Art, culture, exploration, street food, and scratch-and-sniff exhibitions: welcome to the Spring 2020 Graphic Design Foundations Core Course Week. As with most things design, our week was a well-structured, diverse amalgamation of things, beautiful in its entirety and delightful in details. We started our week in Copenhagen with the other design classes, getting to know the rest of the design department and foundational tools. On the first day we wasted no time: in an attempt to master the art of making gifs, we were split into smaller groups and asked to create a six-second story about Megan and Harry leaving the British royal family. With only thirty minutes on the clock, my group got creative and somehow integrated a flying moose, the Canadian countryside, and the Queen of England! This silly-but-also-educational workshop set the tone for the rest of week.
On Tuesday we all took a trip to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art. If you haven’t heard of it, you should check out the website here, follow them on instagram here, and change everything in your life to make a trip to see it as soon as possible. I have been to this museum five times and every time I fall in love with it all over again— the way the structure interacts with the landscape, the maze of exhibitions that bleed into each other like watery paint, the meticulous attention given to the way that light affects every room… this level of precision creates a phenomenal space that yields a certain kind of creativity and inspiration within the visitor. I was so carried away by the magic of the museum that I had a spontaneous photoshoot with my class:
Sketches finalized, design journals filled, and museum pamphlets stolen, my class walked away from Louisiana with a new appreciation for art and design. We took Wednesday off to recharge and pack for the following days where we would explore museums of Western Denmark.
The real party got started on Thursday morning (I’m talking morning morning, like before 6 AM), when both graphic design foundations classes met outside of DIS, sleepy but somehow present, ready to board the bus (that truly became something of a second home) bound for Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark. Two hours and one ferry later, we set out for our first visit of the day: Godsbanen, a center for art and culture that it is subsidized by the state. The space includes workshops, materials, theaters, and rooms for local artists to rent, as well as access to machinery and classes. Much like a lot of initiatives in Denmark, I left wondering why more cities didn’t support places like this. It reminded me of how athletes graduate from high school or college and have a surplus of energy and competitive spirit— they have options to join a gym or a local team, but for artists, there is nowhere to put their creativity, nowhere to cheaply access materials, and nowhere to experiment. With Godsbanen, artists have the opportunity to continue their craft beyond formal education.
After a quick stop in the Aarhus street food hall (we have neither the time nor space to dedicate the attention that this place deserves, I wish I could eat all my meals here), we went to the Aros Museum, one of the most popular modern art museums in Aarhus. Here, they have ~the~ famed rainbow walkway on the top floor, perhaps the most photogenic exhibition I have ever been to:
We also popped into the Dansk Plakatmuseum (for those of you who do not speak danish, that means “The Danish Poster Museum”) to practice sketching. The poster museum is located in the cutest, frozen-in-time village:
After our exhausting day of soaking up museums, we met up for dinner at a local burger place. Other classes from DIS were also in Aarhus for their study tour, so after our meal we skeptically set out to explore the pub scene. The verdict? We were shocked to find that Aarhus has almost the exact same restaurants and bars as Copenhagen, and we all felt right at home!
We left Aarhus on Friday morning en route to the one, the only, LEGO house! We met with the marketing director to discuss how to best produce content for such a diverse audience— the LEGO house reaches 50 countries and all ages, but they strive to distinguish themselves as a distinctly danish brand. We also had time to explore the space:
The LEGO house is firstly a museum, but it is so engaging and reliant on the visitor handling the legos themselves. I grew up with legos, and it wasn’t until I was earnestly trying to build my homestay house out of legos that I realized that I never have time to play anymore. Flexing my creative muscles so absentmindedly, so freely, came back to me like a language I used to speak but hadn’t used in years. We all had a blast!
We left the LEGO house all too soon, quickly finding ourselves back on the bus driving to the most important historical landmark in Denmark: The Jelling Stones. The Jelling burial mounds were constructed in the tenth century by King Gorm the Old and his son Harold Bluetooth (yes, there is a connection between his name and the name for wireless connection), and is widely considered the birth certificate of the Christian state and Denmark as a whole.
One hour later, back on the bus, we continued our way across western Denmark, only stopping when we reached our final destination of the day: The Trapholt Museum. This museum is one of the largest and most popular in the whole country and is largely dependent on the visitors sensory reaction to the exhibits. One of my favorites involved a scratch-and-sniff sheet and video with colorful scenes that corresponded to certain scents! How fun!
We were pretty exhausted by that point, and driving to our hotel and walking to dinner took up about all the energy we had left to spend. Saturday started bright and early the next morning, and we were determined to make the most of our last day. We may have been feeling the effects of traveling for three days, but we hardly slowed down: we went to the Brandts museum in the morning, explored the Pixar exhibit, grabbed lunch at a nearby cafe, and finished our trip at a local street food market where we experimented with linocut printing. Whew!
In just six days, we visited 5 cities, 8 museums, and drove 310 miles. My class witnessed the value of art and danish design first hand in a multitude of settings, and walked away from the week as a cohesive, professional cohort of eight.
240 Days in Denmark 