Testing Ground :
Ida Marie Hede : The As Yet Unrealised Performance III
For this third event in the series Ida Marie Hede has invited architect and curator Sofie Højgaard and writer Lea Marie Løppenthin. They will both present their practice and then join Hede in a conversation about possible motives: bodies, places, rituals, myths, our relationship to life and death across time and space.
Sofie Højgaard is conducting research in architecture, rituals, the lack of resources, physics and technology. At the event she will be showing images of ritual spaces and burial sites from her research and from a project from 2019 about ritual gathering places. Burial rites are know to every culture and religion – it marks a shift between matter and spirit, life and death – and in the future perhaps also a shift between the psychical and the virtual? In a time of dna-prints, cryo-preservation and AI it’s a relevant question to ask how burial sites in the future will look like? What will happen with our bodies when we die? Do we REALLY die in the future? Will we have a technological afterlife? How will burial rites look in the future, and who will performe them? Will they be authentic? Will we one day celebrate the archaic, just as we now romanticize the ruin or will the burial be a futuristic pod anchoring a virtual realm of death?
Lea Marie Løppenthin will read from and talk about her latest novel the wild growing Livet går over sine bredder from 2022. The novel is about the organization Cyklus – specialist in sustainable funerals. The deceased are in an environmentally friendly fashion composted into nutritious soil used in the gardening of Cyclus in the town of Maribo. In the novel you also follow the everyday life of a group of humanlike earth individuals, who are exhaling oxygen just as trees and work as gardeners in Cyklus under very precarious circumstances. The novel shows the dilemmas the organization is confronted with in regard to sorrow, rituals, the local community and climate.
The event will as usual commence with Ida Marie Hede inviting her guests to read a short dramatic dialogue with her.
Read more on the series here.
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The series is created in collaboration with Thiemers Magasin.
Time and location: 28 March 2023, 19.00-21.00, Thiemers Magasin, Tullinsgade 24, 1618 København V.
Tickets: the tickets are 40 dkk and can be bought here.
Please note that the event will be in Danish.
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ABOUT IDA MARIE HEDE
Ida Marie Hede (b. 1980) is a Danish writer, playwright, critic and teacher. She has written eight books and numerous plays. Her practice involves many artistic collaborations and publications: for example, with Cisser Mæhl, Niels Erling, Ursula Nistrup, Marie Kølbæk Iversen, Amalie Smith, Recoil Performance Group and CORPUS dance ensemble. She has also worked as an art critic for the Danish newspaper Information and the magazine Frieze. Hede is a recipient of the Danish Arts Council’s three-year work grant. Her books have been translated into German, English and Swedish, and in 2021 her latest novel Suget eller Vasker du vores fuckfingre med dine tårer was nominated for the Montana Prize and the Politiken Literature Prize.
ABOUT SOFIE HØJGAARD
Sofie Højgaard is an architect, curator and teacher at the Royal Danish Academy in Copenhagen. She runs the exhibition space Platform.dk. Most recently she has curated the architecture exhibitions Spawner (Metronomen, 2022) and Minas first lecture (Energistyrelsen, 2023). Her practice moved between architecture, sciece fiction, rituals and spirituality, physics, and archaeology. She is concerned with space, events and objects containing two conditions and meanings. During the latest years she has been working on a series of texts in the genre practical fantasies, which examines inner technologies and intimacy with materials within the physical frame of the construction playground.
ABOUT LEA MARIE LØPPENTHIN
Lea Marie Løppenthin debuted with the poetry collection Nervernes adresse in 2014. Since then she has published another collection of poetry as well as three novels, the latest being Livet går over sine bredder in 2022. She has also written to pieces of radio drama for AKT1 as well as the libretto to the opera Lisbon Floor, which premiered at Copenhagen Opera Festival in 2022. Løppenthins texts are in a broad sense concerned with bodies and their interconnections with the landscapes surrounding them.