Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt

The Chocolate Wagon
‍“En Danemarc il y a une nation qui s’appelle Kieltrings, elle n’est pas si bien cultivée comme les autres danois.” - Steen Steensen Blicher [1]

“In a way, the sense of quality has improved, the status symbol of the small things is gone, and it is acceptable to use stainless steel, even if the neighbour uses silver.” - Arne Jacobsen

Denmark is the flattest country on the planet, maybe only rivaled by the Netherlands. A quick Google search claims that a few countries actually are a bit more flat, but, the data to calculate the lowest average elevation must surely have included the whole state: historical annexations, and probably even the colonies, which adds a lot of terrestrial elevation to the equation of Denmark.
However, this isn’t national sports. The point is that folks living or bred on the peninsula and the larger islands know that besides a few small hills and cliffs unworthy of being mentioned here, the landscapes of Denmark truly are as flat as any landscape gets.

Therefore the experience of looking directly into a vertical piece of terrain is extremely rare here. The lack of that particular view is of course accompanied by a lack of a consciousness of, or, at worst, even mere thinking about the subterrestrial. One clear proof of this psychogeographical schemata are the small hill graves made by the people of the historical tribes. The tribes dug only as deep as necessary for the stone foundation to be stable, and then put the dead and material offerings for the gods inside, put more stones and soil on top of that and occasionally constructed entrances or nice stone arrangements on the top of the hill graves. Before getting any universalist ideas of pagan religions’ attitude towards the sky, and to draw parallels to the many different magnificent pyramids made across time and place, it should be mentioned that before the advent of popular history, there used to be issues with farmers simply plowing the hill graves down if they happened to be in the way for new fields. Many of the hills are that small and unremarkable in their presence, and we cannot help thinking they simply must have been practical solutions to deposit your relatives when having no idea of the downwards.

A more recent indication of this mentality is the fact that the first underground railway in Denmark wasn’t built before the 1990s-2000s. And another truly shocking consequence is that the modern sewer system wasn’t installed before the 1890s after decades of unauthorized usage of the socalled “open street gutter”. As sensuously recorded by several authors of the latter half of the 18th century, sanitation in Copenhagen was far from on a par with that of the blossoming engineering in other North European capitals.

The flat mentality has even had an iron grip on the aesthetic regime in Denmark. Old masters of flatness; B&O, Hammershøi, Carl Nielsen, Danish Modern, Vasegaard, Kirkeby etc has had and will always be extremely popular amongst the white Danish middle class. And it’s even had a renaissance in recent decades, devouring additional disciplines from gastronomy to interior design and satire under the moniker “New Nordic”.

Before the installation of the modern sewer systems in Denmark the pipelines were bloodlines, the ceramic pipes were men, specifically a caste of outlaws called kjeltringer or nightmen. And before water was the means of transportation of the fecal sludge, the “night soil” was collected by the nightmen on the chocolate wagon. The nightmen and the kjeltringer were of the same caste. But when they lived in the cities running the chocolate wagon, sweeping chimneys and carrying away dead animals, they were nightmen, and when they worked in the countryside doing glazier work and many of the same tasks as the nightmen, they were called kjeltringer. And they and their families were real outcasts. Even a hundred years after The Protestant Reformation all taverns still had “rakker goblets”, a glass with a wooden foot, because citizens still feared that medieval black magic still existed through the kjeltringer caste, and everything these outcasts touched would get contaminated.

The only Danish artist of the time that boldly took on the task to dare represent, say even mention this caste of outlaws was the author Steen Steensen Blicher. And furthermore St.St. Blicher has been the one Danish artist working within the flatness regime, that, through his art, has been challenging that very flatness from within (or on top of it?) the most. He wrote prose, very realist and flat prose, where not the slightest hint of a magical event could ever occur, no hint of a sudden shadow play turning into anything else than what it is, but he situated the narrators of his novels and short stories, letting the events filter through their voices. He even wrote in indecipherable dialects, but most importantly for now, all of his works took place in some of the flattest landscapes in the world, the midwest of the Danish peninsula. And there, as a real psychogeographer, he got to know the heathland by foot in alcoholised rambles, letting the flat landscapes in with the pistol-grey sky above. With his professed Christianity, he managed to crack the relentless flat aesthetics in Nisseland with the sparse, but nonetheless profound multitude he met on ground.

But, despite everything, flatness shone through Blicher’s mentality too. Though many of his works are considered as national masterpieces, especially as the Danish author writing about the outcasts, Blicher proposed a plan for ending the kjeltringer bloodline in his newspaper article “Regarding the Nightmen People” (1820) by deporting them to colonies on two small islands. All children from seven to fifteen years of age would be placed in public foster care, and be trained as craftsmen or soldiers. It would be the task of the orphanages to do everything within their powers to obliterate the heritage of the children, and make them into worthy citizens. The old and infirm would be put in eldercare.

The first island would be for families, where they would be handed a small plot of land to cultivate for their own consumption. If they had small children, they would not be put in the inland orphanages before they were five years of age. If, during their asylum, they gave birth to further children, these children would, likewise, stay on the colony until five years of age. Therefore schools were not necessary on the island. There the night men people would live, cultivate their small plots of land and work in small factories, that would self-finance the entire phase out-plan, until death.

The companionless night men would be deported to a colony on another island, where they would live, the sexes segregated by force, and, likewise, work in factories some hours every day and take care of their individual small plots of land. Marriage would be allowed, but if two night men people married, they would be deported to the colony on the other island. By Blicher’s estimate all the night men would then be dead in 40-50 years time.

[1] Travelling Frenchman in Steen Steensen Blichers “Kjeltringliv”, 1829

- Sebastian Hedevang and Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Copenhagen, 2019

Sludgecake
‍“Our time has produced a need for contrast. This has been achieved not only in the external appearance of plastic expressions of color and matter, but also, and chiefly, in the tempo of life and in the techniques related to the daily, mechanical functions of life; namely standing, walking, driving, to lying and sitting shitting in short, every action which determines the content of architecture.” - Theo van Doesburg

The works in the exhibition has been made in an improvised call response with the infrastructure of the sludge cake, Astrid Noack’s relief ‘The Ox Cart’ (1953) and Theo van Doesburg’s painting ‘Rhythm of a Russian Dance’ (1918).

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, exhibition view, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, exhibition view, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, exhibition view, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, exhibition view, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, exhibition view, Astrid Noacks Atelier, Copenhagen

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Untitled, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 42 x 23 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Staldplan, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 34 x 23 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, bisque fired clay, cardboard, glue, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 42 x 52 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Sludge Cake, 2021, bisque fired clay, cardboard, glue, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 42 x 52 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Untitled, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 34 x 42 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Untitled, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 34 x 42 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Renseanl g 1, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 32 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Renseanl g 1, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 32 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Renseanl g 2, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 35 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Renseanl g 2, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 35 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Untitled, 2021, bisque fired clay, pvc hose, coffee, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 43 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Untitled, 2021, bisque fired clay, pvc hose, coffee, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 35 x 43 x 9 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Kukur, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 23 x 38 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Kukur, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 23 x 38 x 8 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Toiletkunst, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 43 x 43 x 98 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Toiletkunst, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 43 x 43 x 98 cm

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Sebastian Hedevang & Andreas Rønholt Schmidt, Kunsttoilet, 2021, bisque fired clay, acrylics, mdf, spackle, 30 x 40 x 99 cm