The anthropologist Edmund Carpenter said many years ago, that “electricity has made angels of us all, (....) spirit freed from flesh”. Today that rings truer than ever, but despite our obsession with fluidity, liquidity and the virtual, our cities are still built on dirt and piping. Elaborate systems of drains and valves and pipes run through every bit of land we live on, transporting water to and bodily matter fro.
At The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' School of Sculpture we deal with the relationship between fundamental sensate experiences and the increasing remove and autonomy of representational media. In times, where more and more people, produce more and more, in less and less space, times where entire suburban neighborhoods have been taken over by self-storage companies, we attempt to understand the subdued powers latent in objects and technologies themselves.
This thinking, we apply to the entire range of activities, that can be gathered within the framework of expanded sculpture. Not only carving and modeling, not only obvious 3-dimensional operations like performance, installation or architectural interventions, but also everything else that, as Rosalind Krauss once put it, “is in the room (and) that is not really the room”, be it sound, found objects, actions, writing or cooking. We deal with the indisputable significance of the physical. After all, the liberation from the shackles of materiality, implied by the promise of virtuality, rings treacherous in this age of the Anthropocene and mass migration.
Current semesterplan available here
Other activities at the School of Sculpture
Why Words Now - lecture series
Jason - exhibition platform in the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts' Sculpture Garden
https://www.instagram.com/jason.platform/?hl=en
Billedhuggerskolen - the Sculpture School on Instagram
https://www.instagram.com/billedhug/?hl=en
