three Ecologies and More, the work offered a humorous yet deeply sincere take on humanity’s perverse and self-destructive drive to exploit the resources of the Earth.
Georg Jagunov was born in Russia, spend his childhood in Belarus and moved to Denmark in 1998. He studied at The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen (2005-2011). Developing biosanctuarys from Als to Nørrebro, Georg recently transformed his studio into a spaceship of flint and moss. With his Chrysalis cocoon, Georg seeks to extend the projection screen surface by merging digital animation with sculpture, sound and spatial elements. Cocoon is a symbol of new life in becoming and the meeting with the unknown.
Morten Søndergaard is a Danish author, word and sound artist and amateur speleologist based amongst olive trees in Italy. He has translated several works by Jorge Louis Borges, and in 2019 he created the impressive group exhibition “Sproghospitalet” (The Language Hospital) at Sorø Kunstmuseum, which examined how both language and the body consist of many interdependent parts, and how both body and language can become sick, or even fall apart. But perhaps words can also function as medicine, as is the case in his Word Pharmacy. The work presented on this occasion, Speos, is a bodily and verbal exploration of a mountain from the inside. A sci-fi documentary of a mission through underground tunnels in search of the chamber of silence. The sound journey is composed of ambient music, a poetic storyline, and the soundscape from within the actual cave expedition, all published in stone.
Signe Vad is a Copenhagen-based artist recognized for her ecological, activistic and performative artistic praxis and her on-going work with the Syndicate of Creatures (tSoC), Office of Emergency and Voices of Pythia. All projects characterized by collaborative approaches to addressing the current climate crisis and human caused mass extinction. For this occasion, she will present her placenta rugs – digitally woven blankets with the tree of life as its motif. Each placenta has been picked up by the artist directly from the mother in her home or hospital, shortly after birth. Instead of becoming a leftover material after nine months of pregnancy, the placenta is now immortalized as an artwork. Furthermore, it is transformed into a sacred item, in which people can wrap themselves in a ritual of re-birth and as a comforting reminder of the caring, nurturing, and life-giving functions the placenta once had for the fetus in the womb.
Mette Riise is a Danish performance artist who recently graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. She is currently enrolled in the master program at the Academy Konsthögskolan in Malmø. In her practice Riise engages herself in the business world and combines the tragic story of capitalism and climate with critical satire and comedy. She is currently researching the castle in the air called “green growth”, by pointing to the fact that an ever expanding economy will never be sustainable. She is concerned with the white male supremacy and has been touring with her consultancy tutorial “How to build an artist brand” with special attention to the extreme underrepresentation of female artists in museums, collections, auctions and galleries.
