Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen: The Wagon of Mutter Courage. Roskilde Festival 2024. Photo: Ard Jongsma.
Welcome to this Free Lunch Series, where Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen delineates the workspace of art in the shadow of war. Based on the performance piece The Wagon of Mutter Courage that was pulled over the camping area at this year's Roskilde Festival, we ask: how does art navigate the poetics of brutality in the current geopolitical rumble?
Himmelviskerne is Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen's current multi-year work, in which his alter ego Våbensliberen (the weapon grinder) moves between the back room of the war and the showroom, to write his ode to the F-35 fighter jets. In a bloated, naive and image-saturated idiom, the audience is sung into the story of the current battlefields. What does the sound of fighter planes in our national and international reality mean for our experience of war?
Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen lives in Haderslev, a defense municipality with barracks in the town and an airbase as a neighbour. Over the next few years, the new F-35 fighter jets will move in and change the skies. The sound connects him to the battlefield showroom as he hangs the bedsheets to dry. Local, but foreign to the planes, he has named them: Himmelhviskerne (The Sky Whispers), as it sounds like an almighty god whispers behind them.
~
Participation is free, but registration is required. If you wish to participate in the lunch, please register via rsvp@arthubcopenhagen.dk
Please note that the interview will take place in Danish.
There is a limited number of places.
~
ABOUT JONAS KJELDGAARD SØRENSEN
Jonas Kjeldgaard Sørensen (b. 1993) graduated from the Funen Art Academy in 2018. Since then, he has developed a performative practice that tells stories about our contemporary imagination. By engaging in historical research through the lens of speculative narratives, he imagines other realities rather than accepting the existing.
ABOUT GORM HARSTE
Gorm Harste is emeritus from the Department of Political Science at Aarhus University. In 2016, he published a much-appreciated dissertation Kritik af Krigens Fornuft (Critique of the rationality of war), published at Aarhus University Press, where he has also published several other books on war. In 2023, he received a doctorate in philosophy on a thesis on the possibilities of peaceful relations of opinion, The Habermas – Luhmann Debate, published by Columbia University Press. Gorm Harste frequently writes about war and peace in the daily press, just as he holds many lectures on war trauma, the history and absurdity of war.
OM TRINE RYTTER ANDERSEN
Trine Rytter Andersen wholeheartedly advocates that the world only becomes a better place to live if we strive to create a trauma-informed society. Trine is an environmental and climate activist with a great love for regenerative food gardens and stray garden designs and for the living world, which she feels deeply connected to and dependent on. She graduated as a visual artist from the Jutland Art Academy in 1999 and has since created a holistic, critical and activist position on the contemporary art scene as an art critic, curator, teacher, speaker and mentor. Trine Rytter Andersen is also a naturopath, exploring the dialectic between nature, body, mind and psyche. Since 2023, she has lived at Earthwise in the middle of Mols Bjerge National Park, where she forms part of a spiritual and working community with stage artist Christine Fentz, musician and composer Brice Soniano and visual artist Mine Sulbiler.
