Med kroppen i byen

Why Wrap your body in the city?
When we move through the city, we are mostly unaware of the way in which we become emotionally impacted by physical spaces. Nevertheless, our experience of places, our ‘sense of place’ is strongly influenced by personal experiences and recollections which become activated as we encounter these places. Places can make us feel alienated, insecure, or even excluded from a community. However, they can also make us feel included, cared for, and close to other people. We experience the city differently, depending on our background, ethnicity, gender, age, and relation to the city. Wrap your body in the city is a collective exploration of urban spaces in Aalborg which sets out to examine public places in Aalborg as stages which exhibits how we live together. At the same time, the project claims the right for everyone to feel at home in the city.

Urban space and colonial heritage
In a colonial context - to belong to a place, to call it one’s home – is a politically contaminated issue. During the colonization of Greenland by Denmark, Greenlanders became the involuntary hosts for a Danish presence, and paradoxically, today, when Greenlanders move to Denmark as Danish citizens, they are often considered a sort of immigrants. Thus, one of contemporary legacies of the colonial past is the fact that it provokes the question of who has the right to the city. In one of her works, Old School Map, C. 1992, Pia Arke depicts the entangled colonial geography of Denmark and Greenland by superimposing the airline routes between Denmark and Greenland. She thus points to the mutual connectedness of distant geographical spaces. As a result of this historical entanglement, a responsibility emerges in the present to include people who move from Greenland to Denmark.

To inhabit places and turn them into one’s own
Pia Arke employed an embodied encounter with places and landscapes in her art. She literally entered these spaces with her body, mapped them and claimed them with her personal history. In this way, Arke insisted on the right to ‘make kin’ with places and to inhabit them. To Arke, who did neither belong in the West, nor in the marginalized ‘rest’ of the world, to belong to a place was something that demanded an active effort. “If we want to belong to a place, we have to create that place ourselves.” (Etnoæstetik, p. 16) Wrap your body in the city tunes into the physical spaces in Aalborg and investigates how these spaces may enable a co-living across different ethnicities and cultural belongings.

Collaboration with Arctic Street Food
Apart from a concluding public event at Kunsten, Wrap your body in the city consists of a workshop with Arctic Street Food in collaboration with the artist Amalia Fonfara and social geographer Sania Dzalbe. This collaboration seeks to create new knowledge about how Greenlandic youngsters experience urban spaces in Aalborg.