About

Armchairs & Outdoors

2024

video with sound (6’40’’, looped), melamine-coated chipboard, surface transducers, two inkjet prints on Hahnemühle Photo Rag paper (90x60cm, framed)

Armchairs & Outdoors / Video-link

 “Using photography, sculptural installations, video, and sound, Sofus Keiding-Agger’s practice concerns the relationship between physical spaces and their representations, and how the built environment is produced by and for the photographic image. As an emblematic placeholder for questions about image circulation and the production of space, the artist often turns his attention to contemporary cartography and maps, which are not only representations of our physical world, but also are tools to guide us through our surroundings, impacting our environment in turn. Keiding-Agger tests the feedback loop between the image and the world it portrays, the map and the territory, uncovering the role such images have played throughout history and the ways that urban development imagines relationships between the individual and the society.  

Keiding-Agger’s Armchairs & Outdoors scrutinizes two sites in Berlin as archetypal architectural models that contradict each other in multiple ways. The first is the Großsiedlung Siemensstadt, a dense residential development initially established for employees of Siemens in the early 20th century that is celebrated as a UNESCO World Heritage Site as a paragon for innovative housing policies, modernist architecture, and urban planning. Similar to the inventions of the company itself, these housing blocks have affected how the world around it looks, replicating its image across time and space. At the same time, the fact that it is now under monument protection freezes the development as an image stuck in time, a fossil that has to resemble its ‘original’ form.  

In contrast, the Designer Outlet Berlin is part of an international shopping center chain where each location reflects the pre-industrial architecture of its geographical context, an open-air strip mall imitating the appearance of villages like a nostalgic theme park. Replicating a German village, the Designer Outlet development gives an illusion of local, authentic community as a facade for its multinational luxury brands, merging the generic and the particular, the commons and commerce. No matter where these malls are located, somehow they always include a pastiche of Florentine architecture with picturesque arches and plazas. Keiding-Agger notes that this reoccurring image is linked to early forms of image distribution, where 18th-century tourists to Venice would purchase paintings and etchings by renowned Italian Baroque painters like Giovanni Antonio Canal of idealized street scenes, which were then later replicated in postcards and renovations, and are the exact locations and perspectives visitors today photographically repeat. Functioning more as a stage setting than a public space, the architecture of Designer Outlet Berlin carries little history in its materiality but provides a sense of the familiar that feeds on the images that historical locations produce and instrumentalizes our common architectural imaginaries for commercial purposes. The fact that Designer Outlet Berlin is telling: what it sells is last year’s excess goods, the items that weren’t sold, the lower-quality products that give a sense of branded luxury, an image. Armchairs & Outdoors juxtaposes these two developments as embodiments of our common imaginaries, an abstracted and recursive interplay between spaces and images. In a sequence of two looping videos, the sites are depicted from a similar perspective, with both featuring a person moving around the space in a comparable manner, thus mirroring each other while also accentuating their differences.  

Alongside the video loops, Keiding-Agger includes two nearly identical photographs of desktop ‘still-lifes’  taken at the German Research Center for Geoscience in Potsdam. The primary difference between the images lies in the content displayed on a monitor at the center of the photographs, where each presents a geospatial analysis of the exact locations featured in the videos based on open-source data. Displayed at desk-height, these photographs function as a sort of metadata for the locations, excavating those concealed layers of information that make up our built environments, and bringing into view the decentralized and obsessive detailing of the open image.  

The project’s title refers to terms used in the open-source mapping community, which depends on two types of volunteers to accumulate the data, crucial for the open-source map: ‘Armchair mappers’, who identify missing information on maps from an interior desk setting, and ‘Outdoor mappers’, who use portable devices to verify and update the identified missing information on the exterior landscape. Armchairs & Outdoors calls attention to this subculture, while also reflecting on the artist’s own methodology and more generalized conditions in image production and circulation today. A set of dialectics is staged where the ‘real time’ of the data, frozen in the photographs, is set in dialogue with the recurrent yet anachronistic time of the looping videos, while the grandiose nature of the video shots, akin to romantic painting, is contrasted to the accurate yet abstracted ‘code’ of the computer mapping. By comparing these different paradigmatic environments, and unearthing the abundance of information therein, Keiding-Agger charts the visible and invisible structures of our built environment as a dynamic time capsule of history and socio-economic idealization, a set of abstractions that we live in.” – Post Brothers   

Photo credits: Mona Hermann