I have walked past this lion outside the Arsenale in Venice more times than I can remember. I am quite sure I have photographed Jens, Vilhelm and Jeanne standing beside it on earlier visits.
Yesterday, on our way to our second visit to the Arsenale section of the Biennale, Jeanne and I stopped again. But this time I looked at the lion rather differently.
It was only after rereading Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark that I became aware of the rather extraordinary “graffiti” scratched into its marble almost a thousand years ago.
The Piraeus Lion did not, of course, originally belong in Venice. It stood in Piraeus, the harbour of Athens, before Francesco Morosini brought it to Venice as war booty in 1687. It has stood outside the Arsenale ever since. Long before the Venetians acquired it, however, Scandinavian travellers had left their own claim upon it.
In the 11th century, Norsemen serving in the Byzantine world, most likely Varangians and apparently including Swedes, carved runes into the lion's shoulders and flank. These were not just names scratched casually into stone. One of the inscriptions runs through an elaborate serpent or dragon-shaped band, closely resembling the ornamentation of contemporary Swedish runestones. The Swedish History Museum dates this inscription to the last quarter of the 11th century and notes its stylistic connection with Uppland. Historiska Museet
The inscriptions are now badly weathered, so translations remain partly conjectural. But one reconstruction commemorates a warrior named Horsi and contains the wonderfully direct statement that “The Swedes set this on the lion.” Another surviving section names Åsmund as one of those who carved the runes, together with men whose names have been read as Eskil or Askel and Torlev. A shorter inscription on the lion's left thigh appears to have been carved at another time by another group of Varangians. There is something wonderfully human about this. Men from Scandinavia travelled thousands of kilometres through the river systems of Eastern Europe to Constantinople, served the Byzantine emperor, somehow found themselves in Piraeus, encountered an already ancient Greek marble lion and decided to leave their mark on it.
Then, six centuries later, the Venetians carried the whole lion away to Venice.
And now tourists walk past it on their way to the Biennale.
History sometimes survives not in the grand narrative but in graffiti. And, embarrassingly, sometimes one needs Brodsky to tell one to look more closely.
09/30/2026 08:09:59
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- I have walked past this lion outside the Arsenale in Venice more times than I can remember. I am quite sure I have photographed Jens, Vilhelm and Jeanne standing beside it on earlier visits.
Yesterday, on our way to our second visit to the Arsenale section of the Biennale, Jeanne and I stopped again. But this time I looked at the lion rather differently.
It was only after rereading Joseph Brodsky’s Watermark that I became aware of the rather extraordinary “graffiti” scratched into its marble almost a thousand years ago.
The Piraeus Lion did not, of course, originally belong in Venice. It stood in Piraeus, the harbour of Athens, before Francesco Morosini brought it to Venice as war booty in 1687. It has stood outside the Arsenale ever since. Long before the Venetians acquired it, however, Scandinavian travellers had left their own claim upon it.
In the 11th century, Norsemen serving in the Byzantine world, most likely Varangians and apparently including Swedes, carved runes into the lion's shoulders and flank. These were not just names scratched casually into stone. One of the inscriptions runs through an elaborate serpent or dragon-shaped band, closely resembling the ornamentation of contemporary Swedish runestones. The Swedish History Museum dates this inscription to the last quarter of the 11th century and notes its stylistic connection with Uppland. Historiska Museet
The inscriptions are now badly weathered, so translations remain partly conjectural. But one reconstruction commemorates a warrior named Horsi and contains the wonderfully direct statement that “The Swedes set this on the lion.” Another surviving section names Åsmund as one of those who carved the runes, together with men whose names have been read as Eskil or Askel and Torlev. A shorter inscription on the lion's left thigh appears to have been carved at another time by another group of Varangians. There is something wonderfully human about this. Men from Scandinavia travelled thousands of kilometres through the river systems of Eastern Europe to Constantinople, served the Byzantine emperor, somehow found themselves in Piraeus, encountered an already ancient Greek marble lion and decided to leave their mark on it.
Then, six centuries later, the Venetians carried the whole lion away to Venice.
And now tourists walk past it on their way to the Biennale.
History sometimes survives not in the grand narrative but in graffiti. And, embarrassingly, sometimes one needs Brodsky to tell one to look more closely. (09/30/2026 08:09:59)
- This time in Venice, I finally had the opportunity to visit the Berggruen Institute Europe at Casa dei Tre Oci on Giudecca.
The Berggruen Institute, founded by Nicolas Berggruen, is one of those institutions I have followed from afar for quite some time. Its ambition is unusually broad: to create space for long-term thinking about democracy, technology, geopolitics, culture and, ultimately, what it means to be human.
Casa dei Tre Oci, the striking neo-Gothic palazzo overlooking the lagoon, became the home of Berggruen Institute Europe after an extensive restoration. It is conceived as a “house of ideas”: a place for lectures, conversations, workshops, residencies and exhibitions, and for encounters between thinkers from Europe, China and the United States.
I already feel connected to Berggruen through my subscription to and enthusiastic reading of Noema Magazine. It is one of the places where long-form essays about AI, technology, philosophy, democracy, economics and culture are still allowed to be genuinely long, and where complicated questions are not forced into reassuringly simple answers.
I am equally fond of the small books published in the Tre Oci series. They often grow out of lectures and conversations held here and have featured thinkers including Giorgio Agamben, Rosi Braidotti, Francesca Bria, Peter Sloterdijk, Wang Hui and Slavoj Žižek. Small books, physically at least, dealing with decidedly large questions.
One of the latest publications is Constructing Consciousness, which I now need to order and slowly chew my way through. It brings together three prize-winning essays approaching consciousness from strikingly different directions. The neuroscientist Anil Seth argues for understanding consciousness as a property of living systems rather than computation alone, while Xin Huang explores AI, tokens and brain-computer interfaces, and Xiaoben Liu considers the possibility of digital consciousness and the role of language in representing subjective experience.
The visit also gave me the chance to see Joseph Kosuth’s exhibition The-exchange-value-of-language-has-fallen-to-zero. Kosuth, one of the central figures of conceptual art since the 1960s, has spent much of his career investigating the relationship between language, meaning and art. His work felt particularly at home in a building devoted to ideas. And in an age in which humans and machines are producing words in unprecedented quantities, the title of the exhibition has acquired an additional resonance.
Unfortunately, I did not make it to Palazzo Diedo this time. Fortunately, I visited it two years ago. The restored palazzo is the home of Berggruen Arts & Culture in Venice, with some 4,000 square metres devoted to contemporary art and to encounters between artists, disciplines, cultures and historical periods.
Two very different Venetian palazzi, but behind them lies an idea I find deeply sympathetic: that art and serious thinking still deserve physical places where people can meet, disagree, linger and spend rather more than 30 seconds considering a question.
I look forward to returning to both when the Biennale brings us back to Venice in two years. Perhaps sooner, if Berggruen gives me a sufficiently good excuse. (09/29/2026 17:08:57)
- Two more wonderful musical memories from September.
Early in the month, Vilhelm and I went to DR Koncerthuset for the opening of the Danish National Symphony Orchestra's new season, with Fabio Luisi conducting Mahler's Fourth Symphony.
The evening actually began with Beethoven's Fourth Piano Concerto, with Rudolf Buchbinder at the piano. But for me the centre of gravity was Mahler.
The Fourth is perhaps Mahler at his most deceptively innocent. Compared with the enormous forces and metaphysical struggles of some of the other symphonies, it can almost seem intimate. Yet the whole Mahlerian universe is there: beauty constantly threatened by something darker, folk music and irony, the grotesque beside the sublime, and behind it all the question of what innocence might mean once it has been lost.
The extraordinary slow third movement gradually opens into something almost transcendent, before the soprano enters in the final movement with Mahler's setting of Das himmlische Leben, a child's vision of heaven. American soprano Liv Redpath, replacing the originally announced Ying Fang, sang the part with exactly the clarity and apparent simplicity the music needs. DR Koncerthuset
It was also an appropriate beginning to a season marking ten years of Fabio Luisi as chief conductor of the orchestra. Their relationship has become one of those musical partnerships where orchestra and conductor seem to breathe together. DR Koncerthuset
A couple of weeks later I was back in the same hall, this time with Jacob and Nina, for a very different journey: Wagner.
Pietari Inkinen conducted excerpts from the two final parts of Der Ring des Nibelungen: Act III of Siegfried, followed after the interval by music from Acts I and III of Götterdämmerung. His concert version concentrates the vast mythology of the Ring around Siegfried and Brünnhilde, taking us from their awakening love to betrayal, Siegfried's death and Brünnhilde's final immolation. DR Koncerthuset
Magnus Vigilius sang Siegfried and Catherine Foster Brünnhilde, both facing the rather unreasonable vocal demands Wagner placed on singers, presumably because moderation was never really his preferred artistic strategy. Both have substantial Wagner experience, Foster particularly from Bayreuth. DR Koncerthuset
And then there is the orchestra. Hearing Wagner live reminds you how inadequate the word "accompaniment" becomes. The orchestra remembers what the characters forget, anticipates what they do not yet know, and sometimes seems to understand the drama better than anyone on stage.
Two September evenings. Mahler's child's-eye glimpse of heaven and Wagner's world going up in flames.
Not a bad month for music. (09/28/2026 21:12:18)
- Today I made a small literary pilgrimage to San Michele, Venice’s island of the dead.
The cemetery has its origins in the Napoleonic period. In 1807 Venice began burying its dead outside the densely populated city, initially on the island of San Cristoforo. In the 1830s the canal separating it from San Michele was filled in, creating the cemetery island we know today: enclosed by brick walls and water, filled with cypresses, monuments and graves.
I went there particularly in search of two poets.
First, Ezra Pound.
My interest in this brilliant, disturbing and deeply contradictory figure was awakened by Jens Carl Sanderhoff’s remarkable novel Det tøvende århundrede eller Sankt Sebastians martyrium.
Sanderhoff does not attempt a conventional biography. Instead, he enters the consciousness of a Pound-like figure and confronts one of the uncomfortable questions surrounding twentieth-century culture: how do we understand an artist of immense importance whose political choices were so profoundly compromised? Pound helped shape literary modernism, while embracing Mussolini’s fascism and broadcasting propaganda from Italy during the war.
Sanderhoff’s novel has now appeared in English as A Century of Hesitation, published by Spuyten Duyvil. I hope this rather extraordinary Danish novel will thereby find the wider readership it deserves.
Then I walked the short distance to Joseph Brodsky.
Brodsky’s small book Watermark has accompanied me on several journeys to Venice. Based on his repeated winter visits, it is not really a guidebook or even conventional travel writing. Venice becomes material for thinking about water and stone, beauty and decay, memory and desire, and, perhaps above all, time.
I came to appreciate Brodsky’s Venice even more after reading Jesper Lützhøft’s 40 dage i vandørkenen. Through 40 photographs and 40 short prose texts, Lützhøft creates his own fragmentary Venice of doors, shutters, alleys, water and imagined lives. To me, it belongs to the literary tradition of seeing Venice that Brodsky so brilliantly embodies.
And then, walking around Brodsky’s grave, I found the inscription on the back of the stone:
LETUM NON OMNIA FINIT.
“Death does not end everything.”
The words come from the Roman poet Propertius. In the original elegy, the dead Cynthia returns to speak to her poet-lover. More than two thousand years later, the words seem almost uncannily appropriate on another poet’s grave.
Perhaps that is what I had really come to San Michele to be reminded of.
Writers die. Their voices have an irritating habit of carrying on.
Letum non omnia finit. (09/28/2026 20:32:29)
- A small look back at a gallery dinner Jeanne and I attended about a month ago at one of our favourite Copenhagen galleries, Wilson Saplana, celebrating the Greenlandic photographer Inuuteq Storch and his exhibition Swing by at 14:14.
It was Storch’s first solo exhibition at the gallery and brought together two very different bodies of work: Flesh, photographed in New York between 2016 and 2019, and Swing by at 14:14, made during journeys to Tasiilaq in East Greenland between 2020 and 2026. Two places almost absurdly far apart, geographically and visually, but connected by Storch’s extraordinary eye for intimacy, everyday life and the strange poetry of apparently insignificant moments. Wilson Saplana Gallery
Wilson Saplana itself has become one of the Copenhagen galleries I most enjoy following. Founded by Christina Wilson and Nanna Saplana in 2022, and now based on Vesterbrogade, it combines younger and established artists and puts considerable emphasis on long-term artistic development rather than simply exhibitions and sales. Wilson Saplana Gallery
Storch came back to me very strongly here in Venice when I walked into the Danish Pavilion at this year’s Biennale.
Because two years ago, in exactly that building, Storch presented Rise of the Sunken Sun. I remember being deeply affected by it then, and returning to the pavilion this year only strengthened that memory.
In 2024 Storch became the first Greenlandic artist to represent Denmark at the Biennale. His exhibition brought together his own photographs of Kalaallit Nunaat with family archives and historical photographs, including work by John Møller, the first known Greenlandic professional photographer. The result was simultaneously personal, historical and political, but never reduced to politics. Colonial history was present, but so were friendship, family, landscape, humour, boredom, tenderness and ordinary life. La Biennale di Venezia
That, I think, is part of Storch’s particular power. He does not seem to photograph Greenland as an idea. He photographs life from inside it.
And then another connection occurred to me. Earlier this year, Granta devoted its Spring 2026 issue, Granta 175: Scandinavia, to Scandinavian literature and art, with contributions from writers including Jon Fosse, Helle Helle, Olga Ravn, Karl Ove Knausgård and Søren Ulrik Thomsen. Among the photographic contributions was Storch’s Porcelain Souls. Granta
Those photographs may be among his works that have affected me most. They emerge from his own family history, particularly the separation of his parents between Greenland and Denmark, and have the imperfect, fragile quality of family photographs rather than the polished distance of documentary photography.
Perhaps that is why they stay with you.
Storch’s Greenland is not primarily something observed. It is something remembered, inherited and lived. (09/28/2026 09:15:04)
- Apparently, there is such a thing as International Negroni Week. And apparently I have become exactly the sort of person for whom this is relevant.
Negroni Week runs from 21–27 September this year. Started by Imbibe in 2013, it has grown into an international celebration involving thousands of bars and restaurants, while raising money for charitable causes, this year supporting Slow Food. Negroni Week
My own conversion to the Negroni has two principal culprits. One is Vilhelm, whose Negronis have gradually made the bitter, beautifully balanced cocktail something of a family habit. The other, and perhaps the more decisive influence, is Jonas Hornhaver Salmonsen at Klub in Copenhagen, whose Negroni tastings have demonstrated just how much can be done with what is, in its classical form, the wonderfully simple combination of gin, Campari and sweet vermouth. Negroni Week
The day before Jeanne and I left for Venice, I just managed to stop by Klub, where Jonas was serving three of his own variations. I chose the Tokyo Choya Negroni, made with his homemade sake vermouth and plum-infused Campari. A distinctly Japanese detour from Italy, and a very good one.
Then came one of those coincidences that make travelling more entertaining. The following day, at the airport, we ran into Jonas and his girlfriend Maria. They were, of all places, heading to Venice on exactly the same flight.
Four people travelling to the birthplace country of the Negroni during Negroni Week. There was really only one responsible course of action.
So the tastings have continued around Venice. (09/27/2026 11:58:02)
- Our first day at the Venice Biennale included visits to two national pavilions that, rather strikingly, approach the same anxiety: what happens when fewer children are born, and what does that tell us about the societies they would be born into?
At the Japanese Pavilion, Japanese-American artist Ei Arakawa-Nash has created Grass Babies, Moon Babies. Visitors are invited to pick up one of around 200 remarkably lifelike baby dolls, weighing about five kilos, and carry it through the exhibition. I am pictured here with mine. La Biennale di Venezia
It sounds almost gimmicky, but it isn't. The physical act of carrying a child changes the way one encounters the pavilion. Arakawa-Nash, who became a parent to twins in 2024, uses parenthood and care as a way into larger questions about declining birth rates, queer families, Japanese identity, war, historical responsibility and what one generation owes the next. At the end, you can even change your baby's diaper and receive a poem linked to its fictional birthday and to events in 20th-century history. La Biennale di Venezia
The Danish Pavilion addresses much the same demographic anxiety, but from a very different direction. In Maja Malou Lyse's Things to Come, pornography, sperm banks, cryogenic containers and "sperm races" form a deliberately provocative speculation about reproduction in 2045. The underlying question is whether images, including pornography, might influence fertility and perhaps even contribute to the continuation of the species. La Biennale di Venezia
Of the two, I found the Japanese pavilion by far the more interesting and intellectually challenging.
The Danish pavilion certainly provokes, but to me the provocation seemed to substitute for rather than open up an underlying idea. Perhaps that is also part of a broader tendency in very young Western contemporary art: an increasingly predictable search for transgression. At some point the escalation defeats itself. When almost nothing can shock us anymore, what remains genuinely provocative may be the artistic poverty of the provocation itself.
The Japanese pavilion did something more difficult. It began almost playfully, with the absurdity of grown adults walking around an art exhibition carrying heavy plastic babies, and ended by making care, responsibility and the future feel unexpectedly concrete.
Sometimes five kilos can be quite a lot to think about. (09/27/2026 11:44:28)
- Back in Venice. Again.
Jeanne and I are here for the 61st Venice Biennale, continuing a tradition that has brought us back more or less every other year for the past 15–16 years. Somehow, Venice and the Biennale have become intertwined for us: the city as a permanent stage, and contemporary art arriving every second year to disturb it.
This year's Biennale is titled In Minor Keys. It was conceived by the late Cameroonian-Swiss curator Koyo Kouoh, who died unexpectedly in May 2025, after she had already developed the exhibition's conceptual framework, chosen the artists and works, and shaped everything from the catalogue to the exhibition architecture. Her team subsequently completed the exhibition according to her plans. La Biennale di Venezia
And there is something unusually attractive about Kouoh's starting point. Rather than another attempt to explain the entire contemporary world through one grand curatorial argument, In Minor Keys asks us to slow down and listen to quieter frequencies: art as contemplation, memory, healing, resistance and sometimes simply enchantment. The exhibition brings together 110 participants from very different geographies, not in rigid thematic sections but through affinities, echoes and what Kouoh called a relational geography. La Biennale di Venezia
Jeanne is pictured here with the Biennale guide, In Minor Keys. The full official catalogue itself consists of two volumes and was conceived as something more than documentation: artists are given space not only for finished works but for essays, sketches, studio images and the processes behind them. It seems appropriate for an exhibition interested less in declarations than in listening. La Biennale di Venezia
As in recent years, we are staying at the Hotel Excelsior on the Lido. This year we have been upgraded to a rather wonderful room overlooking the Adriatic.
Which inevitably brings to mind Gustav von Aschenbach, arriving on the Lido in Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, and even more the extraordinary visual world Luchino Visconti created from Mann's novella in his 1971 film.
Fortunately, the similarities stop at the sea view.
For the coming days our Venice will instead consist of the Arsenale, Giardini, national pavilions, exhibitions hidden in palazzi and churches, far too much walking, probably far too much art, and the occasional escape back across the lagoon to the Lido.
Perhaps that is also why we keep returning. The Biennale is never simply an exhibition. Venice becomes part of the exhibition, and after enough visits, your own memories become part of Venice. (09/27/2026 08:31:22)
- From Birmingham to Saturn, via Helsinki: Rediscovering Sun Ra
Some musical interests arrive suddenly. Others disappear for decades and then return through a rather improbable chain of accidents. Sun Ra belongs firmly in the second category for me.
A few days ago, as part of the Cinemateket Music Film Festival 2026 (https://www.dfi.dk/cinemateket/biograf/filmserier/serie/musikfilm-festivalen-2... (09/15/2026 14:18:14)
- At 9:30 on Saturday evening, LiteraturHaus on Nørrebro had turned blue.
Together with my friend Martin Malmgreen, I went to the late-night concert ACROSS the Night at ACROSS Festival. The setting was intimate, the lighting almost dreamlike, and the musicians were only a few metres away. Kaspar Vig’s light installation was an integral part of the concert, and musicians from NOVO Quartet, Paddington Trio and Simply Quartet were mixed across the programme rather than presented simply as three separate ensembles.
The programme itself was wonderfully constructed.
It began with Debussy’s Clair de Lune, the third movement of his Suite bergamasque: perhaps overly familiar music in other circumstances, but here its suspended harmonies and quiet luminosity immediately established the atmosphere of the night.
From there, almost without breaking the spell, came Karol Szymanowski’s The Fountain of Arethusa, the first of his three Mythes, Op. 30, for violin and piano. Inspired by the Greek myth of the nymph Arethusa, the music seems to shimmer and move like water. Szymanowski uses harmonics, tremolos and the high register of the violin to create an extraordinary palette of sound. The transition from Debussy’s moonlight to Szymanowski’s flowing water was one of the most beautiful moments of the evening: not really a change of world, more as if Debussy’s still nocturnal landscape had suddenly begun to move.
Then Charles Ives abruptly changed the perspective. The second movement of his Piano Trio is famously marked TSIAJ, “This Scherzo Is A Joke”. It is a mad, funny collision of American popular and college songs, quotations, polytonality and rhythmic disruption. Classical music temporarily behaving very badly, which is often when it becomes most interesting.
Caroline Shaw’s Entr’acte brought us back into another kind of strangeness. Written in 2011 after Shaw heard the Brentano Quartet play Haydn’s Op. 77 No. 2, it takes the old minuet-and-trio form and pulls it through what Shaw herself has described as a kind of musical looking glass. Familiar gestures appear, dissolve and re-form in new textures.
This led beautifully into the fourth movement, the Intermezzo, from Shostakovich’s Piano Quintet in G minor, Op. 57. Its long, restrained violin line unfolds over an almost walking bass, gradually intensifying without ever losing its inward character. The transition from Shaw into Shostakovich was, for me, the other particularly inspired piece of programming: from contemporary fragments and half-remembered classical forms into something much darker, simpler and more emotionally exposed.
And then, finally, Jörg Widmann blew the doors open with 180 Beats per Minute, written for string sextet in 1993 and inspired by the techno nights of the early 1990s. Widmann builds almost the entire piece around rhythmic propulsion and variations of a single chord until the music develops into a six-part canon. Chamber music suddenly acquired the physical drive of a club. Widmann himself calls the piece essentially a celebration of rhythm, and that was exactly how it felt.
What I enjoyed almost as much as the music was seeing young musicians of this calibre rethink how classical music can be presented.
ACROSS deliberately places chamber music in an informal setting, with a bar, close physical proximity between musicians and audience, unusual programming and collaborations across ensembles. Yet nothing has been diluted to achieve accessibility. Quite the contrary. NOVO Quartet, Paddington Trio and Simply Quartet are ensembles with major international prizes and appearances at venues such as Wigmore Hall, the Elbphilharmonie and the Concertgebouw behind them. This is experimentation built on musical excellence, not instead of it.
Another Copenhagen example is Festival&Friends at KoncertKirken, also on Nørrebro. Its stated ambition is similarly to rethink what a classical music festival can be through new formats, community and a less formal relationship between musicians and audience. Its programmes mix chamber music with meditation, jazz, theatrical formats, children’s concerts and afterparties, again with exceptionally accomplished young musicians.
For years there has been anxious discussion about how classical music can find a younger audience. Perhaps part of the answer is surprisingly simple: do not make the music less demanding. Change the circumstances in which we encounter it.
Seeing musicians of this generation doing precisely that, while refusing to compromise on artistic quality, makes me rather optimistic.
Classical music does not need to be rescued from the past. It needs to be allowed to belong to the present and the future. (09/14/2026 11:26:07)