Harmony

Year:

Harmony

2025

Stainless steel

Graduation project AMCN Program for art in public space Funen art academy.

Empty vessels make the most noise—these pots talk. All at once and over each other, with their wide, gaping mouths. With their open holes, they would be pretty useless for cooking soup, yet it’s the argy-bargy surrounding shared meals that Emilie Bausager’s works of sandblasted pot-faces bring to life. The artist is drawn to the harmonies and disharmonies that can arise around a fire and a cooking pot—sounds that have existed as long as societies have, and sounds that may well echo around the communal meeting spot in the Tarup-Davinde Natural Area.

These pot pedestals are distant relatives to the ornamental fixtures of the decorative garden, like birdhouses, insect hotels, and fountains. And they may, in fact, serve as such. If all goes well, grasses, beetles, and birds will move into these cylinders. A bird might snatch an insect from the hotel, and perhaps, thanks to a sly human, become a nourishing chicken soup. Whose natural habitat are we really in? It simmers, boils and rumbles, but at frequencies difficult for us to hear. The pots themselves have ears. What can they hear? Are they laughing at us?

Performance manuscript:
ah the politics of soup
Written by Marie Vedel and Fie Martins Ljungmann.

Performed by Emilie Bausager and Marie Vedel.

Photos: Brian Kure

Text: Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen