Preparing the ground. Building DesignWISE Circle, march 2025. Colletcting wood to forme a circle with a strong epicenter. Site-specific work, local production with available materials. Marking the four corners of the world. Work with short and long perspectives. Open to all. DesignWISE circles at this location starts in May 2025. Please write to me, if you would like to receive an invitation.
Hvordan skaber vi uden at skade?
Skal jeg fortsætte med at afholde mig fra at udkomme? – ikke skabe nyt, og i stedet betragte? Hvor bor så min skabertrang? Kan man i øvrigt skabe ingenting? Er et hul ingenting … og på samme tid en indramningen af et mulighedsrum, et potentiale for at noget nyt kan opstå? A matter of a new mind.
Dansk design, forstået som os designere, branchen og det vi frembringer – er ligesom resten af verden i forandring. Der er opbrud og vi må flytte os, gøre det vi gør på en anden måde end vi plejer, for fortsat at være relevante. Dansk Design Center udgiver en artikelserie om Dansk Design i enbrydningstid, hvor de behandler emnet, og jeg har haft fornøjelsen af at bidrage til artikelserien. Læs artiklen her.
In the beginning of summer 2024 I was contaced by Betlehem Fair Trade Artisans, (BFTA) about an assignment they needed a designer for. When I heard it was a cooperation between BFTA, a Palestinian NGO I already know – and Sindyanna of Galilee, an Israeli non-profit organization led by a team of Arab and Jewish women working to create social change – I immediately accepted. This is all I long to use my designerly skill for. My summer was set.
The aim and purpose of the project was to develop a peace project. I had to workout a concept that could combine products from the two partners and also I had to design the products and the visuel profile following the concept. At our very first meeting I sugessted to build the concept around food and sharing a meal. Both partners like this starting point and this idea stayed with us and eventually became the Living Peace Meal Box. The box contains a Table Tower with two small stacking dishes, one of olive wood and one made of ceramic. The production of the dishes are to be organized by BFTA and made by artisans in the West Bank. To put into the dishes are the excellent Olive Oil and Za’atar produced by Sinydanna in North Israel. Also inside the gift box we decide to put the Balancing Peace Bird, that was already designed by FairTrade Designers in an earlier cooperation with BFTA. To emphasize the main purpose with the meal and to help participants have a meaningful and maybe hard conversation we also developed a written document, the Peace Conversations Menu. This is inspired by Samtalesaloner the result of work done by Nadja Pass og Andreas Lloyd in their citizen laboratory – Samfundslaboratoriet Borgerlyst.
The Living Peace Meal Box contains the start of a meal – the receiver and the participant are to complete the meal and make the rest of the food. The meal box is in itself ‘an invitation’ to ask friends or even somebody whom you like to reconcile with – to share a meal. The small dishes and the oil and za’ater is to start the meal, you should add food of your taste and meet up to break bread and start the Peace Conversation.
The geo political state of the world urges us to have these hard conversations – and to opt-out war. It approach might seem naive to some, to me it is more naive to go into war. Because it brings no solutions, only more hate, revanche and the ongoing dead and destruction. It has to stop now and be replaces with each of us daring to invite to brake bread and start forgiving, reconciliation and build up a new real trust.
Visiting Elias olive wood workshop, Bethlehem, June, 2023
In October 2022, the German development organization GIZ offered an assignment regarding a collaboration with Bethlehem Fair Trade Artisans. After a long and sometimes incomprehensibly complicated application process, I ended up, to my great satisfaction, landing the assignment. This also became a wonderful opportunity to gather FairTrade Designers others members; Pil Bredahl and Liselotte Risell and to invite a guest designer Katinka Sol to be the dream designteam for this project. In January 2023, I traveled to Frankfurt to do research at the Ambient Fair and personally meet and spend time with the founder of BFTA; Suzan Sahori.
After the fair, a longer series of online meetings and email dialogues started with the aimed of clarifying BFTA’s needs, the artisans’ material areas and level and, and in extension of this, – to decide the material area to work with and which methods were best suited to our collaboration.
In June 2023, it was finally time for the long-planned trip to Bethlehem at the West Bank. As the project manager, I had assembled the dreamteam of designers and the trip was planned, for us constantly to be two designers on site to facilitate the workshop, explain the design proposal we had brought, working on drawing new designs and to start and supervise the preparation of prototypes of the new designs.
BFTA Craft Village, workshop location. We brought suitcases with models and equipment to work on new drawings and models.
During the three weeks on site, we held a joint workshop for all the participating artisans and we visited the participates workshops and spent time together with the artisans to develop and discuss appropriate production methods, trying to achieve as much as possible and getting as far as possible with all prototypes in progress while on site.
Salam and Pil at the ceramic workshop together with the owner and CEO Rami.
Early on in my career I worked to learn the mechanisms of design. Today I use the power of this process to change the system from within. I am part of a necessary change. Working for a new paradigm that uses creativity, art and design to find the new paths for us humans to enter into the future more happy, healthy and in balance with our surroundings and the eco system we are a part of.
I am a pragmatic idealist. I use creativity as an approach and method to create new visions. More sustainable solutions. I do this by facilitating processes in cross disciplinary forums with collaborations between many different disciplines. Because I believe any one of us might run faster alone but will get much farther working together, and the enormous problems we’re facing collectively today cannot be solved by a single person or a single industry alone.
We need to work together. Dream together. Achieve this together.
I want to expose the faults in the current system using art and critical design. And then use the vacuum that occurs to argue for the needed change – both of design as a practice and of our lifestyle and society. I dream to initiate the transition from a society based on economic growth, to an emerging future with wider criterions of success.
Something as naive as a world for our common best.
Når vi undersøger noget, påvirker vi næsten altid det, vi undersøger. Når du stiller spørgmål kan svaret være interessant, og det kan den forandring som spørgsmålet sætter i gang, i den det får stillet spørgsmålet, også være.
I forbindelse med projekt The Time Is Now overvejer jeg om det ting, som deltagerne udvælger bliver til en interessant ‘samling’ af ting? Eller om det mest er selve spørgsmålet, der er interessant …
Når jeg interviewer bidragsyderen til projektet kan jeg godt lide pauserne, fordi de giver ro og rum til at reflektere og finde de gode svar. Pauser kan være også pinefulde, og måske alligevel også der være en måde, at få lidt mere at vide.
I’m going to spend the fall in Denmark since my stay at 18th Streets Arts Center in Santa Monica, California has again been postponed. I was granted the art residency by the Danish Art Foundation #DAF / #statenskunstfond back in 2019. First the plan was to go to 18th SAC in the fall of 2020, but the pandemic changed this. Now again I was prepared and good to go, my calendar was cleared and I was super excited, but do to the COVID situation in the US the US government maintain the very strict entry rules for foreign visitors. That leaves me in Denmark alone with hopes for a better situation in the early spring of 2022.
Projekt The Time Is Now er i bevægelse. Det vokser, går i cirkler og er i gang med at finde sin form. Så der kan præsenteres et dansk og et amerikansk spor under mit art residency på 18’th Street Art Center i LA i okt-dec. 2021.
Projektets ‘krop’ består af bidrag fra ‘bidragsydere’, som har fået til opgave: at vælge de 12 ting i deres hjem, som de ville tage med sig, hvis de skulle forlade det og ikke viste, om de nogen siden ville komme tilbage igen.
Jeg indsamler danske bidrag nu og frem til afrejse i slut september, så der er åbent henvendelser, hvis du har lyst til at være med. I så fald skriv til mig, så jeg kan fortælle mere om hvad det indebærer.
Udover det løbende arbejde med at indsamle bidrag er jeg også igang med at udarbejde et Manifest og en MaterielDetox, – det sidste er til mennesker der er afhængige af ‘ting’. Desuden arbejder jeg på workshopformater, som tager udgangspunkt i up-cycling af udtjente materialer, der skal have nyt liv i en anden form. Gerne noget der kommunikere håb og handling som fx. ‘Spread the word’, hvor der laves håndvifter af udtjente biblioteksbøger.
Projektet er støtter af @statenskunstfond, og er en del af satsningen #DKdesignUS og #denmarkinarts.
I teach at the Royal Danish Academy school of Design and normally campus looks like this … on a sunny day.
Students hanging out for outside for lunch and getting fresh air and ready for more learning.
But do to the current Corona lockdown campus is empty and all activities are now online and teaching looks more like this at the moment. It is really a learning process – for the teachers too.
HÅB: ‘Hope is not like a lottery ticket you can sit on the sofa and clutch, feeling lucky. Hope is an ax you break down doors with in an emergency; because hope should shove you out the door, because it will take everything you have to steer the future away from endless war, from the annihilation of the earth’s treasures and the grinding down of the poor and marginal. Hope just means another world might be possible, not promised, not guaranteed. Hope calls for action; action is impossible without hope.”
Thank you Rebecca Solnit, writer and activist for your words from ‘Hope in the Dark’, written in 2003. And thank you my friend @lynneweiss for introducing my to Rebecca Solnit.
