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
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- 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)
- A small flashback to the Bargello — still my favourite museum in Florence.
Not because it is the grandest museum in the city. The Uffizi obviously wins that competition almost unfairly. But the Bargello possesses something else: silence, shadows and a strange sense of proximity to the early Renaissance before it fully became “The Renaissance.”
I found this face hidden among the frescoes in the Cappella del Podestà — also known as the Magdalene Chapel — painted by Giotto and his workshop in the 1330s.
The frescoes themselves are fragile and faded almost to disappearance in places. You have to slow down and allow your eyes to adjust to the darkness and worn pigments before the figures gradually emerge from the walls.
And perhaps that is partly why they feel so alive.
Giotto and the painters around him were among the first artists in Europe to paint human beings not merely as theological symbols, but as people with physical weight, emotion and interiority. Faces that appear to think. Faces that carry memory.
The strange thing is that the fading itself almost improves the experience. The incomplete surfaces force the imagination to participate.
So much contemporary visual culture shouts at us constantly through screens with impossible brightness and resolution. These frescoes do the opposite. They require patience, attention and silence before they reveal themselves.
And perhaps that is why the Bargello continues to feel strangely modern to me.
I am curious though: can you recognise the figure? (05/06/2026 18:04:45)
- Although Pietrasanta is a relatively small town, it feels almost absurdly dense with sculpture.
You walk through medieval streets and small piazzas and suddenly encounter monumental bronze figures, experimental marble forms or strange contemporary works placed quietly between cafés, churches and ordinary daily life. Sculpture here is not hidden away inside museums. It is simply part of the town’s metabolism.
One of the works that stayed with us most was Jørgen Haugen Sørensen’s La folla (“The Crowd”), which Jeanne is standing beside in one of the photos. The sculpture feels both ancient and strangely contemporary at the same time. Human figures almost dissolve into one another, merging into an anonymous mass. Something simultaneously human, tragic and unsettling.
We also became very fond of Andrea Roggi’s The Albero della Pace (Tree of Peace), shown in the second photo. The tree growing organically out of a spherical form has something both poetic and cosmic about it — somewhere between planet, seed and olive tree. Only later did we realise that we had already encountered a monumental version of the same work earlier in Florence, on the corner of Via Lambertesca and Via dei Georgofili near the Uffizi. There was something beautiful about rediscovering the same artistic language across different cities and scales, as if the artwork itself continued a quiet conversation through Tuscany.
Naturally we also visited the wonderful Museo dei Bozzetti. The museum is dedicated to bozzetti — sketches, plaster studies and prototype versions of sculptures that later become monumental works in bronze or marble. Several of the attached photos are from there.
There is something deeply fascinating about seeing sculpture before it becomes “finished.” You see hesitation, experimentation, structural problems and artistic thinking normally hidden behind polished surfaces. Walking through the museum almost feels like entering the subconscious of sculpture itself.
Another work that caught our attention was by the Danish sculptor Søren Georg Jensen — son of Georg Jensen. His abstract marble forms somehow balance geometry and organic softness at the same time. And suddenly yet another connection appears between Pietrasanta and Denmark, because a very similar sculpture by him can also be found at Langelinie in Copenhagen.
Perhaps that is why Pietrasanta feels so alive artistically. Not as a place where finished artworks are simply exhibited, but as a place where you can still sense the process of making. (05/06/2026 17:46:12)
- One of the pleasures of travelling is discovering that the world is simultaneously enormous and improbably small.
Jeanne and I were sitting at Piazza Duomo in Pietrasanta, watching the afternoon drift slowly past sculptures, tourists, church facades and glasses of white wine under the Tuscan sun.
And then suddenly someone says: “Hej Martin.”
It turned out to be Thomas, a younger friend from Copenhagen whom I originally got to know years ago while wandering around and buying books in his former antiquarian bookstore in Skindergade.
A few hours later we were eating and drinking together with three young Copenhagen artists in the middle of Pietrasanta.
Pietrasanta has that strange magnetic quality. A small Tuscan town that somehow functions simultaneously as marble workshop, sculpture laboratory, café culture and temporary embassy for artists from half of Northern Europe.
The city itself almost feels staged for conversations like these. You sit beneath Bernar Venet sculptures and near churches older than most countries outside Europe, while people drift between foundries, marble studios, galleries and bars late into the night.
And perhaps that is one of the reasons art cities matter.
Not because they are efficient. Quite the opposite.
They create improbable collisions between people who otherwise would never have shared a table. A former Copenhagen bookseller. Young artists. Lawyers. Sculptors. Tourists. Locals. All temporarily assembled around wine, cigarettes, books, sculpture and conversation.
The algorithm would probably never have planned this meeting.
Reality still occasionally does a better job. (05/06/2026 17:27:40)
- There is something deeply reassuring about visiting a marble workshop in Pietrasanta.
Not reassuring in the nostalgic sense of “craftsmanship” as lifestyle aesthetics, but reassuring in a more fundamental way: the reminder that some forms of human creation still resist acceleration.
Some weeks ago Jeanne and I were lucky enough to spend time with the fantastic artist Kevin Francis Gray at his Marble Projects workshop in Pietrasanta. We shared lunch among dust, stone fragments, half-finished sculptures and machines that somehow coexist with techniques stretching back centuries.
Pietrasanta is one of those strange places where contemporary art and Renaissance infrastructure collapse into each other. The same mountains that supplied marble to Michelangelo still feed workshops producing works for contemporary galleries, collectors and museums around the world.
What struck me most was the tension in Kevin’s works between the digital and the physical. His sculptures often feel almost computational — as if a 3D model had melted, folded or partially corrupted itself — and yet they emerge from one of the oldest and heaviest artistic materials imaginable: marble.
In an age where so much culture risks becoming frictionless, weightless and infinitely reproducible, there is something almost radical about sculpture. Marble insists on resistance. Every cut is irreversible. Every mistake expensive. Gravity still matters.
And perhaps that is also why places like Pietrasanta feel increasingly important.
Not as museums of the past, but as reminders that technological modernity does not abolish material reality. It merely hides it from us for periods of time.
Very much looking forward to Kevin’s upcoming visit to Copenhagen in connection with the exciting new launch at Gl. Holtegaard.
Yes, I am aware of the irony of writing this on a smartphone while covered in marble dust. (05/06/2026 16:57:25)
- On the recommendation of Sara Malie, we had dinner at Il Trillo in Massa.
A place set slightly above the town, with a terrace looking out over the landscape — and, perhaps most memorably, framed by lemon trees that seem to belong as much to the meal as anything on the plate.
The food was excellent.
But what stayed with me just as much was the coherence of the place. Not in the sense of concept, but in the sense of origin.
The wines served were the restaurant’s own.
A white, Fucchia (2023), and a red, Massarolo (2020), both from Bertazzoli — produced locally, from the surrounding hills.
They were not “grand” wines in the conventional sense.
But they fitted.
Which is perhaps the more interesting quality.
There is something satisfying about eating and drinking in a place where the elements do not travel far — where the landscape, the view, and what is on the table are still loosely connected.
It is not a given anymore. (05/03/2026 20:30:51)
- Everywhere, there are sharp contrasts. Carrara is no exception.
On Piazza Gramsci stands a bust of Giordano Bruno.
The philosopher who insisted that truth could not be contained by authority — and paid for it with his life, burned at the stake in Rome in 1600.
A short walk away, in the tourist shops, you can find marble busts of Mussolini.
Carved in the same material. From the same mountains.
It is a strange coexistence.
The martyr for free thought and the symbol of authoritarian power — both rendered in marble, both reduced to objects, both available to be placed on a shelf.
Perhaps that is also what Carrara represents.
Not just permanence.
But neutrality.
The material does not choose. (05/03/2026 20:15:11)
- Jeanne had arranged for us to go up into the mountains above Carrara to see the marble quarries.
Which, in a way, completes the picture.
You see the marble in the city — in façades, in churches, in sculptures that seem almost detached from their origin. And then you come here, where the origin is anything but abstract.
Whole mountains being cut into.
It is striking — not just the scale of the operation today, but the continuity. That this has been going on since Roman times. That the same mountains have been opened, cut, carved, and transported — long before modern machinery made it easier to imagine.
Blocks of stone that would eventually become something like Michelangelo’s Pietà or Moses once started here, embedded in this landscape.
And still do.
There is something almost difficult to grasp in the idea that entire sections of a mountain can be removed, piece by piece, and redistributed across the world as architecture and art.
Extraction turned into permanence.
But standing there, it is also hard not to notice the reverse.
That permanence, at scale, leaves its mark.
The mountains are no longer quite what they were.
Perhaps that is always the trade-off — when something is made to last elsewhere, something changes irreversibly at the source. (05/03/2026 20:05:57)
- The last stop on Jeanne’s and my trip to Italy was Carrara.
A city quite literally built on marble — on the wealth that comes from extracting stone from the surrounding mountains and sending it out into the world, where it becomes columns, sculptures, façades. Permanence, exported.
We visited the Duomo, set slightly awkwardly — almost modestly — on Piazza Duomo.
From the outside, it is exactly what you would expect here: a beautiful, almost luminous marble façade. The material not just used, but asserted.
Inside, something else.
The cathedral was nearly empty when we entered. A few people scattered. Light filtering in. And then — unexpectedly — a piece of music that felt oddly familiar.
The final variation of Bach’s Goldberg Variations.
And suddenly, that small melodic turn that in Denmark lives on as Bro Bro Brille.
It is a strange moment — to recognise something so local, almost childish, embedded in something so canonical, in a Catholic cathedral, played on what sounded like a recording drifting through the space.
Bach, of course, was not writing for this room.
And yet the music fit.
Perhaps because certain structures — musical, architectural, cultural — travel more easily than we tend to think.
Or perhaps because we recognise patterns long before we understand where they come from. (05/03/2026 19:55:12)