Located directly opposite Copenhagen City Hall, the building is wrapped in scaffolding and advertising banners. I emerge from the metro at Rådhuspladsen, edge past the green fences set up by the seemingly unending metro construction projects, slip behind a work site caravan to get to the entrance, and, suddenly, there I am inside the completely empty building. The block used to contain a mix of residential flats and offices, but apart from a single resident who has entrenched themselves in their apartment, it has been entirely gutted, destined to become exclusively an office building.
Amidst this chaos of protruding pipelines, masking film, and rubble, the Copenhagen project space Vermilion Sands has taken over the third floor to present a site-specific group show that specifically addresses gentrification and the eternally changing face of the city. The title Soft Town Strip Hall points to the location on Rådhuspladsen – the City Hall square – but also to the renovation technique known as “soft strip,” where buildings are stripped of everything apart from load-bearing walls. Perhaps it also hints at the fact that what is today a hub for traffic and tourism was formerly a somewhat dodgy neighbourhood directly adjacent to Copenhagen’s red-light district. Cities change all the time, and while the increments may seem small for those of us who live here, when seen over a longer period the changes are nevertheless fundamental.
The ever-mutable city is also the theme of a simple and poetic video work, Death Loop (2019) by Mia Edelgart, Sebastian Hedevang, and SOLW. Riding through the futuristic corridors of the city’s metro, they interview a number of randomly selected Copenhageners about what they think the city will look like in the future. “I think it will look like Tokyo,” dreams a little boy. Others envision a city drowning in waste, or a Copenhagen where a growing sharing economy will build a stronger sense of community. The interviews are interspersed with a visit to the Museum of Copenhagen, where a staff member presents archaeological finds made during the metro excavations: skulls, meerschaum pipes, and skates made from animal bones, which exquisitely tell a poignant story about those who came before us. What, I wonder, did the fishermen on Gl. Strand see before their inner eye as they puffed their pipes and dreamt of the Copenhagen of the future?
Vermilion Sands has engaged in a delightfully loose curation, tightly bound together by the spectacular venue. Moving among the half-demolished walls, barriers, and abandoned tools feels like a regular treasure hunt, one where I am alternately captivated by the views of the city’s central boulevards and the works of art that slip and slide elegantly into their surroundings. Such as when Julie Riis Andersen’s analogue prints of advertising logos and pictograms strangely enter into a direct dialogue with instructions spray-painted on the building’s interior (“take down mouldings,” for example). Or when I suddenly spot Cecilie Skov’s small, fine tin plates with keys and chess pieces in an otherwise completely bare space.
Soft Town Strip Hall maintains a carefully poised balance between political calls to action and future scenarios that are dreamier, more surreal. Whereas Adam Gallagher’s miners having lunch seem to point to the working conditions of all those who build our city, Michala Paludan’s photographs of factory robots speak to a near future where manual labour has disappeared.
Inside Marco Spörle’s series of white letter boxes are prints depicting interiors of the kind found in real estate ads: large, bright rooms with designer furniture and a rather sterile feel. But something disturbing has creeped into this realtor’s fantasy: alien-like entities of exposed flesh glide across the windows or slither down from the ceiling.
If you are looking for a more hands-on political position, then Lucille Groos’s video work Emotion Rules Alone (2022) delivers. Here we follow a woman who, reduced to desperation by rising property prices, climbs up into a crane in one of the city’s many construction sites and proceeds to scatter flyers from on high, threatening to jump unless she is offered affordable housing. For many artists and art workers, her situation is relatable: what is for some a dream vision of a glittering, futuristic metropolis is for the less well-off a nightmare of temporary leases on flats located further and further away from the centre. I wonder where we – the last tenant in the property on Rådhuspladsen included – will all end up living?
