The City as a Collection of Poetry
Title:
Værløse Bymidte
den. 3.sept. – 12. sept. 2004
Lyrik-installation
/ Bog / Digtsamling
Subtitle:
The City as a Collection of Poetry
Location:
Værløse Bymidte, Greater Copenhagen, Denmark.
Poet/Artist: Jan Hatt-Olsen
Description:
For a period of ten days downtown Værløse
was transformed into a collection of poetry, with a little over
People would together with the printed words see
spaces in the making, reflected, on the other side, in front of them and
shadows of the words.
In the area is situated the town hall, post office,
cinema, library, culture house, coffee shops, police station and almost all
shops in the town and some residential areas.
The poetry roads and plexiglass
plates with poetry being catalysts in the process of making the whole urban
space in to a work of art, a collection of poetry in which anything in urban
space is a poem and anybody in urban space or relating to it are themselves
poets and artists, authors of the City as a Collection of Poetry.
The first picture is taken through the poetry tree,
which was planted at the main square.
The second picture is a picture of the formal
announcement of the publication of Downtown Værløse
as a Poetry-installation / Book / Collection of Poetry, which is published by
the experimental publisher Tiara. The plexiglass
plate in the picture is placed on the second pillar when you arrive from the
local train station. Printed on the plexiglass is title,
isbn nr. (International
standard book number, 87 is the number for
During the 10 days people were living - as poems and
writers themselves - in a collection of poetry, a poeticized urban space.
A more full view of the installation/intervention and
articles about it can be seen at the online catalogue www.lyrik-installation.dk/Vaerloese or the printed catalogue.
(unfortunately there are at
the moment no more printed copies left. The catalogue can be downloaded as an
E-Book, by clicking on the picture of the cover)
I wanted to highlight my idea, that the city as a
text, visual poetry and written poetry essentially is the same. The city as a
collection of poetry is a hyper complex reality you can live in, leave or enter
and at the same time it is a chôra a space
in-between, even the smallest scratch in a wall, a person walking on a street
or a written word is a gateway to poetical transcendence.
To achieve
that in an urban space I thought it necessary, that the
installation/intervention was an integrated part of the architecture and
infrastructure in the whole area.
The installation/intervention in the city was made
possible by the new digital production techniques. The
installation/intervention would have been extremely expensive without the new
digital techniques and utopian to put through the political, fundraising
process. The new digital techniques of printing have made it possible to
transform large urban spaces in the city to books. It is possible to transform
the City into a Collection of Poetry, with all the implication it have for
concepts of literature, the author/authors, the book and the urban space.
The web-catalogue and the printed catalogue is a part
of the installation/intervention together with the actual site-specific
installation/intervention in the urban space. One of the ideas in the concept
is how poetry travel across different media and the different media is a part
of the poetic expression. The web-catalogue is both functioning as information
and documentation of the installation/intervention in the urban space, and as a
work of art/poetry by itself.
If you click on headlines in the left side of the
web-catalogue www.lyrik-installation.dk/Vaerloese
are there both pictures and text.
Most of the text in the web-catalogue is in Danish,
but the following part is in English:
An article by art historian Nicoletta Isar
about the project.
A description of the projects participation
in City Living – Living City. The 6th Biennial of Towns and Town
Planners in Europe, where it was one of the 30 examples selected from
In the web-catalogue there is an updated annotated
list of references to literature about the project.
The dots in the right side of the web-catalogue www.lyrik-installation.dk/Vaerloese were placed during the
installation/intervention in the urban space, and each of them point to a day.
If you click at the dots there will be a lot of
pictures and the last dot www.lyrik-installation.dk/Vaerloese/120904 will bring you to 4 videos.
English Title: Danish Title
:
Time :
Optical / Virtual /
Real Optisk
/ Virtuel / Virkelig 1: 01
Installation
Installation
Membran Membran 1: 02
Walk in Words 1 Gå i ord 1 0: 39
Walk in Words 2 Gå i ord 2 0: 24