Writings

Book publication with texts by:
Adam Bencard, Lasse Blond, James Bridle, Ryan Calo, Raffael Fasel, Louis de Gouyon Matignon, Lulu Anne Hansen, Bengt Holst, Michael Listner, Yoriko Otomo, Edward Payson Evans, Lucia Pietroiusti, Laurie Shannon, Jessica Sorensen, Mette Svendsen, Karina Vold, Eyal Weizman, Kumar Yogeeswaran & benandsebastian

A spectre is haunting the law – the spectre of the nonhuman.
Eight legal cases involving animals and robots
cast judgment across a spectrum.
The eight legal cases on which the artwork Silent Parties are based are a motley of mute participants in history: nonhumans that have been spoken for in courts of law because they do not have a voice of their own. Four of the legal cases concern animals that have been put on trial; the other four concern robots that have been at the centre of legal disputes. 

S I L E N T

P A R T I E S

Book publication with essays by Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch, Michael Marder and Ursula K. Le Guin



D E P A R T M E N T
O F  V O I D S

Every object has its double.
In front of the glass wall is doubt and indeterminacy.
Behind the glass wall is the promise of expert, exclusive knowledge.
On display here is the Department of Voids, a collection around which a taxonomy of absence has grown. It started with two empty transport cases for objects that had gone missing from a Copenhagen museum’s collection. Only the shell-like containers for the objects, carefully crafted and worn from much use, remained. All information about their contents’ identity and provenance had been lost…

Text published in MIT journal Thresholds

          mouth

“Open wide!” says the doctor.

We had been gazing at flakes of gold in a vessel and a small, perfect sphere: the nineteenth-century gilding bowl and pill displayed at the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. In the early days of modern pharmacology, wealthier patients would have their pills gilded in order to cover the taste of the medicine and make them look more attractive. The gilded pill would pass through the body undigested, making it available for reuse. One pill could serve entire families, passing through one body to the next. The golden pill is a placebo par excellence; the brilliance of its shell being designed to please, while simultaneously sealing away the pill’s contents and blocking them from having any physiological interaction with the patient’s body—or their child’s or grandchild’s. An edible heirloom, made valuable not only by the gold layer but also by its close contact with familial extensions of the self. And a gleaming bit to dig out of the ancestral shit.

G I L D I N G

O U R

G H O S T S

Text published in Kilimanjaro Magazine

M A K I N G   L O V E   T O   A R C H I T E C T U R E

 

ON THE 17th OF JUNE, 1979, a 25-year-old Swedish woman named Eija-Riitta Erklöff got married to the Berlin Wall. The ceremony on Groß-Ziethener Straße was witnessed by a small group of friends and was performed with the help of an understanding man who channeled vows on behalf of the wall. As the pioneer of the term ‘Objectum-Sexuality’, Eija-Riitta put a name to her attraction to objects, buildings and structures that she sees as sexual, loving and reciprocal – insofar as all objects are, in her view, sentient beings with souls…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

2 0 7 8   F I F T H
A V E N U E

 

HORROR VACUI, in other words a fear of empty spaces, could be seen to have shaped the tightly stuffed home of New Yorker brothers Homer and Langley Collyer, whose reclusive existence has been the subject of fascination since their deaths over sixty years ago. After living alone together for almost three decades, Homer and Langley died within ten feet and one week of each other.

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

C I T Y  o f   t h e
(R e) O R I E N T A T E D

DETACHMENT from the city’s multitude of distractions is only possible in small oases of isolation in City of the (Re)Orientated. In this city the ‘map’ has long been useless, its streets continually reshaped by their walkers, vendors, sponsors, hobby street-artists and salvation-sellers…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

M O U N T A I N
[…]

REPRESSION is revealed as lying under the façade of a neutral and anonymous workspace in Mountain […]. The mountain literally grows out of depression; as the adjustable height office table is lowered, contour lines spring up from the surface and its various strata are revealed…

Text from stabled and stored parallel project

S T O R E D

EDIFIED by institutions in Denmark and the United Kingdom respectively, these two male, white, living humans have been reared within educational establishments and cultivated with support from cultural agencies in ways that have enabled them to create objects for display in museums and similar spaces,  or to teach in similar institutions as they were schooled in themselves.

Text from Homecomings exhibition
ben: “I’ve been more fearful than fond of horses most of my life. They were never sweet playthings. More like scary masculine brutes. Horses used to strike the tarmac outside my childhood home at 7am every day. Up to the gallops. Like clockwork. Giant ‘Grand National’ bound machines with pneumatic legs, schizoid eyes and twitching metal flanks. Mechanical beasts cocked and coked up for the racetrack…”
sebastian: “The first thing I got, of course, was the ‘Grooming Parlour.’ This included a comb, various harnesses and other equestrian accoutrements, plus two hats and a plastic cat. I remember I was quite excited by the male shire horses with long hair on their feet.  For ages I wanted to get the Dream Castle. But for some reason that was simply too much, and probably too expensive. So I had to wait until my sister didn’t want to play with hers anymore, and then I inherited hers…”

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

T H E   O U T S I D E R  /  T H E   I N S I D E R

ESSENCE can be an elusive quality. The Outsider/The Insider consists of two chairs in one. ‘The Insider’ is a slender white chair cast in white concrete, with detailing that is reduced to the absolute minimum. While ‘The Insider’ strives for a purified ideal, ‘The Outsider’ carries the complexities of potential. Its fragmented form comprises the wooden shuttering in which ‘The Insider’ is cast. In contrast to the slender white ‘Insider’, the ‘Outsider’ is structurally elaborate and detailed, with its soft…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

M A D E  i n  R U I N S

FRAGMENTS of ruined architecture and construction sites simultaneously, the delicately collapsing and elaborately erected Made in Ruins & Seat […] stand as if caught in time. As both staircase and superstructure, chair and classical portico, ruin and construction site, the works exist in a state of spatial and temporal suspension…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

B U R I A L  o f  t h e     L A S T   Q U E E N       o f  D E N M A R K

FIGUREHEADS continue to hold symbolic power even after death in The Burial of the Last Queen of Denmark. A ritualised national event is retold as a future endpoint. The work is a water-driven mechanical theatre and architectural model housed in a bog oak sarcophagus. In it is staged the funeral procession for the last queen of Denmark. At their death Denmark’s monarchs have for centuries passed through Roskilde’s cathedral square before being laid to rest in the city’s cathedral. Here, the future event is projected as an assemblage of long-established urban rituals, in which the queen’s body is dismembered…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

S Å D A N   S E T . . .

PARADOX is celebrated in the film Sådan Set er Byen  (‘In a Way the City Is’), which contemplates the strangeness and absurdity within the familiarity of urban life. The film …

Book project

F O U N D A T I O N
D E P O S I T

FORGIVING one’s dues laid the foundation blocks of the Bankrupts’ Institute (2006), where the lives of resident, recovering bankrupts productively shape the life of the institution. ‘Foundation Deposit’ consists of three books that portray the architecture and everyday life at an institute for recovering bankrupts in Venice, three years after its foundation.

The institute was founded on the principle that ‘Bankruptcy is a Gift’…

Text from Phantom Limbs project

T H E  G I F T

LEGACY and its associated combination of rewards and debts are often at play within families of objects as well as families of people. The Gift is composed of a chair designed by Kaare Klint that is built into a vitrine also designed by Kaare Klint. The chair, elevated, amputated and dysfunctional in its new position within the vitrine, is both pacified and enthroned…

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

F O R G O T T O N   F O L L I E S  of  S Ø L Y S T

CONJECTURE was invited by The Forgotten Follies of Sølyst , which were cast in a ruined state within the wooded grounds of Sølyst Castle. The follies consisted of a series of oversized and dismembered classical architectural elements cast in white concrete. A collapsed colonnade caused visitors to stray from the castle’s manicured lawns into the surrounding woodland where they in turn stumbled upon The Forgotten Follies of Sølyst. The giant flutings, ruined columns, emerging dome and hieroglyphic details that comprised the follies took inspiration from the dreamlike, eroticised architectural descriptions in Francesca Colonna’s Hypnerotomachia Polyphili….

Text from Phantom Limbs exhibition

P H A N T O M  L I M B S

PROSTHETICS tell the story of the bodies they once fitted in terms of their absences. They cannot help but remind us of the absent limbs that they come to stand in for. Seen alone as bespoke pieces of craftsmanship, they recreate the absent contours of the individual’s body they were tailored to match, and of which they once formed part. Phantom Limbs make space for absence within the tightly-packed rooms of the museum. The teak vitrines that Kaare Klint designed for the museum’s artefacts have turned in on each other, knotted and interlocked in such a way as to repeatedly frame…

Text from Phantom Limbs project

C O M P L E T E L Y  D U S T Y

REJECTION of dust and other deviant dangers plays an important role in maintaining the illusion of order. Completely Dusty is composed of structure provided by benandsebastian and dust provided by Thorvaldsen’s Museum in Copenhagen. The work takes inspiration from Thorvaldsen’s plaster sculptures, whose porous surfaces are stained by decades of dust. Completely Dusty has not reached its full potential without the time taken for dust to settle into its underlying surfaces. The piece’s grooved walnut latticework and leather bindings both harbour dust and are fragile enough to be threatened by the delicate use of a feather duster. While dust slowly unsettles the piece’s obsessive order, attempting to thoroughly clean the piece would most likely lead to the work’s collapse. The piece both accommodates and defends the dust that we try to eliminate from our lives through clean lines and frictionless surfaces….

Interview with curator Cassandra Edlefsen Lasch
about Phantom Limbs exhibition
DAMn°: “Titling your exhibition ‘Phantom Limbs’ provokes viewers to discern what is missing or to imagine a wholeness that is visually absent. Can you speak of the various possibilities for locating ‘bodies’ and ‘limbs’ in this exhibition?”
benandsebastian: “Our exhibition, our works and texts,Designmuseum Danmark’s collection, and the museum building could all be seen as complete and self sufficient ‘bodies’. But this is a convenient illusion that we want to challenge through the theme of phantom limbs. Designmuseum Danmark’s own collection might appear logically ordered and complete, but we invite visitors to view it as a bizarre assemblage of dismembered objects that have been ‘amputated’ from their heterogeneous cultural contexts. Our own exhibition’s peripheries are intentionally ambiguous; we leave the visitor questioning when and whether or not they have left the exhibition. One visitor became convinced we were responsible for the loosening of a wobbly floor slab in front of our work ‘Made in Ruins’”

P R E S E N T

A B S E N C E