2024 060 anne-mette schultz: real chairs
april 28 — june 23, 2024
viewable 12 — 2 h (best view from dusk onwards)
opening on saturday, april 27, 18 h
I grew up on a farm in Jutland. In Denmark, this is a statement used by right-wing politicians with the subtext I know what I am talking about when I talk about agriculture and its politics. My dad was a pig farmer. Within the discourse, a sentence that further reinforces a claim of anti-elitism. Pigs are simple, cheap livestock, nothing fancy. The farmers are threatened by their enemy; the people inhabiting the salons of Copenhagen. This is where intellectual Copenhageners gather to talk about things you don’t understand.
My dad took this photo when he burned our playhouse behind the farm about twenty years ago. Why did you burn the playhouse? And why did you document that you burned it? I don’t know, it’s beautiful, he said, looking at the printed photo about a year later, and then he laughed a little. The fields are completely naked. The trees between the fields have no leaves. Recently he said, I don’t think I was capable of understanding what happened when you were suddenly all grown up. It was around the time when you left home, and I realised that the playhouse was no longer of any use. I could either tear it down or burn it. It didn’t occur to me to give it away. You did it by yourself. It had to be done. As I watched it burn, I realised I wanted to keep the memory. It’s so beautiful, the way the house disintegrates with the fire on the field and the opaque sky. It’s violent and romantic at the same time. There’s a lot of feelings out there in the brown field.
