CHALK - Site of memory in the Anthropocene

Name
Nikolaj Emil Svenningsen
Education degree
Kandidat
Fagfelt
Architecture
Institute
Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape
Program
Architecture, Space and Time
Year
2021

This project aims to create a memory archive of the many different states and temporalities of chalk. A memory theatre of sites of memory, exploring new ways of looking at our worldview and nature. Using myself and my toolbox as a yardstick, I obtained the raw material to establish my own order with my own sense and presence on site. It is a strategic search, for a form of representation.

The chalk layer model investigates the relationship between the immense forces of geological nature, erosion The controlled and the uncontrolled and the relationship between industry and nature.
The chalk layer model
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Exploring the different chalk landscapes all over Denmark. I used my own body, my senses and presence on site to experience and understand the landscape. I am an actor who acts with my body. I put it into the frame of the camera to convey information, a feeling or memory on this stage.
Expeditions - Body in Landscape
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The toolbox is the size of a suitcase and its contents are well organized. The Toolbox functioned as a documentation instrument, and the raw material collected from the selected sites is organized and processed for the Toolbox.
The Toolbox
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These drawings investigate the spatial and interconnected processes of the raw material that act as fragments in the fictive memory space of the limestone quarry of Karlstrup 25 km South of Copenhagen. Memories consist of loose fragments. All these fragments grow together and become, by means of the imagination, a one unified narrative. But this story is of course full of errors because we never remember things exactly as they happened. And it is good, for one of the most important functions of our brain is to predict and plan our future so that we have the greatest possible of success with our endeavours. Two people will also never experience the same place in the same way. They will filter the place through their own experiences and memories. Memories that build on their own understanding of themselves, where they are, and what made them be there. We never experience the world without prejudice.
Karlstrup - A landscape of memory fragments
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The archive is the cumulative body of raw material gathered on all the expeditions. It's carefully curated, numbered. The time and date registered and put into a system for further investigation.
The Archive
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The Royal Danish Academy supports the Sustainable Development Goals

Since 2017 the Royal Danish Academy has worked with the Sustainable Development Goals. This is reflected in our research, our teaching and in our students’ projects. This project relates to the following UN goal(-s)
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