New Neighbours

CASPER AGUILA FREDERIK NÆBLERØD

New Neighbours CASPER AGUILA FREDERIK NÆBLERØD

CASPER AGUILA

New Neighbours 03/02/2021 16.30

CASPER CASPER AGUILA AGUILA FREDERIK FREDERIK NÆBLERØD NÆBLERØD

New New Neighbours Neighbours 03/02/2021 16.30

Mash good! Grrr!

Ce que nous appellons monstres ne le sont pas à Dieu, qui voit en l’immensité de son ouvrage l’infinité des formes qu’il y a comprinses “What we call monsters are not so to god, who sees in the immensity of his work the infinity of forms that he has comprised in it.“ (1580) Montaigne

New

Neighbours

Ruins and Beginnings Project: My Friend the Wind Project: The Cross Project: Memorial Flag Project: The Country Club Project: Rake over Ashes Project: Protection from Bad Weather Project: The Forest

EDITION LUCKY

Ruins and Beginnings We knew well the shattered summer cottage down on the beach between Kattegat and Flyndersø in Rørvig, Odsherred.

Mikkel Bogh Director, SMK – The National Gallery of Denmark

We’d visited it on our way to and from Korshage in all kinds of weather and at most times of the day. The place was sad and beautiful. So much destruction, so many images. The winter storm of December 2013 had blown out both its gables; sunsets and sunrises gleamed unhindered through the remaining rooms; the chimney with its eye-catching yellow bricks lay a short distance away, among the remains of the splintered structure. In the dislocated dwelling, so to speak, the bunk beds were still there, strangely untouched by the forces that had torn the house from its foundations. A saucepan still stood in the kitchen cupboard, on the stove a kettle. The wind had taken care of the main lines and allowed some lighter fixtures and fittings to stay put.

We weren’t the only ones who used to pass by the ruin.

It became a tourist attraction for visitors like ourselves who stayed in cottages during

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the summer. Everyone took photos of it. But not without a certain unease, I think. After all, the house was private; there were signs of the past residents – someone had once called it a home. Although the most personal possessions had been blown away or removed – and despite the fact that the house had suddenly and violently become part of the public beach – it felt like trespassing on private property, as if one was an intruder. The summer cottage had been turned inside-out by the wind and stood there like a tormented hybrid; halv cultural history, half living natural history. But did that then make it common property?

One day the place changed almost beyond recognition.

The ruin of the house on the beach had become a house once more. A space. The same locality, and yet a different house. Someone had occupied it and transformed the heap of rubbish into a place to stay. It had assumed

a form. We were astonished.

Was it the owners themselves who’d let the youngest generation of the family play at being squatters? New changes had been made every time we passed by, without our ever seeing anyone working on it.

We quickly understood that there were artists involved.

Paintings large and small appeared on the walls, along with figures painted directly onto the boards. All of them with an angular, skewed, robust Expressionism executed by a sure hand. Overpaintings of old photos and second hand pictures were also part of the exhibition. Carpentry, using materials that had apparently been found in place, had dexterously protected the house from further dilapidation and actually created new rooms, giving the house back its interior and, at the same time, transformed it into a picture. A ruin left behind by the storm had been transmuted into a statement.

I now recognised the style,

and found traces in the house that confirmed my intuition: the artist duo Casper Aguila and Frederik Næblerød had taken over. Today I know that they hadn’t asked the owner for permission. Like the rest of us, they’d entered the smashed house, but out of the ruin and what remained they’d conjured up a total installation, a round-the-clock, unmanned beach gallery. An exhibition venue, officially opened by the wind.

Like the other locations which Aguila & Næblerød have since converted into temporary, visual expressions and installations, the work in Rørvig – which has been given the title My Friend the Wind – isn’t without historical precedent. There are numerous examples of more or less spontaneously created joint works in deserted or occupied buildings – created, in an intoxicated rush, in an hour, or burgeoning over a period of several years – by professional visual artists or

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by creative squatters. In Denmark, one thinks of COBRA, or Asger Jorn, but also of artistic interventions in disused factory sites, of the graffiti scene and, especially when it comes to conversion with the aid of found and other cheap materials, of the camps in Thy, Jutland, and other locations. But there’s a difference between historical actions such as these and the Art Squats of Aguila & Næblerød.

My Friend the Wind and the other Odsherred-projects are not driven by social-revolutionary or distinctly institution-critical ambition. As a gesture it has few political implications. The installation is not part of an alternative society or a commune – it hasn’t been created for dwelling purposes, but instead conceived of as an exhibition venue and as the indicating of a location.

Should it have its own utopian perspectives, these would first and foremost consist in the dream of a refuge, the dream of something else than yet another private and a now

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soon storm-resistant summer residence, five metres from the shoreline in the middle of a public beach. There’s an insistence on keeping the channels of creativity open for as long as humanly possible, even if, for all its harmlessness, it must be on the wrong side of the Constitution’s word on the inviolability of private property. One senses a hint of a poetical-utopian thought in this investigation of how the imagination can take the opportunity to run loose in ways other than when we construct standard summer cottages, design interiors of private homes or build new urban precincts, where everything’s organised with the aim of creating maximum comfort for the individual owner and ensuring the greatest possible protection of the dwelling. The visual and architectural rhetoric that permeates the Aguila & Næblerød projects has to a high degree the character of spontaneity.

New private buildings,

even in the countryside, are nearly always hard, smooth, stylistically consistent and elegant. As a house, My

Friend the Wind, the first of the Odsherred projects, was different: well-constructed but movable, clumsy and angular, full of slanting walls, cracks and fissures, full of wild-growing pictures, colours, and mixed materials. It radiated its own instability.

But it had no message for the observer. In vain could one search for a manifesto or a consistent theme. In this and

later Odsherred projects, the paintings like the architecture are imaginative and associative, quick and playful. The boyish, foolish, grotesque and low-comedy horror universe meets up with a powerful discharge of energy and the inner urge to expand into a territory, a combat zone.

In a way, they address and play with the traditional idea of the interior design of the bourgeois home with its salon hangings and preference for knick-knacks and personal histories that belong to the formative influences on the owner’s personal narrative and identity. But with Aguila & Næblerød, there’s no signature at the bottom of the picture. The owner along with authorship has literally been blown away. The centre of these utterances is empty.

The strokes and lines and figures have something ‘primitive’ and ‘raw’ about them, almost flesh-like and confrontational. One senses an interest in the animal aspect of humanity and in

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forces that cannot be controlled – neither inside nor outside the body, neither in the soul nor in the community. Such themes were treated with great seriousness by the COBRA artists; Aguila & Næblerød themselves find it difficult to keep a straight face. Not because they don’t take themselves seriously, but because they allow themselves

Asger-Jorn-The-Little-Grey-Home-in-theWest-Modification

to have fun while doing so.

They allow themselves to turn painting and architecture into a kind of party celebrating the fact that this takes place. To keep themselves, the observer, and the imagination on the move would appear to be an important motif. As a workin-progress over several years,

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movement is also a prevailing motif. Rather than dwelling on what has been created, it’s a question of keeping the installation and its images in a state of dynamism where one element grows out of the other. Without origin or conclusion.

There’s a touch of graffiti about what they do. And yet not entirely so. They leave quickly made traces behind them, but not tags or signatures. The project does not derive from a wish to manifest an individual subcultural identity in a non-accommodating urban space. On the contrary, it’s constructive and regenerative. Like an imaginative ‘recreation’ of the Danish writer Kai Hoffmann’s house, which, lying further down the shore, has long since disappeared under the rising sea level, My Friend the Wind constructs a memory. It continues the story of a ruin and becomes part of the spirit of the place. Rather than erasing an older history and creating a new one, the artists

have so much surplus energy that they provide a new form which contains the history of the place and the writer’s own fantasy of a workplace in the open air. Nothing new and original is founded, but something is set in motion.

One could call it a beginning or the beginning of a continuation: the continuation of a history built on the ruins of the old one.

With their temporary transformation of the beach house and the other Odsherred projects, Aguila & Næblerød have created possi-

bilities for the freer movement of the materials and the images, language and thought. The installations naturally show the effects of time, of the history of places and of buildings, of the time of coming into being and of decaying. As such, they can be called places of transition. But even after their inevitable end as accessible physical manifestations, they can be visited. Not only in the pages of this book, but also as models of how a place can be expanded. As models of how what we thought was over and done with can become a space for creation.

A writer’s hut for all of us.

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PROJECTS

PROJECT: My Friend the Wind (2015 - 2018)

PROJECT: My Friend the Wind (2015 - 2018)

Fall what cannot stand. Home is where the heart is? Home is where my house is. Don’t we all strive for a place of our own where we can go and shut the door and decide who’s allowed to enter and who’s not?

If that sacred place of yours is torn down by something, nature is likely to be to blame. War can turn things upside down or, if you’re an enemy of state, you may have your belongings confiscated. Cyclones, typhons, earthquakes, tsunamis, fires aren’t friendly either and it may take them only a minute or two before all is lost. And we’re all to blame?

The Anthropocene Era hasn’t made things less complicated.

The cyclone did it and she has a name; we call her Bodil. She ravaged the coast of Denmark in December 2013 and one of her casualties was a historic summerhouse near Rørvig, Odsherred – a part of the countryside popular for its unspoiled nature and enticing bathing beaches much sought after by the citizens of Copenhagen who can reach Odsherred by car in an hour or so.

The house then belonged to the descendants of the Danish poet Kai Hofmann who back in 1919 – as did a great many other artists before and after him – sought tranquility in the countryside.

Hofmann preferred the countryside to the capital hoping to find there the necessary inspiration and peace in the

aftermath of the World War I. He wanted to write poems for ‘the new era’, but he didn’t want to keep this haven to himself, so he invited friends and fellow artists to stay and work. Hoffman is best known for his popular poem from 1924, Den danske sang er en ung blond pige (The Danish song is a fair young maiden) set to music in 1926 by the world famous Danish composer Carl Nielsen.

In the 1970s this original house was taken by the sea in an autumn storm and rebuilt further back from the shoreline.

By the time it was ravaged in 2013, the moving shoreline meant the summer residence of the Hoffmann’s was on the beach once again! If you strolled along the beach, you’d have to make a large detour around it. So when the cyclone saw it off, it was too great a temptation for the many Copenhageners who spend their holidays in Rørvig with their families. They had to have a peek inside.

The authors of this book, Mikkel Bogh and Line Rosenvinge, two of those who couldn’t resist the temptation – saw the interventions there as the work of true artists. A year or so after their separate visits, they talked together about the experience.

In the foreword, Bogh has described how he found the house ravaged, then occupied, then transformed. Back in 2013 he was the Dean of The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and recognized the style of a 26-year-old academy student, Frederik Næblerød and indeed it was he who had made the

intervention together with his friend, the photographer and painter Casper Aguila. But Bogh didn’t reveal this fact out of respect for the young artsquatters who’d been secretive about their identity.

The secret was kept until Art Critic Rosenvinge wrote a feature for the broadsheet weekly, Weekendavisen, comparing the clever transformation of the house to art installations by Ilya & Emilia Kabakov, Gordon Matta-Clark, Kurt Schwitter’s Merzhytta (a barn in Norway) and labelled it an Art Squat by an anonymous collective. The young artists then came forward, received their due credit, and were eventually nominated for the Art Critics Award by the Danish section of the AICA Association Internationale des Critiques d’art.

Art Squat is always temporary and you won’t find them on the official gallery lists. News about Art Squats circulate on social media only similar to the flyers of the techno raves in the 1990s. Some of them pop up and disappear before anyone really knows about them. Others become more established. You’ll find Art Squats in Berlin, London, New York, Paris and most major cities. Add to that Korshage, Odsherred.

Same same but different: countryside Art Squat isn’t anything like you’d find in an abandoned warehouse, ramshackle residential or such. Countryside Art Squat is more unexpected and you may have to travel far to find it, like a piece of Land Art with a site specific nature.

Squatting is illegal and the rightful owners, the Hoffmanns, disapproved of the work of Næblerød & Aguila. But it’s a fact that the artists, without any funding, took care of the ravaged house and turned it into an art venue open to the general public. And they went gently.

Removed the broken window panes, repaired the woodwork, painted walls

and ceilings, built new doors and a ladder, brought furniture in and kept the place tidy. Well, yes, they did paint most surfaces. But these wall paintings along with the framed photographs and the small sculptures, were worthy of a proper art gallery. Some of the works were stolen, of course. But the artists didn’t bother about that because whatever they did, they did it out of generosity.

Lots of people did drop by and passers by felt welcome. “Hej from Berlin”, it said on a note alongside greetings from other visitors. Entry was free of charge and it was open 24-7, with no gallery assistants to disturb, and no price lists to consider. Some saw it not only as an art venue, but a place to hang out.

Someone made a bonfire. Some spent the night there, but Næblerød & Aguila didn’t. To them it was a studio and an exhibition. For three, long, good years.

Until one day a bulldozer came and tore it all down.

have no fear say hi to the monsters * where did they come from? will they still be here tomorrow? * don’t tickle them they’re already aroused

My friend the wind will come from the hills When dawn will rise, he'll wake me again My friend the wind will tell me a secret He shares with me, he shares with me

* yes, yes * more wants more * turn around and there’s another fellow * come daylight and you’ll see it wasn’t just a dream * these beasts are for real * and this is the place where the monsters go

Who died?

A house did (AND DON’T YOU FORGET)

PROJECT: The Cross (2018)

The house of the poet Kai Hoffmann (1874-1949) and the house of the artists Næblerød & Aguila (2015-2018).

The original house from 1919 was taken by the sea in a winter storm and rebuilt by the Hoffmann family further away from the coastline. But this house was too taken down in a storm, inviting Næblerød & Aguila to partly rebuild the house, using the scattered materials and adding things brought to the site. There, right on the beach, the house was transformed and became a studio and a venue for open exhibitions. They called it My Friend the Wind, but that building too is gone.

In 2018 the Hoffmann family eventually sold the land and the new owner removed what was left of the house and had a new one built on a solid concrete base. For some months there was nothing there.

That is, nothing except the cross!

You could see the tall white cross from afar, and might think it’s a flagpole. But it’s not meant to guide you; it’s meant to make you think back. That’s why it bears the inscription 1874-1949 on one side and 2015-2018 on the other, remembering both the Hoffmanns and My Friend the Wind.

Under the cross, a white bench invited you to sit down. The bench was also brought and placed there by the artists.

A few weeks on someone had taken down the cross, but left the bench. Local anglers and young couples would sit there, an ideal spot from which to watch the sun go down.

1874-1949 The place from where to write poems for the new era.

2015-2018 An open air workplace fantasy comes true.

PROJECT: The Country Club (2018 - 2020)

PROJECT: The Country Club (2018 - 2020)

Let’s leave the city behind. Let’s go and find a haven in the countryside. Unblemished. Great potential waiting to be revealed. A farm. Yes, an old farm with an abandoned farmhouse, traces of past residents, and rubbish where the pigs once lived.

And so they moved in. The first thing was to do some tidying up here and there and turn it into a proper workplace. You can get used to having no water, no heating, no electricity. A smaller building, which at least had windows and a functioning door, could serve as a place to rest and keep their things. A few worn-out chairs and sofas rescued from the local recycling station would do just fine. And some garden furniture and some flower pots.

One thing lead to another. The pots, some of which were damaged, had a make-over with paint the artists had also picked up from the recycling station, which proved a generous supplier throughout. Kitchen doors and anything suitably shaped served as canvases for small pictures and various materials lent themselves to Arte Povera-like outdoor installations. They built plinths, rough plinths, and painted them all white.

When the long stable room had been cleared, the artists couldn’t help but see it as an ideal exhibition venue and so hung the small scale paintings and placed the splash-painted pots on the white plinths.

Indeed, this was no fancy White Cube with spotlights and a flat concrete floor.

This was an old stable with the glass long gone from the windows and no illumination but daylight. This was just how they wanted it to be.

And the murals. Murals all over! These large-scale painterly interventions were mostly collaborations and they worked on them continuously, while each couldn’t resist adding to the pieces the other was supposed to be working on alone.

At the end of the artists’ two-year-long work stay at the old farm some curators, critics, and collectors came to visit The Country Club, located near the Holbæk highway in the Odsherred countryside near Copenhagen. My Friend the Wind is the project that got them started, but The Country Club is the project with the most impressive yield, if you consider the number of large scale murals and the outdoor installations as well as the many minor paintings and sculptures. No wonder little groups travelled from the city to the countryside to get the chance to take it all in.

And this is The End of the story. The farmer who owned the land has sold the site to the local council, Odsherred, which needed the land for a new gasworks. Meanwhile the place become covered in graffiti tags so now very few things survive from The Country Club. Oh well, that is apart from the pictures of the happenings, gathered in this book so that you can see them. Enjoy.

you may enter a carnivalesque underworld * don’t stay too long * you may question what it means to be human *

open your mouth or close your eyes or scream at the top of your lungs * and smile while you’re at it

don’t even consider to even call them by their consider telling them y unheimlich *

tame them * don’t names * don’t yours * password

1945-1982 Nutcase Brains “To make life lighter and secure/ for troubled minds that need a cure/ is what these houses will ensure”

Things used to be different around here

PROJECT: Memorial Flag (2016-2017)

Memorials are here so we won’t forget. They remind us of good deeds and things to be proud of, or they’re here to say sorry. Do you want to remember the nutcases who, without being asked for their consent, donated their brains to science? do you want to say sorry?

Næblerød & Aguila do.

They want to be kind and respectful and they won’t let us forget. So here’s how it goes. They ran up a smiley face flag on a tall flagpole in the middle of an ancient landmark, a barrow, on the private property of a local Odsherred farmer.

‘But why?’ you might ask. Well, nobody knows why. It was just there until it wasn’t. No art people were invited for a festive opening with cold drinks and clever speeches. No press releases were issued. No little informative signs advertised the art and explained the concept and the context. And the farmer didn’t have a clue.

Usually, he or they who sponsor an – often costly – sculptural landmark have noble (or vain) motivations.

The Memorial Flag by Næblerød & Aguila is just here to say sorry.

But there’s a story to tell and a reason why the artists placed a flag on the barrow near Nykøbing.

In the years 1945-1982 around two thousand people who died had their brains removed by the personnel at the Psychiatric Hospital Nykøbing Sjælland. Without their knowing this would happen and without their prior consent – and without the consent of their next of kin or their guardians – they were buried in the hospital’s graveyard without their brains. In the service to science, even today their brains are kept in the Psychiatric Hospital Aarhus along with around seven thousand brains of other psychiatric patients who died while hospitalized during the same years.

Apparently these collections have been used for dementia research though nowadays neurologists prefer live signal scans of brain activity.

A dead brain is just a lump of wet tissue. Decorative, perhaps. But nothing more than that. So it wasn’t even worth it? Anyway, they deserve a memorial flag with an oversized smiley emoji fluttering in the wind.

Smile!

PROJECT: Rake over Ashes (2018)

This time they wanted to stay for as long as it pleased them.

They wanted to stay without having a bulldozer and a lawyer come after them.

This time they signed a lease and conditions were all clear and secure. Yeah. Let’s go make some art.

Well, there wasn’t any water, no heating either, and the place was a mess. No wonder nobody else wanted to rent this miserable building, but for the artists it was right on. They didn’t have to be tidy. They could pretty much do as they like. So they brought in their materials and began to work. Bliss. No one around. No one to interrupt and tell you what to do and what not to. No neighbours. Just work, work, work.

That is until the fire. Most likely the electrical fittings were outdated and blew. It happened at nighttime and you could see the flames from the nearest village, Nykøbing. Of course the fire brigade came to the rescue though there wasn’t much to rescue. A run-down, old building? No residents? No valuables? But lots of potential and a handful of broken dreams.

The young artists were allowed out of the lease, but had to find somewhere new. Legalities? Never again. Why do it the right way, the formal way? Nothing is certain anyway. What’s the advantage? None. It’s more appealing to squat. More daring, perhaps. Illegal too. But nothing is set in stone anyway, so keep moving. And so they did.

It happened at nighttime and you could see the flames from the nearest village

PROJECT: The Forest (2020-)

Well, there’s no land to defend or regions to conquer, though what these artists do when they squat is literally take the land, or, at least, use for a while what’s not really theirs. But when they do so, no general will encourage and inspire them with speeches. This is their struggle alone and they ramble on.

They’ve done the beach (My Friend the Wind and The Cross). They’ve done the field (Memorial Flag). They’ve done the farm and the countryside (The Country Club and Untitled). So what to do next?

The forest, of course!

As before, Næblerød & Aguila would wander the Odsherred countryside looking for a hidden spot to squat and came across a little deserted house in a forest away from any track. It seemed as though the previous resident had only just left. The house was clearly abandoned – and slightly spooky – and we might as well keep its whereabouts a secret. Maybe that’s all there is to say for now.

BACK IN CPH

a crowd came to see the show

PROJECT: Protection from Bad Weather (2020)

From the deep countryside north of the Danish capital to the headquarters of a renowned broadsheet daily with a kunsthalle-like exhibition space in the busy town hall square.

Is that doable?

They pulled it off. Shipped the raw stuff from the initially site-specific projects My Friend the Wind, The Cross and Memorial Flag to central Copenhagen and installed the enticing treats at the Politikens Forhal for all the passers by to see. A crowd turned up for the opening. Rumours had run ahead of it. For some time, the rural projects of Næblerød & Aguila had been the talk of town in the local art scene, yet only a few had actually visited the sites and seen it for themselves.

Indeed, the artist’s film, My Friend the Wind, has been exhibited at the Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen (and at the Voute Gallery, Marseille). Images of, and stories about, The Cross had circulated on Instagram under the hashtag #artsquatkorshage, and the Memorial Flag was the subject of a column by Line Rosenvinge in the Kunsten.nu art zine.

The Politikens Forhal exhibition, Protection from Bad Weather, and the Alice Folker Gallery exhibition OFF GRID, brought together these projects and was even acknowledged by The Danish Arts Foundation which rewarded the young artists – their first official recognition.

Who’d have known it would come to this? The boys just did it and one thing led to the next.

They wanted to get out of the city and they got the best out of it and then they brought back their findings and inspiration to the art world public. Thank you.

20 August 2016 Thinking about that summer when I discovered what appeared to be a collaborative art project by Frederik Næblerød and Casper Aguila. That autumn I got to meet them and call them by their first names.

21 October 2016 Another visit at the artsquat on the beach.

Windows and mirrors have been polished recently. Materials and items are all worn down and rambled but things seem tidy anyhow. Someone wrote on the wall. “Laurits slept here for one night.” Would I want to sleep here too? So many passers by. People who want to join and celebrate.

14 November 2016 I write a column about the Memorial Flag for the artzine Kunsten Publishing. The artists pitched me to do so. No press release, no other press at all. Glad that text at least got out. Did anybody else notice the Memorial Flag on the farmer’s field in the middle of nowhere? Frederik and Casper is from the generation of artists who’ll devote themselves to a project with little or no audience as long as it’s documented. The afterlife in photos can be just as authentic.

26 May 2017 The beach house art squat is still there.

Maybe I’m to be scared by the crocodile with sharp teeth. Maybe I’m to be provoked by the skinny man with a voluminous erection. These large-scale paintings on walls and cupboards and whatever are the work of Frederik. “It’s all in my head. All I’ve got to do is close my eyes”. A person in a wheelchair. A person with a gun. A bird that shits.

A face. Plenty of them. I can’t but think he’s got a messy mind, but the output is utterly painterly. It’s not just in his head it’s also in his hands. He may not be conscious about his style but he’s been working so intensely for a number of years that there’s a style to be noticed. The, mostly black and white, photos by Casper blend in as they depict the homeless, the squatters, the party leftovers.

14 February 2017 All window glass is gone, cracks appear, the walls open. Still sand is removed from the floor.

2 March 2017 What do they do when they’re not in the countryside working together? When I google Casper his photo stories on Vice Magazine pop up. They may be commissions but I get the feeling that he’s confident with the sub-cultural alternative milieus he portrays.

He’s not sent on a mission he just happened to be around. I can’t find any writings of his and when he talks he’s very factual. “I was there. I saw this. They did that.” There’s an attitude and a seriousness to be found in the method, the use of super tech cameras. These are not slapstick smartphone pictures, these are pictures of a photographer.

9 July 2017 Another visit at the beach house artsquat.

How do you take possession of a place?

Well, if you happen to carry with you buckets of paint and packs of photos the obvious answer is to cover all surfaces with pictures.

Anonymous all-white slick modern homes brighten up with a colourful artwork or two.

A home with no pictures isn’t very homely? Be they holiday snapshots on the fridge door, children’s drawings, design posters, art. When humans over 30,000 years ago covered cave walls it could’ve been to explain the hunt, but it might as well could’ve been to take possession of that particular cave. To make a mark. We were here.

To plaster your surroundings with visuals makes it more comfortable. To invite others in to have a look is generous. Or: to invite others in consolidates the fact that you were here. You’re a witness. Without doubt, Frederik and Casper want us to see them.

They shine. But I’m not the one to barely add to that shine I want them to give me something back and they do. Their taking possession of places gives me the courage to do so too, not as a painterly expression, but as a desire to make a mark.

22 February 2018 Would you invite them home? I did as part of a private salon in my home where they sit down on an old sofa surrounded by the salon guests for a conversation about their collaborative projects and their methods of working. Push the button and start. No preparations, no papers, just whatever’s on top up their mind. Once they begin to talk

they’d supplement one another and one thing leads to the next.

28 May 2018 Simon Boye from the major national broadcaster TV2 News wants to do a story about The Country Club and together with a camera man spends hours on site filming Frederik and Casper as they work and talk.

It’s obvious they’re very excited about having found the farm and being able to work there. As it turned out this art news isn’t prioritized in the general news. Instead a short version is edited for the news section for the young viewers and ends up with an impressive viewing rate. What’s not to like.

Frederik and Casper are likeable in the eyes of the young. Do you still say street? If so that’s what they are.

10 October 2018 Around Copenhagen I begin to notice tags with a certain figure and only very little variations. Some are huge, murals. Others are more discreet like the one near the main entrance at the National Bank of Denmark.

I document some of them and post them in my feed. Maybe Casper writes to me. Maybe he tells me it’s a collaborative thing and that he’s one of the key initiators. Maybe it’s spread around Europe, particularly Northern Germany and Southern France. Maybe lots of people have picked up this particular figure. Maybe there’s an account on Instagram that collects these figures. Maybe there’s over 16,500 followers.

24 December 2018 The church is packed but he’s the only one wearing a cap so I notice him right as I enter. He’s sitting next to his parents and I’m there with my family too. It’s an odd setting, but without doubt he’s a beloved son as much as he’s a hyped young painter. I’m surprised Frederik can sit down for a full hour. Maybe he watched the frescoes? His own pictures can be as devilish and grotesque as any Medieval fresco you’d find in a village church around the country.

Pictures meant to warn you and guide you to be moral and do good. Explicit pictures understandable even for those who don’t read or can’t follow the preacher’s speech.

But his are no illustrations, he conveals no

message and if there’s horror it’s happy horror. He isn’t afraid, nothing holds him back, he’s allowed.

23 February 2019 On my desk the catalogues Restless Rebellion and Art is a Party! from 2014 when The National Gallery of Denmark and the Museum Jorn celebrated the eponymous Asger Jorn. Jorn might be best known as the cofounder of the CoBrA movement (Copenhagen, Brussels, Amsterdam) and for his expressive paintings, though the CoBrA movement operated in the years 1948-1951 only. In the 1940s Jorn was inspired by and promoted Nordic folk art, jazz, Surrealism, children’s drawings and his overall enhancing open mind was grounded in political commitment. “Life is the purpose of art”.

Spontaneous. Abstract but still figurative.

Engaging. That’s Jorn. Together with fellow artists he’d do murals in a kindergarten, a summerhouse, a flat, a library and more.

He’d work with photographers, potters, architects, poets and his impressive productivity is a reference for a great many artists in Denmark. Frederik and Casper too? Political engagement aside, they too are spontaneous and engage with people and places and large scale paintings on any surface available.

18 June 2019 Casper spends the summer in Calanques and Malmousque, near Marseilles. It’s his tenth visit. I happened to spend a summer there in the mid nineties. We text about the city now and then. He sees roughness and poetry. He’ll go there with his girlfriend and their two children. I imagine that some day, some years from now: Casper spends the summer in Marseilles working from his house with the adjacent studio. Like the previous summers artists join and collaborations evolve. He’s not afraid of nudity.

5 December 2019 We meet up at their solo show Protection from Bad Weather at the Forhallen art space near the Townhall of Copenhagen. We hear the bells go at noon. There’s a drug store on the opposite corner from where you can get a handy fridge cold white wine in little bottles with a screw cap. I don’t do wine

before lunch.

5 January 2020 Frederik and Casper are in Berlin for a group show at the Haverkampf Gallery.

Kim and I are waiting for them to send pictures from past projects. We wait in vain.

Stories appear on social media and it's obvious Berlin was a blast.

12 February 2020 They’re late and we’re about to call it a day though I really wanted Kim, the designer, to meet the boys. Suddenly they appear on a fat wheeled bike, cruising. They were meant to work at the council sponsored studio that can be used free of charge on application from professional artists preparing for a show. The reason we couldn’t find them at the studio is that they’d rather be outside in a tent. The other artists in the dwelling didn’t like their music.

22 April 2020 Happy to be invited along to see The Country Club. There’s an art collector with his dog. I ride there together with two artists.

We’re in a pretty run-down Suzuki. We park next to a Tesla and a Lamborghini.

1 March 2020 Where does it all come from? There’s no filter, no obvious awareness of tradition. No logic, no reason. They don’t sit down and plan things. I wonder, is this Dada. No, not Dada. From 1915 and onwards the international Dada movement that counts artists such as John Heartfield, Richard Huelsenbeck and Tristan Tzara, were anti-bourgeois provocateurs who rejected cultural conformity and capitalist society and associated with the radical left-wing. They strongly discontented toward nationalism that they meant had led to the World War One and for this reason they wanted to leave behind all tradition and indulged in playfulness and intuition. In all their irrational acts and random outputs there was still an ideology behind. They didn’t want to do art, Dada wasn’t meant to be a categorization of artworks, it was considered a way of living.

They’d do public gatherings, discussions, demonstrations. They’d publish journals and manifestos, lots of them. And when

they wrote, painted and performed they’d call it anti-art in an attempt to stay unlabelled. Frederik and Casper don’t do anti-art. They smile as they say “this is arty”.

2 March 2020 Forget what I just said. Formally, there’s a lot of photomontage and assemblage just like early day Dada. Casper brings his photos to the art squat studio sites. Photos, some of which have also been presented, neatly framed, at the Arles Photo Festival. There’s also a lot of worked-over readymades and junk objects that are presented as collaborative sculptures. They may not be aware of it, but without Dada they’d probably have had a hard time doing what they do.

5 July 2020 Kim and I join a small crowd that pays a visit to The Country Club. We ride there together with a friend who’s into the arts. He can’t stand it and spends half of the visit waiting in the car. All these young art historians so excited. A museum curator, a gallery dealer, a critic. They all take pictures.

15 July 2020 Frederik is back at the island of Bornholm to do ceramics. He doesn’t answer any calls.

7 August 2020 Casper spends the summer together with his family at the Anneberg, I’m in Rørvig and can get there by bike. It’s super hot and cold water is all we’re having. When he’s in a studio of his own he allows himself to do flower-like abstractions on canvas with layers of crayon, concealer and crayon again. I didn’t know he had this in him. But when I think of his stories on social media they often include close ups of flowers and picturesque sunsets. And graveyard details. He seems happy. Happy enough to photograph sunsets and paint flowers and visit graveyards.

18 August 2020 John Irons, the translator of the foreword, sees in Frederik and Casper obvious links to another book he recently translated on Kurt Schwitters’ Merzhytta in Norway.

Schwitters fled further than he had to. Not only did he leave his native country Ger-

many, because the Nazi regime considered him a misfit, he fled deep into the countryside way up in Norway and found himself a primitive stone barn in the middle of nowhere, on the little island Hjertøya, since the 1850s a fishing village with nothing but a few fishermen’s racks. What in the first place, in the 1930s, functioned as a getaway for Schwitters ended up as a home in the years 1937-1940 and here he’d continue his pioneer work with two-dimensional collage and three-dimensional assemblage, painting and sculpture, without ever becoming part of the local art scene if there ever was one. The mainland was only ten minutes away, so he’d get his everyday necessities, but it seems the quiet was what he sought. When Germany occupied Norway in 1940 he moved on to England and found yet another primitive barn, in the English lake district, the rural Cumbria, near the village Elterwater. A beautiful spot. Wikipedia informs me that only a quarter of the houses in Elterwater are permanently occupied, the rest being holiday cottages. A beautiful spot indeed. The barn became a sculpture and the artist lived inside. An installation of stone, cement and found objects covered one of the walls. Damien Hirst, Anthony Gormley, Tacita Dean, Bridget Riley, and many other great British artists, not least Richard Hamilton, have supported and helped the preservation of the barn. Schwitters worked on it till his death in 1948.

Tuesday 25 August 2020 There’s an opening at the Alice Folker Gallery, Copenhagen, and the boys are in the show. I’m wearing my fancy green dress and get to meet new people. The boys showed up fashionably late and I didn’t even get to greet them.

Friday 4 September 2020 Kim has a home office and a balcony and of course we’d sit outside on this sunny day.

Frederik had rooibos tea, he hasn’t had coffee for years, afraid to be too speedy, still I’ve seen him drink fizzy drinks. Casper didn’t show up as it turned out he couldn’t get a ride from the countryside to the city and he hasn’t got a car of his own. Frederik’s on his phone, talking to a cousin. Or talking to Kim and I, phone in his hand, filming the

prints and the designs we’re talking about and that he shares with Casper. I’m thinking; does he sometimes paint with one hand and film with the other? Does he ever just talk with one person at a time?

11 September 2020 “I can fix it, I’ve got a hex key”. Frederik looks at Casper’s bike sattel. It’s an old bike. We’re standing outside Frederik’s studio because that’s where we tend to meet.

Casper’s studio is smaller. Frederik is excited about the event he’ll host over the weekend when family, some forty people, kids included will drop by. The white wine will be chilled. Frederik prefers white wine.

12 September 2020 They’re so young. Frederik’s born in 1988 and Casper in 1985 so that makes them 32 and 35 years old respectively. They seem determined that what they’re doing now is more or less what they’ll be doing forever.

15 September 2020 A kunsthalle close to where I live opens a small survey exhibition of the Danish artist P.J. Martin, the last to be included by Guy Debord in the Situationist Movement, making him he-who-closed-the-party or never left and let the idea fade. Far from Paris, in the Danish smalltown of Randers, he’d promote the anarchist Situationist thinking in the very same years that the core group stopped being active together. Later, in the 1980s, P.J. Martin works in five colours only: red, blue, yellow, black, white. He prefers the shiny lack paint used for bikes and pours the paint on canvases lying flat on the ground. One look and it’s obvious he worked fast. The take is similar to that of Frederik. I ask Frederik if he’s familiar with P.J. Martin’s work but he isn’t. The artists he knows of are closer in time. Like Jonathan Meese who doesn’t think of himself as a painter, more like a conceptual artist working with installation and performance as much as painting or sculpture. Meese.

Martin. The lot. Bundles of energy.

17 September 2020 Are these stage settings for an absurd theatre production? Are these remnants of a German Expressionist silent movie gone

technicolour? Did a cult pull some tricks?

The paintings are happenings, so many of the photos have had a makeover, the act is here as much as the object. It occurs to me that if anything they’re performance artists.

Why not. Performance art is the shit in this decade.

2 November 2020 If I were to curate a group show with contemporary painting I’d probably include Casper Aguila, Mamma Andersson, Aneta Kajzer, Jonathan Meese, Frederik Næblerød, Albert Oehlen, Daniel Richter, Luc Tuymans, and Clare Woods.

a dis-alienating, creative relationship to the built environment. Carnivalesque images often use an approach Bakhtin terms ‘grotesque realism’. This style transgresses the boundaries between bodily life and the field of art, bringing bodily functions into the field of art. It also celebrates incompleteness, transgression and the disruption of expectations. It often performs a kind of symbolic degradation aimed at bringing elevated phenomena ‘down to earth’ – to the material, bodily or sensuous level (with reference to Andrew Robinson’s Carnival against Capital).” It’s a bit of a mouthful, but it makes sense. To me, the carnivalesque has an innocent, unrestrained nature. I see the wild monsters on the loose and they don’t really scare me, but yes, I agree they’re disruptive elements in environments such as a beach house, a farm, a forest. Their creative relationship with the environments in which they appear are unsettling and invite me to imagine worlds with different boundaries.

Worlds with monsters called on any surface.

23 November 2020 Things are coming together for this book and the past months Kim and I have had endless discussions about the art of Frederik and Casper. He claims that my concept of Frederik and Casper as artsquatters doesn’t resonate with the current discourse of identity and collective social movements.

Instead he claims, their projects trigger transformative affects such as anger and anxiety. And then goes on about the monsters. The monsters as a recurring motif, particularly as murals, are an irruption of the unconscious into the built environment, a carnivalesque underworld. Kim calls, all excited because he the night before read Mikhail Bakhtin. Later in the afternoon he writes: “Bakhtin terms the ‘material bodily stratum’ that expresses and produces affects (with reference to Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World) and I believe that these monsters have a utopian aspect, inviting us to imagine a world with different boundaries, differently conceived relations with nature and between Self and Other. The images open up questions about what it means to be human, whilst producing affects that may be either comforting or unsettling yet produce

24 November 2020 There’s more to it. Kim adds: “The monstrous is notorious for its capacity to unsettle; tied to Freud’s notion of the ‘Uncanny’ it has the capacity to ‘generate material of uncertain epistemological status.’ Using monstrous imagery designed to provoke affects such as eroticism and disgust, the images transgress the fundamental limit between life and death as well as collapsing boundaries between bodies by exploring the transgression of presumed binaries such as human/animal human/nature desire/disgust, individual/social, wisdom/madness, mouth/anus. The body is radically dispersed within the context of Frederik and Casper’s projects, it raises the question as to what it is to feel at ‘home’. I try to imagine what the country club or the writers hut would look like without any art, and think it would be desolate and unhomely. Disembodied teeth, penises and vaginas – as we find them in the murals – seem transgressive because they return us to ‘partial objects’, deconstructing the unity of the self and returning us to the material bodily stratum through emphasis on the body. They give living form to the buildings, turning inert matter into organic mouths, and transgress self/other

10 October 2020 I imagine that on the occasion of his 40th birthday the papers portrays Frederik and writes: “Through expressionist brushwork, surrealist methodology, and self-conscious amateurism his oeuvre is a testament to the innate freedom of the creative act.” Something like that.

relations, drawing the buildings closer to human experience, suspending alienation.

The amorphous fears are brought ‘down to earth’ through parody and degradation, and turned into something worldly that can be overcome, stripped of its metaphysical pretensions. It tends to produce a sense of freedom conditioned on complete fearlessness.”

I too see the fearlessness and the emphasis of the raw bodily experience, but I also see the gratitude and the poetry. The pictures of sunsets and a butterfly (for they too are part of the images that come out of their projects) as expressions of the sheer gratitude of being here and now. I admit that I’m not that likely to see death, eroticism, alienation suspended, symbolic degradation and such. I see the grotesque realism as proof there’s a party going on. But I also see Frederik and Casper’s persistence, their collective endeavours, as an honest try and belief in that other worlds are possible. Not as up-front critique but innate wildness.

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