Parklife

Lyt til et uddrag af PARKLIFE I

PARKLIFE  is three original, audience-engaging audio works, or as we call it: “Audio events”, respectively in Ørstedsparken, the Kings Garden and the Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen.

One work was created by Public Performance/Erik Pold for the Kings Garden, the second one was created by Sarah Thom and Simon Will from the Berlin-based, arts collective Gob Squad, and the third one will premiere in May 2025 and will be created by the finish artscollective WAUHAUS.

“The movements of our bodies set something in motion that can perhaps best be described as heightened attention. An attention to the scents, structures and textures of the surroundings and to each other as a group. The group of strangers who, for a good half hour, are together to give the story a physical expression. More cheerfully in Kongens Have, more quietly in Ørstedsparken, but with a common attention to connections and being part of something bigger that we may neither be able to nor need to oversee.”

ISCENE.dk/ Anne Liisberg

“The constrained park meets becoming the park in Liminal & Gob Squad’s double audio walk PARKLIFE … this is where we begin to understand that we are one with nature, and that every time we hold someone else’s hand or touch a tree, we are not just standing on a line – we are all part of the universe, part of the great circle of the universe.”

Sceneblog / Anne Liisberg

“A hilarious micro-examination of the structures of power and our own imaginations … Thoroughly enjoyable.”

Dagbladet Information / Anne Middelboe Christensen

About Parklife

The audio events are a mixture of flash mob meets guided tour, in which audiences are invited to participate in being guided around parks and fulfill particular tasks. The experience is active, political, critical, entertaining and surprising.

Come and join us as we explore the public parks of Copenhagen and discover what they have in store for us in terms of history and possibilities.

PARKLIFE I
THE KING’S GARDEN:
THE LION

By Erik Pold / Public Performance

Lions, gods, powerplay and nonbinary fairytales. LIMINAL directs us in a straight line into The King’s Garden. Here, nature is under control, beautiful straight avenues and trimmed flower beds are strictly and symmetrically disciplined, and visitors are normally expected to be well behaved, while they feel themselves wrapped in the presence of history, greeted by kings, queens, princesses and princes in the middle of neat flower beds and sculptures that elevate man over nature. But as we proceed, we slowly realise that the presence of history has lost some momentum over time.

Which forms of power do we accept today? Royal power is beginning to seem a bit like a fanciful decorative construction, a folly garden. Let’s move away from the usual straight paths of the park and challenge its hierarchy. In THE LION, the princess is non-binary and we may have to fight dragons, lions and our own ego.

Duration: 35 minutes.

PARKLIFE II
ØRSTEDPARKEN:
THIS IS NOT A LINE, BUT PART OF A VERY LARGE CIRCLE

By Sarah Thom and Simon Will / Gob Squad

“Urban living has always tended to produce a sentimental view of nature. Nature is thought of as a garden, or a view framed by a window, or as an arena of freedom”. 
The White Bird, by John Berger

The park, and parklife has given us city folks a quaint view of nature. We prefer it in a frame, landscaped and aesthetically pleasing and at the service of our need to escape the urban grind and concrete. Perhaps we once believed that if we surrounded ourselves by a Garden of Eden, we would ourselves become pure and innocent as the founders of humanity we believed in.

Gob Squad will lead you into the picturesque idyllic setting of Ørstedsparken Which melts from the city into the park landscape. In this charming landscape, clues will reveal themselves and speak to us about the more chaotic, fearsome and unbridled sides of nature and humanity in which our desires do not conform to the ideal standards of beauty and the common good but rather splurge between attraction and repulsion, between uncertainty and fleeting encounters.  The audio walk will be fun and playful, but also dive you into a world of surprises and secrets, of longing, encounters and departures.

The title references a piece from Yoko Ono and speaks of life cycles and the perception of seeing only a small part of something gigantic and greater than us.

Duration: 35 minutes

PARKLIFE III
ASSISTENS KIRKEGÅRDEN:
GARDEN ON THE GRAVE

By Samuli Laine and Jussi Matikainen / WAUHAUS

“Romance and poetry, ivy, lichens and wallflowers need ruin to make them grow.” Nathaniel Hawthorne (4.7.1804–19.5.1864)
Urban cemeteries emerged as a response to the urbanization of the 19th century. The burgeoning population of cities was filling up the old churchyards, burial grounds and vaults. This need for burial space was met by large landscaped garden graveyards where local people could both mourn the dead and refresh themselves amidst busy urban life.

Garden on the Grave approaches garden cemeteries as ‘living places’, where cultural and ecological processes are inseparably intertwined. Inspired by the 19th century’s flourishing individualism and romantic view of nature, the landscape architecture of these mortuaries blend in with the centuries-long cycles of decaying and becoming

A rotting corpse is full of life. As bodies are laid in earth, they start to decompose and break down into simple organic matter. Slowly merging with the soil, the bodies return their nutrients to the vast ecosystem of the cemetery. They meld, evolve and flourish amidst the tombstones as willows, poplars, and wild roses. The site-sensitive performance invites participants to observe themselves as an integral part of the material and biological world. It guides viewers to contemplate the relationships, emotions and rewildings that these gardens embody. The cemetery, often negatively associated with death and decay, can be a place where diverse life flourishes and our mortality can be seen as a part of the endless ecological cycle.

Duration: 35 minutes