TTA LØGSTØR
1975-1988
TEXTS
Index:
Kirsten Dufour:
A Ragpicker
group in Northern Jutland: WHO we were:
Kanonklubben
The Garden
7 Pictures of Women, April
1970
The Oslo Trip 1970
Hudegården,
the summer 1970
WHAT was the situation like at
the time:
Clothes For Africa
Folk
Music: 1971 - 93
and WHERE did the idea come from:
The rise of the consumer society
Interactivity
within the ragpicking work
Finn Thybo Andersen:
About the antiimperialistic solidarity
group Clothes For Africa Løgstør
Who
and how many were we and the daily work
Conditions
for the antiimperialistic solidarity- work.
Clothes
for Africa Løgstør is founded
Cooperation
withClothes For Africa in Copenhagen, and the break with them
Cooperation with Tvind, UFF and the flea marketvin
Bislev
Choosing a new cause for support
Cooperation
with the Eritreans
Cooperation with IMCC and Danchurchaid
Cooperation with the Ragpicking Group in Ollerup
and Antiimperialistic Solidarity in Odense and Viborg. Seminars.
TTAL breaks up in 1987 -1988
Notes
Marianne Søgaard
Sørensen:
To
be of use - about a humanitarian, an ecological and a (missing)
political perspective on the work with clothing.
Appendix:
The journey to Eritrea 1885
Skema over forsendelser
Skema over
økonomisk støtte
Litterature: Books
of special significance to TTAL
KIRSTEN DUFOUR:
" The natural sequence of activities, i.e. nothing comes from nothing: it is a continuation of preceeding relations and actions." (Jytte Rex)
A ragpicking group in northern Jutland, Who we were, What the actual situation was and Where the idea came from:
Who we were:
Two artists that left the city in 1971 to go into
the countryside with the little red book in the hand as the red
guards in Mao's China did, get off the horse, pick a flower or
stay for ten years. The latter we did.
Finn and
I came from the Royal Academy of Art in Copenhagen where we had
been until 1970. There Finn had a part in the starting up of
an experimental group of students. It was called Kanonklubben
["The Canon Club"] and later I joined it. The name
came from the fact that they had bought a super 8 Canon camera,
a name which in an unpretentious way stood for a group of young
rebellious art students, who in the spirit of that time wanted
to upset the system and who demanded a department without a professor,
which we also obtained during a short period, and who were looking
for new ways of developing the work of art, inspired by the Experimental
School (which Finn had attended) and by Fluxus. Both of which
positioned themselves strongly in the Copenhagen art life in
the 60's.
Kanonklubben
Apart from the great number of individual and collective
(when the camera passed from hand to hand) super8 films, that
were all characterised by that they in a nice poetic and beautifully
registering, more or less project oriented way, described the
world that surrounded us with a partiality for the plain, unpretentious
surroundings. We invented the "dogmas" with the hand
held camera and no smart editing afterwards. The sound was then
found in the music world and played simultaneously with the films
at the showing, on a tape recorder of the time: a Tandberg.
Besides the films, there were two big collective
projects: The Garden and 7 Pictures Of Women.
The Garden,
1969/70:
Instead of an exhibition of art works
in the aisles of the new built elite project the Peter Lykke
centre at Amager, a final home for old people from the Copenhagen
Bro neighbourhood, we created a garden in an atrium, in accordance
with the old people's wishes and dreams of a garden.
From
closed down allotments, in the autumn, we brought perennials,
bushes, bulbs and even an octagonal garden house, that in the
spring got reinstalled in a delightful garden with a lake, bridge,
rock garden and a garden house. We cast a beautiful birdbath
together with the residents. It was out of broken pieces of faience
service which were found in the earth during the digging. The
group greatly expanded during this action. We were many people
that worked laying out the garden, paid normal hourly wages with
money from different funds, among others the Carlsberg foundation.
The garden still exists and can be seen almost 30 years after
it was "built".
7 women pictures: the Prostitute, the
Washing-up, the Beauty saloon, the Wedding cake, the Defence,
the Coats, the Camp.
Today,
in 1999, we can swagger about this being the first women´s
exhibition in Denmark. It happened during the newly started Women's
Lib period that had its first constituting meeting in the assembly
hall at Charlottenborg. During the same week, independently,
the exhibition "7 Pictures of Women" was arranged at
the same place (so of course we participated in the meeting).
Maybe it was the first women's exhibition in the world since
it was clearly before the American feminists´exhibitions
in the 70´s 1. Nobody wanted the exhibition, so after many
attempts in vain, it was arranged in the Rådskælderen
at Charlottenborg, which at this moment was both the premises
of the school council and an exhibition place. The "7 Pictures
of Women" became an exhibition which had seven tableaus
describing women's isolated and oppressed situation in the society
and ended by offering a way - together with other women - to
create new connections.
("That women aren't
spiritually and intellectually creative beings, good at handicraft,
but for real art they don't have enough spiritual and intellectual
capacity, is a dogma, which one still has the impression exists
in the best of health, in any case at the public institutions-although
in disguise" (Jytte Rex, - "Billed som Kampmiddel").
A photo documentation was the end of the women's
exhibition, and from this point two opposite attitudes arose
which became decisive for subsequent projects/actions throughout
the 70's and in the further events and decisions. These attitudes
were, to a great extent, the conditions to start Clothes for
Africa, and perhaps they had a political basis: On one hand,
there was the description of the oppression of the bourgeois
woman that later became the core of the Women's Lib movement
with new ways of living, the dissolution of the nuclear family
and experiments with the collective. On the other hand, there
was solidarity with women in the surrounding world and with women
from different social classes.
The Oslo Trip in May 1970:
Finn and Per Bille (also one of
the driving forces in Kanonklubben) got invited to the Young
Nordic Biennial and decided to buy 50 return tickets for the
Oslo ferry and distribute them to 50 youths (mostly artists,
musicians and architects). They were to be installed at the art
museum in Oslo, as a piece of art, together with youths from
Oslo, invited to participate in a pickup concert with musicians
from both capitals. The concert was held the very same evening.
We had brought Furkåben from Copenhagen with Hans Vinding.
Before the concert, the crowd managed to make a great commotion
in the Norwegian capital. Dressed up as Indians with red ribbons
round the head and red banners (it had just been May the first)
they were photographed in front of the banks and the sights of
the city with a big banner on which it said "PEOPLE OF THE
WORLD UNITE". In the evening we got removed from the museum
and installed in a mountain hut, to be transported home the next
day. To us it was the final break with the art world and after
the arrival in Copenhagen we moved directly to Hudegården
together with many other Oslo-goers.
Hudegården
A squatting residence at Vesterbro run by "Slumstormerne"
(the Squatters) from the office in Magstræde. Hudegården
became the next project with common meetings where common issues
were discussed and decisions ma de about the organisation (medical
consultation, cafe and restaurant), maintenance of the squatting
(barricades and guards) and political actions (demonstrations).The
main task was to create an alternative adventure playground for
the children of the block and the first outlying kindergarten
of Copenhagen.
A political action, collective
living and a local/social project.
WHAT was the situation like at the time?
Away from the city with all it's possibilities
and isolated from fellow beings with shared ideas, placed in
a totally different society structure, we had to find new possibilities.
This was not just to maintain our own lives, but also to continue
the research in possibilities that develop society. This is what
working with art, creativity, in it's basis is all about. That
is, without the heavy daily influence from a culture centre,
a vacuum appeared where new ideas could come up.
There
were groups (among others Det Ny Samfund [The New Society]) who
came to Northern Jutland to experiment with alternative social
structures. Small, closed communities were created where those
within the enclosure could build new, exciting architecture,
collectives, etc (Frøstruplejren). The squatting of Livø
was a political/aesthetical action with a collective concept
and the cultivation of your own vegetables as an idea., but we
had decided to learn from the people not to isolate ourselves,
but to integrate and intervene with the local population.
The folk music: 1971-93
We started playing folk music with
old people in the area, an art form that had survived among the
farmers uninterruptedly from earlier times and was passed on
from generation to generation. Himmerland was known for its many
musicians. Our closest neighbour was a musician. He played the
accordion and his father the violin. The well known Rask Polka
was composed in the 30's by one of the area's finest musicians
who had lived in a small, neighbouring cottage where the son
Rask still lived. A light blue chest in the attic contained the
old sheets of music (our valuable cultural heritage) which were
getting eaten by all kinds of small creatures. In the musicians'
museum at Rebil, there was orchestral play for musicians every
Monday, and we went there once a week for many years and learned
the music as well as got acquainted with the musicians. Later
on, we started playing folk music at dances with the local associations.
Furniture department
WHERE did the idea come from?
Clothes For Africa arose in this
aesthetic and political void.
It was a project
which could be done in the 70's.
We were looking
for a position from which the local population could participate
actively in a social, humanistic and political action.
One
day, we read in an alternative, architecture magazine about Emmaus
Björkås, a Swedish ragpicker group in Småland,
who sent used clothes to liberation movements in the third world.
The ragpicker work was exactly designed for this
function: We could use resources, traditions that already existed,
we just had to make an approach, and therefore there were never
any problems in getting clothes and fleamarket goods. The collecting
for relief work and foreign mission work was an old tradition
in the Home Mission, which had strong origins in the local population.
It was completely comprehensible and a humane action to deliver
one's old, worn out clothes to people in need. (the Salvation
Army, the Red Cross etc.)
The rise of the consumer society
The rising welfare in the 60's
after a huge explosion in the labour market resulted in that
two in a family earned money and the consumption escalated concurrently
with the industry pouring out an enormous amount of new commodities;
people wanted new things even if the old things weren't worn
out. An enormous surplus came up.
Interactivity within the ragpicking
work
By collecting
the surplus and recycling it for humanitarian purposes, we solved
several problems at the same time: We could make people aware
of the conditions in other parts of the world and get them involved
in an action, in the project.
Leaflets about the
collection of clothes were handed out to households, and press
releases about the annual flea market were sent to newspapers
and local radio stations that covered the whole province. Here
we informed about the political conditions in those countries
where we supported the liberation movements. We also told about
the fact that the clothes were given to the liberation movements
that distributed them in the refugee camps over which they had
taken responsibility.
Last but not least essential,
because of their tremendous contribution, the core of the group,"
the activists", who took actively part in the daily work,
were recruited from the local community.
It was our basis that Clothes For Africa
should be both a local/social and a political/global project,
and at this point we were radically different from the other
solidarity groups in Denmark, with which we later had a close
collaboration.
Note:
1: "The Power of Feminist Art", 1994, Harry N. Abrahams, N.Y,