Mikkel Bogh, director of the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, contributes with an essay on the experience of mental and physical spaces in Franke's installations and her concern with borders, limitations, divisions and relations.

By Mikkel BOGH

SPATIAL BETWEENITIES

For almost fifteen years Anja Franke’s artistic work has focused on space and the experience of space. How do the architectonic spaces with which we surround ourselves contribute to the ways we form and maintain awareness? How does space control our behaviour as social individuals? How are physical and mental spaces
interconnected? Is it possible for alternative spatialities to instigate a new awareness, a new sensibility? A set of premises for her artistic work with space in various genres
and media could be formulated as follows: Space is never a purely geometric abstraction, predefined and existing prior to our experience of it, but rather something that comes into existence through specific practices and their meeting with the material world. Hence space always appears as a complicated, historical product of the interplay between human and physical circumstances. We may perhaps have
a reasonably clear perception of possible physical circumstances when considering architecture, towns, and landscapes. But what human circumstances might contribute to a given setting – besides a certain ability to perceive and create notions of space based on our bodily
orientation with our surroundings? Space is human in the sense that it always has specific significance to people as regards interests, needs, desires, goals, knowledge,
experiences and so on, factors that may vary from one place to the next, from time to time and of course, from one individual to another. To people, space is born semiotic and as such will never be neutral and devoid of meaning. Space holds significance for us because it constitutes a framework for atmospheres and moods and because it holds possible roads, openings, and passages just as
it imposes limitations and obstacles. Space has a strong tendency to naturalize itself, become objective and unnoticeable to us – as if no other scenario was possible. And yet we know that the most familiar and homely of spaces can become the most menacing. Here it becomes quite clearly apparent that space is always a human, subjective matter and thereby a cultural and historical entity. Thiswas what Sigmund Freud analysed with great precision in his essayon Das Unheimliche – the Uncanny. In other words, space may be said to arise through relations, not just between points suspended in
three dimensions, but between people, materials, and places. Thus the degree of stability and firmness of any given space is dependent partly on subjective and intersubjective factors like relations of power and imagination, partly by material qualities, and finally by the specific formalities of a place. These are the abstract prerequisites from which Anja Franke takes her cues when she tries through her frequently place-specific installations to introduce differences, material oppositions and new spatial characteristics to places that otherwise tend towards
self-effacement under the mask of functionality, geometric necessity and unchangeability. Here Franke takes issue with other spaces, creating a betweenity between her artistic space and the others, be they urban spaces, the spaces of a residential area, domestic spaces or work- or production spaces. In her work with space, she frequently spans scales ranging from the nearest, most intimate of spatial experiences relating to microevents surrounding the body to extensive social, municipal and institutional spaces. However, no point on the spectrum is taken
for granted. Questions concerning the nature of private, homely or intimate spaces are just as open to new answers as the significance of so-called public space. Above all, she does not operate with clear-cut distinctions between private and public, but rather with alternative divisions, transitions, and delimitations. While virtually all space is
subject to some form of control or administration, some spaces are more dialogical, mobile, and flexible than others. Anja Franke seeks the conditions for the latter kind. The fact that her works are more than mere models of alternative spaces, always appearing specific, spatially anchored and practically utilizable is a significant point for
an artist emphasizing audience involvement, aiming to make visitors into participants and discussion partners in a real situation. On the other hand one cannot fail to notice a utopic dimension in several of her installations. They are at once places and non-places, realized and unrealizable spaces, presenting us above all with a poetic and political vision. When she for instance erects a small wooden house in her own garden in the Copenhagen suburb of Herlev and subsequently transports it around the country to form part of various exhibitions it is no expression of postmodern work-utopia with the object preserving its autonomy and unassailability regardless of location. This house, which was part of the work »Free« at Masnedø Fort in 2002 and later – with modifications – in »Yellow House With A Hole« in Kerteminde harbour in 2004, derives a decisive part of its significance from its interaction with the specific surroundings and the stories it opens at the various locations. Yet it continues to preserve a speck of insistent integrity throughout these moves between the artist’s home and different public contexts: like a mobile home encasing a set of notions and dreams. Part of this imperturbability or difference in relation to the surroundings does, however, stem from the fact that this space is neither private nor public, but semi-private and semi-public. This is a place whose intimacy is reminiscent of a temporary shack erected for personal use while at the same time being located in open, publicly accessible space in a harbour or on the edge of the strictly controlled
space that is a military compound. Like several of Anja Franke’s works this house is a diminutive utopia, involved in a given spatial context while still remaining a foreign object from another world. It differs entirely from the dominant architectural arrangements of the surrounding space and the model of subjectivity involved therein.
As such the house represents, in both works, another way of existing in this world, another way of forming subjectivity. This is achieved not only through positioning, choice of materials, and fittings, but also by the way in which it creates connections between interior and exterior.
Approaching the little houses and their interiors more closely, we soon discover that they are more than mere functional living spaces produced from cheap, simple materials. On one hand they create a framework for visitors to stop, pause, and recreate, on the other hand they are transitional zones between different types of space. Their position on the verge of the fortress is eminently ambivalent. »Free« creates associations to the barrack-architecture of refugee camps with its mixture of hard and soft materials and its smooth transition between interior and exterior space. The covered cushion, the mattress, and the furniture for sitting or lying down constitute recurring elements in Franke’s installations. They indicate the restive, recreational function of homeliness while at the same time hinting at the dialogic, contemplative space she wishes to call up in opposition to, say, the unapproachable, inhospitable architecture of the fortress.
The proximity promised by the little house and the suspended canvas is anything but enclosed and protective, rather a vulnerable, exposed intimacy outlining the contours of a subject whose identity is not outlined
by strict delineation from its surroundings but nevertheless creates its own space surrounding its body, however interimistic. Just on the other side of the wall, inside the actual fortress, two benches are set up, on one lies a key to the house and provisions for a person spending the night, the other holds a monitor displaying a video of a
boy executing a daring jump. The double references indicate the boy’s discipline as pointing towards the masculine stereotypes of adulthood as propagated e.g. by military discipline while at the same time constituting an allegory of individual courage in the face of groupimposed
norms and obligations. Anja Franke imbues the conceptof recreation with new nuances of meaning through this installation in conjunction with some of her other works. Here it stands not only for rest in the usual sense, for the purpose of regaining spiritual and bodily strength in order to fight another round in the service of production; the recreational break proposed by these works is above
all a question of reconsidering or reinventing a subjectivity which may have lost its freedom and inventiveness though the constant flexible attempts at adaptation imposed by everyday life. In this sense both »Free« and »Yellow House with a Hole« as well as related works like
»Woolhouse« are utopic while at the same time constituting real breathing-spaces for productive inactivity, for waiting and holding back. Their quiet, hospitable homeliness does not signal the solid demands of sociocultural norms and codexes, possessing instead an inherent potentiality that permits the assumption that other spaces, other materials, and differently delineated interspatial borders can shape an alternative awareness.
Out of the many spaces in which we find ourselves on a daily basis, the closest, the most intimate, are those delimited by our clothes and the textiles, which are in contact with our skin. Anja Franke’s spaces are often primarily textile-spaces, fabric-spaces rather than solid,
geometric architectural spaces; they are soft spaces featuring resilient, elastic, mobile borders: woolly sweaters, tarpaulins, cushions, mattresses and wallpaper are thus all surfaces denoting transitions and membranes from bare skin to more distant environments. The insistence of these works upon the intimacy of close spaces does not, however, seem to confirm a guarded homeliness like the hedges that typically shield Danish residences from neighbours’ glances or the heavy curtains that constitute an interior, textile parallel to the hedge and the car port forever delineating the insurpassable border between the property and what lies beyond. The intimate materialities
of Anja Franke’s spaces are soft borders, a kind of semi-permeable membranes, yielding to pressure from both inside and out. In that sense, they represent a subjective condition, not one of intensity and privacy but of extrovert, dialogical receptiveness, and discreet self-protection. Then of course, there is their transience. Neither
the fabric nor the more lasting elements of the space is anchored to a place or a locality. As documented by the photographic series, the houses can be moved from one place to the next, sweaters from one body to another, but not without consequences. Once again the question is whether it is possible for the modernist dream of a infinitely mobile, self-reliant unit – whether it be an artwork, a piece
of clothing, a subject or a home – to be transplanted to any other framework and context without being affected. Firstly the intimacy of the textiles is closely connected to an elementary bodily sensation of touch and coverage, of tact and discretion, as well as of the feeling of fragile borders between people as well as between people and things, borders that cannot be overstepped in, say, an erotic or
a threatening gesture. Secondly this intimacy is not independent of time and space; the connotative powers of the textiles and the architectural constructions are not to be missed, they represent signs, or even myths, like when patterns on the fabric rouse fantasies of ethnic and geographic origins (»Scandinavia«, 2005) or the serially
modernist abstractions on a piece of wallpaper reveal a model of the artist’s own private dwelling (»Living Space«, 1999), all of which will, to boot, become the object of culturally and socially determined interpretations by visitors. If the textiles (and of course the skin of the other) constitute the first borders of a physical, lived space outside the body, then domestic walls and interiors can be said to constitute the second border. Anja Franke is not, however, looking to confirm accepted notions of western homeliness, but conversely to explore and challenge what we consider necessary and impassable borders. In her project instantHERLEV from 2004, she cooperated with a group of architects and fellow artists to create new living zones, routes and viewpoints transcending traditional
infrastructure and property lines by surrounding her own home in Herlev with temporary constructions. The goal was not so much to render private areas public and accessible but precisely to soften the borders between interior and exterior, between home and municipality, between individual and collective space, to make them more flexible. Her private garden, which according to classical, European notions of property had been considered a closed garden, was opened to the public, who were now able to step in through a temporary, architectonic portal, referring at once to the porticus of antiquity – still important in southern Europe today, to living rooms with their TVs,
roller blinds and potted plants, to the private garden and to the anonymous structures of modernist architecture. This transformation of a private piece of property, this destabilization of the structure of the home and of intimate space, not to mention this exploration of the possibilities of developing a different common sense of public space, clearly demonstrated that all specific, physical spaces come with a series of mental spaces, a set of notions as to how space can and should be fitted in order for us to rediscover our roles as private and social individuals.
If these borders were to shift even the least little bit, it is unlikely to be due to municipal reforms. Rather, these changes take place through intimate gestures and little material events close to the body: through daily practice. Anja Franke’s projects validate the ambivalent space of art as a laboratory in which these little displacements –
the betweenities of current notions of a well-appointed life – are first formed and implemented.

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