about

LISTEN! – Voices in the Shadows of Monuments is an audio walk that examines material traces from the colonial era embedded in buildings and monuments in the center of Copenhagen.The walk takes you from Christianshavns Torv to Kongens Nytorv, creating a polyphonic soundscape. The artists Jupiter J. Child (MZ/DK), La Vaughn Belle (USVI), Sirí Paulsen (GL/DK), Sabitha Söderholm (DK/IN), Oceana James (USVI), Julie Edel Hardenberg (GL) and Bernard Akoi-Jackson (GH) create narratives that intertwine different geographies and times: past and present interweave and testify to how colonialism is not a closed chapter, but still has strong reverberations in the present. You are invited to assemble the fragments that you encounter along the route into new narratives about the city.

The audio walk takes approx. 1 hour and 40 minutes. All you need is a pair of headphones and a tablet / smartphone from which you can play the audio. Feel free to listen to it wherever you are in the world and enjoy the visuals.

How did we create the project?

Following the Black Lives Matter demonstrations in 2020, where monuments celebrating colonists were being toppled worldwide, in Denmark there was a general atmosphere that this was a history that only pertained to the British, the Dutch, the Belgian, the French, the US etc. and that Denmark was/is a benevolent colonizer. We became interested in exploring how colonialism is inscribed in the built environment and monuments in central Copenhagen. And once you stumble across it - it is everywhere. We invited the artists Bernard Akoi-Jackson, La Vaughn Belle, Jupiter J. Child, Julie Edel Hardenberg, Oceana James, Sirí Paulsen and Sabitha Söderholm to create site-specific voices and narratives for the different locations. Apart from initial conversations held with the artists, they all used different methods of performativity or storytelling that they are already working with in their artistic practice. Bringing all the pieces together, it was amazing to see how relationships started to emerge between the different voices. Copenhagen Light Festival provided the setting to experiment with light projections. For the inaugural tours, visuals designed by Barly Tshibanda were projected on the Layer Cake House and the equestrian statue of Christian V. (see Archive).

Contact

For inquiries, contact, comments and feedback please contact us at: theshadowsofmonuments@gmail.com

About the artists

Bernard Akoi-Jackson, PhD, is a contemporary Ghanaian artist who works from Kumasi. His multi-disciplinary, audience-implicating installations and performative “pseudo-rituals” have featured in exhibitions across the world. He has curated exhibitions with blaxTARLINES KUMASI, Savannah Centre for Contemporary Art (SCCA) in Tamale, Ghana and co-curated the Stellenbosch Triennale in South Africa. He is a member of the Exit Frame Collective and holds a PhD in Painting and Sculpture from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi where he lectures with particular interest in disruption and the revolutionary potential in contemporary art.

La Vaughn Belle makes visible the unremembered. She is a visual artist working in a variety of disciplines that include: video, performance, painting, installation and public art. She explores the material culture of coloniality and her art presents countervisualities and narratives that challenge colonial hierarchies and invisibility. She has exhibited in the Caribbean, the USA and Europe. She is the co-creator together with Jeannette Ehlers of the large-scale public monument I AM QUEEN MARY. Her work has been featured in a wide range of media including: the NY Times, Politiken, VICE, The Guardian, Caribbean Beat, the BBC and Le Monde. She holds an MFA from the Instituto Superior de Arte in Havana, Cuba, an MA and a BA from Columbia University in NY. Her studio is based in the Virgin Islands.

www.lavaughnbelle.com

Jupiter J. Child is a Mozambican-born queer artist residing in Copenhagen, Denmark. They are a multifaceted performer and a visual artist, drawing inspiration from Black history, their Makonde ancestry and the Black arts movement. By combining theatre, dance, song, spoken word, creative writing and storytelling, Jupiter describes their art as an anti-colonial intervention, resistance, Black feminism, migration, queerness and empowerment.

Julie Edel Hardenberg (Paneeraq) was born and raised in Nuuk, Kalaallit Nunaat/Greenland. She is educated through the art academies in Finland, Norway, England and gained her MA degree in Art Theory and Communication from The Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark. Her works problematize the unequal power structures that exist between Greenland and Denmark. With roots in both cultures, she has an insight into the identity and self-understanding of different Greenlandic people, while exploring the economic and social dependency that exists between the two countries and its impact on the Greenlandic people; entangled or trapped in a shared or divided identity, between power and powerlessness.

hardenberg.gl

Oceana James is a St. Croix-born interdisciplinary artist. Her work is an examination/a re-telling/ a re-imagining of her Caribbean indigeneity and is commentary on the socio-political, cultural, and economic realities of peoples of African descent. In her work, James deconstructs the idea of language as one’s sole means of communication and experiments with the use of time, space, non-linear form, and movement to do this. Additionally, she uses her Caribbean “Nation Language” or "Mother Tongue" to further explore the mythologies and stories that she grew up hearing. Right now, her research is centered on epigenetics, trees, (the biology and mythology), the intersection of science, spirituality, agriculture; and the use of the body to embody and then exorcize the trauma.

www.oceanajames.com

Sirí Paulsen creates audio walks and theatre plays based on a mix between research and creative writing. Her work is motivated by finding different points of view to points in history that are poorly nuanced. Whether working on own projects or other’s, the motto is ‘there is always a narrative and no analysis of facts is objective’. Born in Nuuk (GL), raised in Nuuk (GL), Tromsø (NO), and Ålsgårde (DK) in a mixed Inuit & Danish family.

sialukproductions.wordpress.com

Sabitha Sofia Söderholm is a Danish/Indian author and artist, currently studying at the Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen and with a practice that revolves around rituals, ceremonies, inquiries and letters, always with the writing as a starting point or bearing element. Sabitha is the author of the book Chellam published in 2022 by Gads Forlag.

Please check out the book here (in Danish): gad.dk/chellam

Barly Tshibanda was born and raised in Kinshasa, Congo. He he received his education from the Academie des Beaux-Arts Kinshasa and INA (Institut National des Arts de Kinshasa), and is currently studying at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts, Denmark. His practice is centered around decolonization processes and anti-border regime strategies. He draws inspiration from different lived experiences with the European border regime and racism in Denmark. He has a strong connection with local activist and artist groups in Denmark and Congo. Amongst others he is a member of Bridge Radio from Copenhagen and La Folie dance crew from Kinshasa. In the work of Tshibanda the necessity to connect these two places of belonging is present.

Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld, PhD, is a visual artist, independent researcher and educator affiliated with the Uncertain Archives research collective (University of Copenhagen). Her work explores “reparative critical practices” as collaborative, audio-visual practices that explore the debris of broken histories. Current artistic work and research traverse the entangled colonial archives between the United States Virgin Islands, Ghana, Greenland, India and Denmark, often presented in video installations, performative presentations and publications. She was the head of the Institute for Art, Writing and Research at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, where she was also a postdoctoral researcher. She is the co-founder of Sorte Firkant bar & cultural venue in Copenhagen.

Nanna Elvin Hansen is an artist and filmmaker based in Copenhagen, whose practice often focuses on questions related to politics of feminism and migration. These questions are mostly researched through collective and collaborative process of film, video and sound production. She is a member and has been part of forming the Bridge Radio Collective, which makes radio and sound about people’s movements, migrant struggles and freedom of movement. She recently graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts where she studied at the Media Art School with Angela Melitopoulos and Jane Jin Kaisen.

Credits

Created by Barly Tshibanda (DRC), Nanna Elvin Hansen (DK) and Katrine Dirckinck-Holmfeld (DK).

Participating artists and voices: Bernard Akoi-Jackson (GH), La Vaughn Belle (USVI), Oceana James (USVI), Jupiter J. Child (MZ/DK), Julie Edel Hardenberg (GL), Oceana James (USVI), Sirí Paulsen (GL/DK) and Sabitha Söderholm (IN/DK).

Narrator and kalimba: Jupiter J. Child
(MZ/DK)

Sound design: Arash Pandi (IR/DK)

Visuals and illustrations: Barly Tshibanda (DRC)

Layout and website: Anders Gerning (DK)

Languages: English, Danish, Greenlandic, Sanskrit and more.

The project is supported by the Danish Arts Foundation, Copenhagen Light Festival, Kunsthal Charlottenborg and Rådet for Visuel Kunst, Københavns Kommune.

We want to thank all the artists who have made this project possible; as well as Rendering the State, F.eks., C4 Projects; Daniela Agostinho, the Bridge Radio, the residents of Lagkagehuset as well as all the people who have been on the walk and provided valuable feedback.