Nature as Infrastructure - Conversation with Anja Franke
As part of the online project Nature as Infrastructure by The Winter Office.
Conversation with Anja Franke about the exhibition SOIL
Artist/curator, Anja Franke, and artist and director of The Winter Office, Hugo Hopping discuss Franke’s artistic research and curatorial project, InstantHerlev Institute. Including the exhibition, SOIL, that took place at SixtyEight Art Institute in September 2017. Under this exhibition, the film “Er det jord det her? Det er Jord” (Is it soil this thing? It’s soil) was produced and featured in the Nature as Infrastructure program for Manifesta 13.
The SOIL exhibition invited artists to research and conduct aesthetic experiments on subsoils from InstantHerlev institute’s own site/property. Which in short means creating art from the land, and the research outcomes that come out of these explorations, such as the exhibit at SixtyEight Art Institute.
The conversation explores Anja Franke’s take on the relevance of soil as an artistic research material, and reflects upon its wide range of meanings and the geopolitical entanglements that artists find themselves working through as they seek to imagine new communities . In this way, the conversation hopes to ignite new ways of relating to the Earth and organic matter more generally.
InstanHERLEV institute is an art and site research initiative of Anja Franke, organized from her suburban home and property located outside of Copenhagen, Denmark.
Anja Fanke is a graduate of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. She is a visual artist, curator, and early purveyor of the self-organized and artist-run scene in Denmark. Franke established InstantHERLEV institute (IHi) in 2004, as a site-specific project from her own home located in Herlev, a small suburban city near Copenhagen. IHi was conceived to develop site-specific and intervention art projects related to land use. This small organization has been exhibiting artists from around the world since its inception. As a visual artist, Anja Franke creates specific and contextual works based on identity, gender, culture, and nature. Her practice revolves around feminist strategies, and asks questions about the boundaries between public and private space. Anja Franke’s works range from watercolor to text, to photography, and to object. On a daily basis, Anja Franke is also artistic director of the IHI-InstantHERLEV institute, which is a platform for international art exhibitions and research.
Hugo Hopping is an American artist who often works with video, photography, drawing and other mediums as part of his conceptual art practice. In addition to his artistic activity, he is involved in writing about art, architecture, and cultural history. He is also the co-founder and director of THE WINTER OFFICE (est. 2010), which is a work-group exploring experimental art and architecture projects. He lives and works in Copenhagen.
Originally invited to produce an exhibition and public program in Adelaide, in parallel with the exhibition “Wilfrid Almendra - So Much Depends Upon a Red Wheel Barrow” at Atlantis Lumière in the frame of Manifesta 13 - Les Parallèles du Sud, The Winter Office developed a month-long programme of talks, films, artworks and projects from THE WINTER OFFICE and invited artists.
Nature as Infrastructure encapsulates the research interests and theoretical underpinnings of The Winter Office, focusing primarily on the relationship between nature, humans and the urban environment. These are at the same time informed by the diverse creative contexts surrounding the initiatives and projects led by the group’s collaboration with SixtyEight Art Institute and Really Simple Syndication Press, both based in Copenhagen.
More specifically, through new artistic connections and contexts, the programme examines how we can re-establish a new connection to nature, rethink a renewal of society, and inspire the design of future public spaces by asking how to reintroduce nature into cities. The initiative presents films, ideas, and conversations from a number of artists and thinkers engaging with the various preoccupations of the group, and examines how the concept of ‘Nature as infrastructure’ is treated through artistic strategies.
All these facets considered, the Nature As Infrastructure: A Proposition by The Winter Office programme aims to imagine a new role for Nature, not only as infrastructure, but also as a catalyst to a discussion on the power of creativity to act as a disaster mitigator. Arguing instead for the distributive potential of an emerging consultant framework led by artists, and that any regeneration project demands new ways of imagining and driving architecture, landscape design, art, and ‘communities of practice’ to form around solutions.