Matthew Buckingham / Joachim Koester

Past and present life in the anarchistic “free city” of Christiania in Copenhagen, Denmark, is the subject of this five-channel video installation by Matthew Buckingham and JoachimKoester. In 1971 Danish housing activists broke through the fences of an abandoned seventeenth-century military base, founding what is now one of the largest anarchistic communities in the world. The work investigates the contrasting power relations and vivid social forces of this environment to unravel the assumptions and arbitrary events that make up its history. Each of the projections follows a separate thematic line through the daily excursions of the fictional protagonist Sandra, an outsider living in Christiania.

Idiosyncratic facts and historical data are interwoven with the unpredictable and subjective flow of memories, offering multiple perspectives on this community’s originating utopian ideals and the consequences of “living outside the law” as a form of protest.

Pressetext

Matthew Buckingham / Joachim Koester
Sandra of the Tuliphouse or How to Live in a Free State
Kurator Debra Singer