(day 1)
I was seven minutes late for picking up M. with her multiple shopping bags with art supplies like used paint rollers, ancient electric cables and claw hammers. Together with my golden bag and golden floor isolation we drove off to a place near Bremen in Germany to spend the night. But first I needed to buy something at the supermarket at the Overtoom with my bankpass to have evidence that I started the trip from my place of living, on this particular day. I bought apples and tangerines. I think that the parents of the lady lived in the apartment, before they passed away. There is a door between the two houses and everything ist super sauber. The lock on the toilet door is located inside the doorknob, very ingenious and almost invisible at first. So we yelled at each other when sitting on the toilet. M. bought a pre-cooked potato for dinner with a huge bag with sauce. I bought a salad at a reduced price because of the expired date. We had a great meal together.
(day 2)
In our dead-end street Sunday morning is for driving your Mercedes-Benz to the nearby bakery around the corner and driving back like crazy with a single paper bag full of kaiserbrötchen. A grouse is displaying itself at the edge of a potato field. The landlady was very happy with our compliments. In the file a van on our left side drove with the door open and a man with a beer can screamed hello to us, or something like that, we couldn’t hear him. We were all very slow. In Denmark the light was light, lighter than in Germany. The red in the traffic signs… the road through Augustenborg leads to Augustiana, a palace used as a museum surrounded by cobblestones and artworks. And the other artists.The volunteer didn’t know we were coming. For two weeks. With rest materials. We needed to go within five minutes because she wanted to close the place. I have a room in the attic. I dreamt about an artist who came to talk with me about her career. She was invited for an Artist-in-Residency, a well-known one. When I told her I didn’t know the place she told me I was stupid. I told her to go and never come back. I slept well.
(day 3)
Yesterday I met five other artists that will participate in the Poubelle project. Mirjam, Lisbeth, Yvette, Philip-Donald and Iris. I got up this morning and ran for 45 minutes to the fjord and back, thinking about art and myself and all the clothes I need. And that art is not something without me. I found two bags of clothes in the barn and I am planning to make a registration of myself while changing clothes all the time. The white clothes I want to sew together for the very small and intelligent Princess Louise Christine Caroline. Besides that I am planning to make two ‘philosophical’ columns of darker clothes. Ronald de Ceuster came this afternoon, and Jens Chr Jensen as well. When the risotto was ready Faller und Budasz and their children arrived.
I checked out the thrift shops in this village Augustenborg but I probably was a very strange duck because the lady of the shop came to hang things straight, things very close to me several times. I like to be a strange duck. They had one pair of trousers I might buy next week when I probably ran out of trousers.
Mirjam is hunting mosquitoes with a cloth to dry the dishes. Ronald showed me a picture of a work of art he made in a split second in the attic of the White Palace. A transparent box with a crushed piece of golden folie. I liked it.
(day 4)
Maybe. Maybe it’s. Maybe it’s not a word. Maybe it’s not a word, a word really. Maybe it’s not really a word that I found.
These words came to mind while running this morning. The first draft ended with: I give it back. But I removed it, too much drama. I tried to get to work before everyone else but I didn’t succeed. Ronald knocked on my door in search of the keys from the ‘working palace’.
To find something. To find something out, a word or a moment of revelation.
I have been changing clothes in front of the camera almost the whole day. The computer has difficulties with downloading, so tomorrow I will only add a few sessions. I am not patient enough. And I am easily bored. I got fantastically bored with all the H&M clothes. I will bring them to the Red Cross second hand store in Sønderborg. A good excuus.Matthieu and Ariane are installing a creature with blue tentacles going everywhere on the first floor in the White Palace.I am just going to use the white, crème, soft grey and pink, and lily clothes in a wall in front of overpaintings in white. Mirjam is giving some woods back to the giant oak tree, some are balancing just right enough. A very kind man from the village drove almost over her kinetic work with his trailer full of rusty fences. When he wanted to open the door of his car he nevertheless put his very big hands on the installation to put it aside.
(day 5)
There are two transport bikes, one very old ‘oma’ bike and a sportbike in the barn. We are allowed to use three of them, they all have flat tyres except the sporty one. But that one is locked. I suggested using an angle grinder. Mirjam thought that it might be someone's bike and therefore locked. Yes. Yesterday evening we talked a little bit about politics. Ronald mentioned a column in a daily Dutch newspaper that compared Caroline van der Plas with Alice in Wonderland falling into a rabbit hole. I ran to Costa Del Seflev, a beautiful ‘strand’ with a demolished ironmade jetty. I thought about Alice and the game that is played by the queen, getting a ball or something through racks or small fences. So I need an angle grinder to grind my way to the princes. And then to the queen.
Philip Donald and Yvette, duo Pannas and Tulip have a iron saw to borrow. That’s great. After I finished filming the dressingfilm I saw Jens tearing up the iron racks I wanted to use. I felt like an amateur as I am, but talking helps, he only needed some little pieces. I don’t need to cry or worse.
During lunch Iris, who is originally from Iceland, spat her heart out by telling us that she had a severe panic attack the day before, her stomach did hurt from it. Therefore it was impossible to take on an extra task like cooking dinner for ten people. I thought it was a brave thing to tell us. Iris makes tiny works between the cobblestones and manhole covers. Later, when she showed me where I could set up my ‘Alice’ installation in the park I confessed to her that I had experienced the same ( if you can ever know), uneasy feeling. I sawed the iron racks in pieces and put them in the grass. And after making two new objects of pieces of clothes and iron elements I thought that I had made enough art for the day and offered to do the shopping ( and went to four thrift shops in Søderborg ) and the cooking.
(day 6)
What is minimal. When is a word found by you, by someone else. When is something ready. When do you know it’s the end of the rabbit hole and not the beginning. When is it you and not you. When do you know how deep you are allowed to dig. Do you think gold is pretty. Is it allowed to despise a robot lawn mower for mowing over your artwork in progress.
After running I went swimming in the fjord in my underwear.
Can you help me. To build this wall of us. To think about Alice. To describe the game. Can your art be mine. I found your art, now it’s mine. Now it’s mine too.
I helped Jens with a new artwork, he almost screwed the screw in my finger. Nice man wearing beautiful socks knitted by his sister.
Lisbeth Parisius and Mirjam Berloth started to put the artworks in the White Palace, sculptures by Ronald de Ceuster, Pannas and Tulip, and those they made themselves. It’s ‘real’.
(day 7)
I cannot sleep this night. This installation with clothes in soft colors isn’t filling up something I thought it would. I keep thinking in circles how I can make it work. Maybe cover it with roof tiles, or make it square with glass or perspex on top. A yellow piece of wood attaching to the wall. Sew it all together and hang it in the air. Tape it, make it more abstract, yes and hang it, with the poem written with dust from the attic underneath. The little green sculpture should go, it only worked in the Red Palace. Yes I think I am going to tape it, if it’s allowed to use tape. And add a larger uberpainting with the cut á la Fontana.
Early in the morning a giant plumber came to resolve our toilet problem, after our plead from yesterday. We are amazed how quick this help came. Maybe they have lesser work because their way of constructing is more solid.
I must say, after the two workshops with the children from and around Augustenborg, I will not change the work I thought about Alice, because of the simple and dubious reason that a lot of people reacted very strongly to the installation. In a positive way.
They couldn’t explain but it came to them. I cannot express how happy I am. We heard from the teachers that the children were reacting extraordinary good on the workshops, some pupils were difficult to work with but this ‘action art class’ was really working for them. All the pupils wanted to come back next week.
I made a new work ‘ the princess’s party’, and I started a Gertrud Dentjens and a Fontana work. Art is filling something you didn’t know. Grab it.
After we said goodbye to the couple Faller und Budasz, promising a quick rendezvous, Mirjam and I went for a quicker red cross shop in Guderup. She found fantastic Saucony running shoes. The ladies of the shop were horribly nice, one spoke English very well. I was happy for Mirjam and jealous, size 38,5 is too small for me.
(day 8)
I noticed an Agnes Martin in the lawn of the palace. The last words were how images are gifts. It means a lot but I do not know the words. The curtains are outside the window. Today Simon Gorm Andersen arrived, a very friendly artist from Copenhagen who is generally making sculptures with soft materials, circled with threads and wool. He is here for two days, so he is working like crazy. In the late afternoon he took a dip,in the wTer with Mirjam and me, with one finger high in the sky because it had a nasty cut.
I started early today, Still thinking about the man in the gray suit and fresh blue shirt from the sixties, he was walking his dachshund at seven. I finished an uberpainting and enlarged my new installation, far more abstract then ‘I thought about Alice’.At ten I went for a drive just to be away from the area and have my own thoughts. I ran into a giant messy but organized thriftshop where I found a beautiful Wrangler jeans. I should bring Mirjam there when it’s open again on wednesday, besides another one in another village.
Petra van Aken is a performing artist and she used Lisbeth, Mirjam and me to try out her workshop. I think we did well, and with souplesse, although we were busy with art and the visitors to come in our heads.
It is Saturday and they all came, mostly elderly people. Our kind of art seemed very new to most of them but they apparently enjoyed and got some clue after some explaining. And a good advice: just let it come in. The performance by Petra was spectacular, foremost because of her transformation from a distinguished lady into a madwoman almost naked. Lots of telephones were filming. To show at home.
(day 9)
It was a fabulous sight, deer running to the far end of the sunlit dewy meadow. Obviously they were running because of me. I am sorry for that. Sunday the 22 of September. We will have visitors in the Augustiana White Palace and in our open studio’s in the Red Palace. I feel like making a sound system. It’s nice not to know how yet.
The work by Simon has been placed in the White Palace, it’s a fabulous amorphous piece of work, leaning against the doorframe talking with the creeping work by Faller und Budasz going everywhere. There were quite a lot of visitors, most of them very shy, by nature I think, but also because of our kind of work. Some asked me in perfect English: what were you thinking while making this work? My answer more or less was: When I start a new work, most of the time in the middle of another work, I am not thinking at all. I gather the materials that fascinate me, picking them with my senses and begin to combine them almost with my eyes closed. What I think what happens is that all the stories I have heard, red, the images I have seen, felt and smelt, come together in an installation, forming a new atmosphere in which I can be and hopefully shake hands with the audience. In the case of ‘I thought about Alice’ a soft wall of clothes came into being, without the means of a boundary, au contraire, with lots of possibilities. That’s why the paintings are mostly überpainted in white. The white light on Als.
(day 10)
It was totally foggy until eight o’clock. The sun rose with her fellow suns to whiten up the land. To finish what I wrote yesterday, a piece of ( abstract ) work is telling a story not told yet. It’s our story, mine and yours. Yes. And at the same moment I said too much. Forget about the words and let it happen.
We might have a day off, if we can manage not to make any form of art. At 10.30 Mirjam and I went off to the North, Nordborg and Havnbjerg. The latter had a recycle shop annex café for the jeux de boulles club. It smelt like warm food and the ladies were nice and spoke English, all the ladies ( always ladies) of a certain speak very well English. But you could only pay with cash or with a pay system only available for Scandinavian citizens. So we let our nice things in search for a bank. After the cashing we went sightseeing and to the sea. It was brighter than the Mediterranean Sea. In Nordborg the shopping street is with empty shops, except for two thrift shops and a Wok Palace. I bought five packages of chamomile tea at the Netto. At Augustiana we met Jens Chr.Jensen and our new colleague Marie J. Engelsvold.
I threw the sound system out and finished a work on paper: I try I try. I am very happy with it. It is nice to throw things out. I made a wonderful tortilla. If I may say so.
(day 11)
I have a rectification to make. To create an atmosphere where one can be, for an instant most of the time.
Jens was looking at parts of my installation with the schnapps glasses. He needed one a little bit taller than one of his in his own installation. The big exchange will occur today. During the slow run of this morning two works popped up in my mind. I am curious if I am going to get them into being, anxious of boredom.
I went to work with my headphones on, so many people and energy and materials around. After a little start we went with all of us to the ‘genbrug’, a gigantic place where cars are driving on and on and we were allowed to pick whatever we wanted to. I dove into the textile container. Once home I started to sort out seven huge plastic bags on the lookout for white fabrics. I would like to stitch together some white blouses. I haven't found them yet. What I did find were unfinished knitting works, in the white, beige and crème. I laid them out on the ground as a part of my room filling installation. Philip and Yvette made great wall art pieces in the room next to mine
Jens had to leave, such a pity. He placed a beautiful sculpture in the White Palace.
I cooked pumpkin soup and made a huge salad. Unfortunately Lisbeth was too tired to stay. Marie showed Mirjam and me some nice exhibition places here in Denmark. How can we ever leave? I probably will take the work I made today down, or it will be in a larger group.
I did a video selfie.
(day 12)
I looked at my fingers during the video selfie ‘brush’ and thought they are actually beautiful. I had my headphones on and listened to the music by Michael Gordon. After one and a half week working with the Poubelle artists at Augustiana I am questioning…..today I wish to sew pieces of sheets together for the princes to get out, or to get in. I did, and am feeling good about it, especially the yellow areas on pillow covers. Iris came during lunch, we couldn’t do without her view on art in daily life, and what art can bring. Her installation was placed in the White Palace, as well as that of Marjolein Knottenbelt. We helped her a bit, each one of us took a random thing from the potato shed and placed it on the floor. It turned out fabulous.
I had to bring one of the rented bikes back ( when I put it in the car a reflector went off, luckily nobody saw it ). The bike boy was very friendly. I like that. I always like that very much. I needed some time alone so I drove around a little bit longer, visiting some fantastic Danish thrift shops. In the meantime Lisbeth’s work was situated in the Palace, so now the exhibition is waiting for a work by Marie.
Yesterday evening I finished the video’s ‘ brush ‘ and ‘ tooi ‘. Tonight we are going to eat together at the Holiday house of the family of Lisbeth, and watch ‘tooi’. It’s only two minutes and thirty seconds.
(day 13)
Today is going to be a good day. Running in the rain at seven a.m., I ran into two other elder runners, one with a dog, very slow on the leash, and the other in bright lemon running gear coming over the same slippery path. When I came into the studio Marie was already at work, making wonderful steady and at the same time fragile works. Now and then something hard falls on the floor, she probably needs to start again. I sorted out my last bag of textile from the ‘genbrug plads’ and found a bag with a very rough cloud of cotton and a pair of off-pink pantyhoses. It became a floor installation. The one that I made yesterday I declared unvollendet finished: Z.t. ( through 3). Mirjam was working all day to make a list with the works and the artists text for visitors of the museum. I admire her doing so. I run away shopping in Sonderborg to check out a new supermarket Rema 1000, but I like the Netto better, because of the warmer atmosphere. It still rained and I wanted to see more from Sonderborg. Fortunately the Netto was situated next to a Kirkens Korshaer Genbrug where I could buy this wonderful selfmade eggyellow spencer a little bit too little.
I was just in time to have a tour through the building of our neighbors, a former psychiatric hospital, now used as studio’s. One one-person room for three or two artists. Amazing how small and on top of each other. They have to pay forty euros a month. So that was the good thing. After the tour there offered us giant sandwiches overloaded with different kind of toppings in fascinating combinations. And a Danish snaps on the side. After a sip my legs went rubbery.
(day 14)
Thursday evening we got lectured in the history of performance art by Petra van Aken. Except Mirjam, Lisbeth and Marie, we had an interested person from Søderborg as well. Petra is a very enthusiastic speaker. You can feel that her heart is totally into performance art. I liked the part on the duration - and simple performances best. Petra will conduct a workshop of performance dance today for people from the community. Philip and Yvette came to Augustiana quite early to help sort out all the discarded ‘treasures’, because on Sunday afternoon most of the things have to be transported to the ‘Genburg plads’. In Denmark one is supposed to separate all the garbage very strictly. After lunch with the sandwiches donated by the ‘commune’ and the scrambled eggs made by Mirjam and the stinky cheese I accidentally bought yesterday, we went to install the work of Marie J. Engelsvold in the White Palace. Her hanging objects looked like giant jewelry. Princess Louise would probably be very grateful. Philip did the lamps and Yvette sneaked a work by Lisbeth Parisius into the room. The leaning person high perspex plate against a metal pipe by Mirjam moved to another spot, her work can handle almost anything, as minimal as it is.
(day 15)
First thing, it’s going to be a good day. Second, I think my computer broke down. It doesn’t want to go on the internet, in no way.
Yesterday evening Petra organized a performance/dance workshop in the Red Palace. I participated last week, Marie and some ladies from Augustenborg were having a wonderful time this session.
I thought that the Genburg plads would be open at 7.00, but it is at 10.00. I have to wait to get rid of ten bags of hard plastic and cardboard. And afterwards I felt to drive along and along and along, seeing some other villages and even a church with two towers.
I came back at twelve o’clock the first visitors arrived, on we went! We started with the assignment from Joanneke, she had asked us to gather white materials and form HELP HELPS on the lawn. Yvette did a good job,and luckily the sun made the words glimmer and shine. Inside the White Palace Mirjam introduced the artist and there works to the visitors and we took turns to tell how more or less the artwork came i to existence. Fluently Petra took over with a minimalistic performance reacting on the artworks. I could tell that the audience was fascinated. One lady of a very old age started to dance with her in the middle of the performance. Beautiful. In front of the potato house Pannas and Tulip explained their workshop. Each person was supposed to add an object to the object of the previous person in order to create a Poubelle artwork together. The last performance of the day started with Philip and me standing very still on the lawn next to HELP HELPS, waiting for the wheelbarrows full of different kind of materials. Marie and Petra began to dress us up with extraordinary ‘ clothing’ like pillows, cardboard boxes, garden hoses etcetera etcetera. At the end we looked like sculptures, we could have stepped out of an Oskar Schlemmer performance, barely able to walk. The director of the Augustiana Kunsthalle told us that it had been a long time since there were so many visitors during an exhibition.
Lisbeth and Mirjam ordered pizza and the salad was on me.
(day 16)
The last full day at Augustiana. The house smells like pizza. Yesterday evening we said goodbye to Petra and Jeroen. Marie needed to go as well. We had such a good time, I am very grateful to have met such nice people and interesting artists at the same time.
This was the last day the studios were open and filled with our art. At four in the afternoon we needed to clear the place.
We cleaned the house we have been sleeping in and welcomed several visitors, including the parents from Lisbeth who live nearby, and shot the last close-ups in the white Palace. Our fellow artist Iris passed by to say goodbye. And then Pannas and Tulip said goodbye. They will be working tomorrow on their own. And after making a straight plan Lisbeth left while saying goodbye. We will see her tomorrow. So Mirjam and I were free to go funshopping in the Netto spending our cash Kronen. I bought some ecological cleaning products and muesli and dried mango stripes. Mirjam bought a lot more. She had more cash.
(day 17)
We stacked a lot of bags with used materials in our cars to bring to the ‘Genbrug Plads’. It was crowded overthere, what are all those people doing with their houses and clothes? Not new anymore, did it ran out of fashion? We used a lot of ‘flamingo’, that means styrofoam. At first I went to the wrong container with it because I thought that flamingo is a bird. Philip propped the rented bike in his car to bring it back to Mommark just in time. The shop was supposed to be closed but I had promised the shopkeeper we would bring it this morning.
Mirjam is filling in a form to apply for an artist in recidency, with ten Poubelle artists in Artoll near Kleve in Germany. Today is closing day.
We had to go home.
We had an emotional moment, not that I showed, after the moment Mirjam turned the key. Through Augustenborg, Sønderborg, after a silent while we turned left in the direction of Flensburg. Great great time.
