This website uses cookies

Royal Danish Academy – Architecture, Design, Conservation uses cookies to create a better user experience, to interact with social platforms and for anonymised statistics of traffic on our website.

Social media cookies enable us to interact with well-known social media platforms and content. This may be for statistical or marketing reasons.
Neccesary to display YouTube videos
Neccesary to display Vimeo videos
Preference cookies enable a website to remember information that changes the way the website behaves or looks, like your preferred language or the region that you are in.
Is used for UI states

CHALK - Site of memory in the Anthropocene

Name
Nikolaj Emil Svenningsen
Education degree
Master
Study programme
Architecture, Space and Time
Institute
Architecture, Urbanism and Landscape
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.
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.
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.
1/10
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.
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.
564346353
Entry - Karlstrup
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):
Sustainable cities and communities (11)
Responsible consumption and production (12)
Climate action (13)

CV