North Coast Art Triennale 2016

For the 2016 North Coast Art Triennial in the Grisbskov municipality of Denmark, I decided to work with the Munkeruphus museum, located in the city of Gilleleje North Zealand where the artist Gunnar Aagaard Andersen had his that original residency and workshop since the early 1960s. I was interested in Gunnar because of his hybrid practice between art and design experiments, where he explores different mediums such as editorial design, paper mural, architecture and furniture. Gunnar has also collaborated with PP Møbler, a family carpentry workshop established in 1953 with a longstanding tradition and high level of craftsmanship.

My projects related artistic investigation (research), experiments with furniture, the archive and its exhibition. I was interested in establishing a conversation with Gunnar, between his experiments and mine, and thereby mixing design prototypes generated in Mexico with those generated in Denmark by Gunnar, and in that exercise I hoped to construct a project that exhibited Gunnar’s archives and prototypes. For Hanging archive: Aagaard Andersen wire structures (EVAs) that can be attached to exhibit documental material were used, constructed with the collaboration of the artisan Jesús Aguilar in Mexico City. The project involved the mix of advanced Danish “formal” design with informal Mexican design-the contrast between the design created by the Danish furniture business established as PP Mobler and that which was illicitly created in the streets of Mexico City for informal activities and street sales.

In the process of developing the project the Danish curators Line Kjaer and Lotte Toftgaar contacted me because they had been researching Gunnar’s work and they were planning an archive exhibition dedicated to Gunnar Aagaard Andersen for the Munkeruphus that would become part of the museum’s permanent collection. We ended up collaborating on the project that not only showed documental archives, but that also reproduced Gunnar’s experiments and prototypes of all kinds, from abstract wall paper, furniture created using the traditional Danish style of carpentry, as well as others exploring new industrial materials such as liquid polyurethane.