I have for many years been deeply fascinated by the music of Olivier Messiaen.
Every Christmas I make a point of hearing his monumental organ work La Nativité du Seigneur performed in Trinitatis Church in Copenhagen. And whenever his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is performed here in the city, I try to be there. Few composers have managed to combine ecstatic intensity, spirituality, sensuality and rhythmic complexity in quite the same way.
Yesterday evening Jens and I went to DR Koncerthuset to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with Bertrand Chamayou as piano soloist.
The title itself is difficult to translate precisely. “Turanga” suggests movement, time, rhythm and life-force, while “lîla” refers to play, love and divine cosmic playfulness in Sanskrit-inspired interpretation. Together the title points toward something like a hymn to love, life, movement and ecstatic existence itself.
And ecstatic it certainly is.
I love both Messiaen’s almost jazz-like rhythmic energy and the enormous orchestral sound masses that erupt throughout the work — nowhere more overwhelmingly than in the fifth movement, Joie du sang des étoiles (“Joy of the Blood of the Stars”), where the orchestra seems to dissolve into pure cosmic celebration.
But Messiaen could also suspend time completely. The sixth movement, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (“Garden of the Sleep of Love”), is among the most beautiful and meditative stretches of music I know. Listening to it almost feels less like following a composition than drifting slowly through a dream.
What continues to fascinate me about Messiaen is that his music never really sounds historical. It remains strangely outside ordinary musical time — simultaneously ancient, modern and futuristic.
And perhaps that is exactly what great art does.
05/15/2026 09:33:08
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- I have for many years been deeply fascinated by the music of Olivier Messiaen.
Every Christmas I make a point of hearing his monumental organ work La Nativité du Seigneur performed in Trinitatis Church in Copenhagen. And whenever his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps is performed here in the city, I try to be there. Few composers have managed to combine ecstatic intensity, spirituality, sensuality and rhythmic complexity in quite the same way.
Yesterday evening Jens and I went to DR Koncerthuset to hear Esa-Pekka Salonen conduct Messiaen’s Turangalîla-Symphonie with Bertrand Chamayou as piano soloist.
The title itself is difficult to translate precisely. “Turanga” suggests movement, time, rhythm and life-force, while “lîla” refers to play, love and divine cosmic playfulness in Sanskrit-inspired interpretation. Together the title points toward something like a hymn to love, life, movement and ecstatic existence itself.
And ecstatic it certainly is.
I love both Messiaen’s almost jazz-like rhythmic energy and the enormous orchestral sound masses that erupt throughout the work — nowhere more overwhelmingly than in the fifth movement, Joie du sang des étoiles (“Joy of the Blood of the Stars”), where the orchestra seems to dissolve into pure cosmic celebration.
But Messiaen could also suspend time completely. The sixth movement, Jardin du sommeil d’amour (“Garden of the Sleep of Love”), is among the most beautiful and meditative stretches of music I know. Listening to it almost feels less like following a composition than drifting slowly through a dream.
What continues to fascinate me about Messiaen is that his music never really sounds historical. It remains strangely outside ordinary musical time — simultaneously ancient, modern and futuristic.
And perhaps that is exactly what great art does. (05/15/2026 09:33:08)
- Last night Jeanne and I went to Cinemateket to see Blade Runner as part of its 35mm series. I must have watched this version — not the Director’s Cut, and not the sequel — countless times since the early 1980s.
There was a period where I could recite almost the entire film from memory.
From Deckard’s first line:
“Sushi. That’s what my ex-wife used to call me. Cold fish.”
To the final monologue that has become almost detached from the film itself and entered cultural memory:
“I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t believe…”
I knew the pauses, the rhythm, the timing. I knew when the rain would fall.
Returning to it decades later, I had expected nostalgia. Instead I was struck by something else.
When I first saw the film, its future felt impossibly distant — a strange world of giant screens, global cities, artificial beings, and blurred boundaries between human and machine. Today much of it feels less like science fiction and more like a distorted mirror. Not because we have flying cars or replicants, but because we increasingly live inside questions the film raised: memory, identity, authenticity, technology, and what remains human when more and more can be simulated.
And perhaps the strangest thing is that while I remembered almost every line, I discovered that I had not been watching the same film all these years.
Or perhaps I had changed.
All those moments will be lost in time, like tears in rain.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing that on social media. (05/14/2026 16:58:56)
- Yesterday evening Jeanne and I went to Lille Mølle on Christianshavn for one of the cultural evenings organised by Mere Levet Liv — the association Jeanne has helped establish around conversations, literature, art, and lived experience.
The guest was Liv Helm: author, theatre director, and one of the more interesting literary voices in contemporary Denmark right now.
With Ivan Rod as moderator, the evening became much more than a traditional literary interview. Through the conversation about Med hjertet i hånden and Hvis du er bange, så ryk tættere, her two autobiographical novels, one gradually sensed that the books are not simply “about” the events they describe. They are equally about memory, narration, performance, shame, class, and the strange instability of identity itself.
The interesting thing with autobiographical literature is often not whether it is objectively true, but what kind of truth emerges through the act of retelling.
So rather than explaining too much, I would simply recommend reading the books yourselves and trying to work out what they are really about.
Incidentally, Liv has also written a very thoughtful essay in the latest issue of Atlas on copyright and theatre productions — highly relevant reading at a time where questions about authorship, interpretation, reproduction, and AI are becoming increasingly blurred. (05/13/2026 08:27:53)
- It may be pouring rain in Copenhagen, but apparently I am participating in one of the city’s defining cultural rituals: eating a BMO.
Today’s @ftglobetrotter in the Financial Times asks whether Copenhagen’s coolest breakfast is simply “a cheese roll”. Which is both absurdly reductive and — according to the article — entirely correct.
The Copenhagen BMO (“bolle med ost”) has now evolved from a very ordinary Danish breakfast into something approaching a metropolitan identity marker. What was once merely bread, butter and cheese has been reinterpreted by bakeries such as Hart, Juno and Lille Bakery into an object of near-philosophical seriousness.
Naturally, Copenhagen has also produced anonymous mathematicians who rank BMOs through formulas involving crumb texture, butter balance, cheese volatility and consistency metrics.
Of course it has.
But beneath the semi-ironic hype there is actually something interesting going on. The Financial Times article correctly points out that the BMO phenomenon reflects a city obsessed with mastering fundamentals. Good bread. Good public spaces. Functional infrastructure. Clean water. Trust. Simplicity. Everyday quality elevated almost to civic ideology.
And perhaps that is also why Copenhagen functions relatively well compared to many modern cities. Not because it constantly reinvents civilisation, but because it keeps refining the basics.
Before you can change the world, you apparently have to master bread, butter and cheese.
Civilisation occasionally arrives in a grease-stained paper bag. (05/13/2026 08:10:35)
- There is a particular kind of pleasure in returning to a city you already know well enough to stop behaving like a tourist.
I lived in Florence from 1991 to 1992, and over the years I have revisited most of its churches, museums, cloisters, palazzi and paintings several times over. The city gradually changes character when you know it like that. The “must-sees” become less important than the details, the light, the conversations, the routes between places.
And yet Florence still has the ability to surprise me.
For the first time — together with Jeanne and Vilhelm during our stay in Florence almost three weeks ago — I finally visited the Vasari Corridor.
The corridor was built in 1565 by Giorgio Vasari for Cosimo I de’ Medici in order to allow the ruling family to move safely and invisibly through the city, elevated above ordinary Florentine life. It connects Palazzo Vecchio with Palazzo Pitti, crossing the Arno through the Ponte Vecchio and winding through churches, private buildings and hidden passageways along the way.
For centuries it functioned almost like an architectural ghost: known, discussed, occasionally glimpsed through small windows, but inaccessible to almost everyone. Only recently has it reopened properly to the public after extensive restoration and new safety measures.
Walking through it now feels strangely contemporary.
A private infrastructure of power suspended above the public city. A physical network designed for controlled movement, surveillance, separation and security. Renaissance Florence suddenly begins to resemble a premodern version of today’s invisible systems of privileged access — private terminals, encrypted channels, executive layers of society hidden behind public interfaces.
But the corridor is also unexpectedly beautiful in a quieter way.
Not because of grand decoration — much of it is remarkably plain — but because of the windows. The city appears in fragments: rooftops, narrow streets, sudden glimpses into churches, people moving below entirely unaware that others once passed overhead unseen.
At one point I found myself looking at Florence through heavy iron grilles while crowds moved beneath us in the afternoon heat. The city felt simultaneously intimate and distant, almost like observing history through a firewall.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing about hidden elite passageways on social media. (05/12/2026 15:52:33)
- Today I had the privilege of attending the Copenhagen Democracy Summit 2026 here in Copenhagen.
The summit brought together politicians, activists, dissidents, journalists, technologists, and civil society actors from across the world around a question that increasingly feels less historical and more immediate: how democracies defend themselves against authoritarian regimes that no longer respect borders, norms, or even the distinction between war and peace.
One of the strongest moments for me was a panel discussion titled Overthrowing Dictatorships with Carolina Barrero, Leopoldo López, Masih Alinejad, moderated by Damon Wilson.
There was something striking about hearing people who have personally experienced prison, exile, surveillance, violence, and state repression discuss freedom in a calm conference setting in central Copenhagen. It was a reminder that democracy is not an abstract constitutional condition. For many people, it is still a physical struggle involving fear, sacrifice, and survival.
Masih Alinejad made a particularly forceful point. She argued that many Western societies still fail to understand that the Iranian regime has for years conducted operations inside Western countries — including intimidation, attempted assassinations, and killings of dissidents and opponents abroad. According to her, this conflict is no longer geographically distant. It is already present inside our own societies, increasingly outsourced through local sympathizers and criminal intermediaries.
The session ended in a deeply moving way when two Iranian women, who had been blinded by Iranian police during recent demonstrations, were led onto the stage to tell their stories. Their testimonies about violence, loss, courage, and their continued fight for freedom transformed the conversation from geopolitics into something painfully human.
One leaves such a conference with a certain paradoxical feeling: both more worried about the state of the world — and at the same time more hopeful because of the extraordinary courage some people continue to display in defense of liberty.
And perhaps that is ultimately what democracy depends on: not systems alone, but individuals willing to risk everything for them. (05/12/2026 15:30:39)
- One of the things I have always appreciated about SUPERFLEX is that they do not merely produce artworks to be contemplated passively inside museums. Over the years, they have also built systems, products, collaborations and occasionally entire economic circuits around the ideas explored in their practice.
In connection with the exhibition Come Hell or High Water at Arken, SUPERFLEX has launched several initiatives intended to support and fund some of the broader ecological and artistic ideas connected to the exhibition — particularly their ongoing reflections on interspecies living and possible forms of coexistence between humans and other species in a future shaped by climate transformation.
This includes the possibility of drinking FREE BEER at Ølsnedkeren on Griffenfeldsgade 52 in Copenhagen. The project itself has long occupied a fascinating position somewhere between artwork, open-source experiment, branding exercise and social sculpture. Beer as intellectual property critique. Beer as community infrastructure. Beer as conversation starter.
And, admittedly, it is always difficult not to appreciate the phrase “Free Beer.”
At the same time, SUPERFLEX has collaborated with Klaus Samsøe on a small clothing collection available at Griffenfeldsgade 58. The garments are produced with a strong sustainability profile while carrying elements of SUPERFLEX’s visual and conceptual universe into everyday urban life.
I had the pleasure of attending the launch events at both places last week.
What continues to interest me about SUPERFLEX is precisely this refusal to maintain strict boundaries between art, activism, branding, economics, ecology and participation. The beer funds artistic and ecological projects. The clothing becomes part design object, part institutional critique, part wearable conversation about climate futures and coexistence.
Very few artist groups manage to move this fluidly between contemporary art, systems thinking and ordinary daily life without it becoming either cynical branding or heavy-handed activism.
SUPERFLEX still somehow manages the balance. (05/10/2026 21:20:49)
- Last Thursday Jeanne and I attended the opening of SUPERFLEX’s new exhibition Come Hell or High Water at Arken.
The exhibition is remarkable partly because it functions almost like an archaeological survey of SUPERFLEX itself — tracing the evolution of the collective from its earliest works to some of its newest projects. The three partners behind SUPERFLEX — Jakob Fenger, Rasmus Nielsen and Bjørnstjerne Christiansen — founded the group in Copenhagen in 1993 and have since built one of the most internationally recognizable Danish contemporary art practices.
What has always fascinated me about SUPERFLEX is how difficult they are to categorize neatly. They operate simultaneously as artists, system designers, provocateurs, researchers, activists, entrepreneurs and satirists. Their works often appear deceptively simple at first glance, yet tend to contain complicated reflections on economics, infrastructure, ownership, energy systems, ecology, intellectual property and power.
Many people probably know them from projects like Supergas, Free Beer or more recently Vertical Migration, but seeing decades of work assembled together reveals how coherent the practice actually is beneath all the shifting formats.
The exhibition itself unfolds in an almost entirely blue atmosphere, simulating that the viewer is already underwater. It creates the strange sensation that humanity’s future catastrophe has quietly become the exhibition architecture itself rather than merely its subject.
One of the newest projects presented is The Ark Factory (2026), represented in part by the pale cement-like blocks perforated with organic holes visible in two of the photographs here. They resemble somewhere between coral structures, industrial ruins and speculative architectural prototypes — as if designed simultaneously for marine life and post-human archaeology.
I was also struck by one of the older photographic works from Sønderborg from SUPERFLEX’s early years, where the three partners themselves appear considerably younger, standing together inside the same blue-tinted world that now frames the retrospective. It creates a slightly uncanny temporal loop: the artists themselves almost becoming artifacts within their own long-running investigation of systems, environments and survival.
There is something very Scandinavian about SUPERFLEX’s ability to combine conceptual rigor with humor and institutional critique without ever entirely collapsing into cynicism.
Even when imagining flooded futures, they still leave room for curiosity. (05/10/2026 20:54:35)
- Yesterday afternoon Jeanne and I went to Cinemateket’s Himmelbio to watch Jeg er levende – Søren Ulrik Thomsen, digter, Jørgen Leth’s short film portrait from 1999, introduced by a wonderfully illuminating and refreshingly unacademic 25-minute talk by Neal Ashley Conrad.
There was something almost perfectly Copenhagen about the entire setup. Sitting above the city in the spring sun, before descending into one of Jørgen Leth’s characteristically patient cinematic meditations on movement, rhythm, voice and urban existence.
Rewatching older portraits of writers and intellectuals also reminds me how physically present people once were on screen. Not merely as “content” or opinion, but as bodies moving through streets, smoking, pausing, reading, riding motorcycles, inhabiting time.
Søren Ulrik Thomsen belongs to that particular generation of Scandinavian writers who somehow managed to combine existential seriousness with an almost casual elegance. Even when speaking about mortality, decay or loneliness, there is rhythm and sensuality in the language.
I also found it amusing to suddenly recognize the soundtrack music by Komeda during the screening. Earlier this year I attended the launch of the book Jørgen Leth og Polen, where precisely this connection between Leth and Polish jazz — including Komeda — was discussed. Strange how certain works, books, films and pieces of music begin quietly speaking to one another across completely different events and moments.
Perhaps culture is partly just that:
a long chain of delayed recognitions.
And perhaps also a reminder that one should occasionally revisit both older films and older writers before the algorithms completely flatten our sense of cultural time. (05/10/2026 12:57:46)
- A theatre performance made me want to finally start reading the books already waiting in my own library.
Last night Jeanne, Mikkel, Nana and I went to see NeoArctic in Den Graa Hal at Christiania — Hotel Pro Forma’s strange and beautiful stage work with lyrics by the Icelandic writer Sjón.
The performance felt somewhere between opera, climate ritual, installation art and science fiction.
Matter itself seemed to become the main character:
grain, vapor, minerals, turbulence, electricity, colours.
One of the final songs — I think either Song for Optics or Song for Colours — exploded into an overwhelming light show filled with what looked like underwater organisms and drifting sea creatures. It immediately made me think about SUPERFLEX’s Vertical Migration project and its attempt to see the world from the perspective of marine life rather than from the human viewpoint we normally impose on everything.
There was something fascinating about how the performance moved away from humans as the center of the story. Not in a cold or dystopian way, but almost as an invitation to think on a different scale altogether.
Also: I have several unread books by Sjón standing in my library.
After yesterday, that now feels slightly embarrassing. (05/10/2026 12:37:05)