together with Laura Gaudutytė
Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, Architecture and Cutlture - Taking Place, Copenhagen DK
Spring 2017
Carolina Dayer




This five-week course focused on spatial, cultural and representational dissections of movies that have been filmed in Copenhagen. The purpose of the course is a chiasmic study of the aesthetics of the city through the aesthetics of film and vice versa.

Films act as cultural, social and poetic entities that carry within their plots a lot more than the stories they mean to tell. Places, habits and history are framed through fictive narratives that mirror structures of reality. Spatially and emotionally, films have the capacity to often tell us unnoticed qualities of a place and its culture. On the other hand, cities are places where cultural, social and poetic activities take place which happens dynamically within the citizen’s everyday life. The very materiality of fiction coexists daily within our horizon, but we often cease to perceive it as such. While films fiction mirrors reality, cities reality mirrors fiction. The undefined edges between one and the other, opens up a world of possibilities for the examination of spaces, materiality and phenomena, as well as cultural aesthetics.

The observation of the state hospital through the perspective of Lars von Trier’s ‘Riget’ asked for a specific point of observation. What seems to be normal and usual turns out to be rotten and supernatural. The review of the building and its structure was therefore aiming the structures and facilities behind the obvious surgery and patient bedrooms. The output of this seminar was a series of spatial observations out of the perspective of the main character in Lars von Triers ‘Rigshospital’. The machinery of infrastructure such as corridors, waiting rooms, elevators and stairs, a skeleton of a bigger creature that observes and directs the human in one of its most vulnerable moments.