This film follows the renewal process of the waste-water plumbing system, called relining, in a high-rise block of flats in central Oslo. Capturing the intense work conducted by workers on site, the original rusty pipes from 1964 is relined and renewed for years to come. Showing what lies beyond walls and under the ground, RELINING captures the process of preventative rehabilitation of hidden city infrastuctures.
HERE [Prologue] and HERE [Epilogue] are two films made by Regner Ramos and Anna Ulrikke Andersen for the exhibition Cüirtopia: Soft Crash at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Juan, Puerto Rico, March – August 2022.
Cüirtopia: Soft Crash by Regner Ramos at the Museum of Contemporary Art San Juan, Puerto Rico 2022. Photo: Raquel Perez Puig.
HERE [Prologue] (2022, HDV, 6:00) by Regner Ramos and Anna Ulrikke Andersen, follows three characters in search of cuirtopia navigating their way into the museum, eventually soft crashing through a pane of glass.
HERE [Epilogue] (16:00, HDV/16mm, 2022) by Regner Ramos and Anna Ulrikke Andersen, is a meditation on the key topics that the exhibition tackles, where the paradise islands sweeps in and out of sight, while Ramos’ narrative text opens up for dialogue with the viewer.
This book examines the ‘window’ in the life and work of the seminal architectural thinker Christian Norberg-Schulz (1926 – 2000). It draws new attention to his architectural designs and re-examines his acclaimed theoretical work on the phenomenology of architecture and place within the context of a biography of his life, linking him with other historical figures such as Helen Keller and Rainer Maria Rilke, and framing him within the modernist tradition of the latter.
Taking a novel, experimental approach, the book also explores the potential of the essay-film as an innovative new approach to producing architectural history. Bridging archival research and artistic exploration, its ten chapters, written by an architectural historian who is also a film-maker, are each accompanied by a short documentary film, hosted online and linked from within the chapter, which use the medium of film to creatively explore and delve deeper into little-known aspects of Norberg-Schulz’s theory of genius loci and the phenomenology of architecture. The book questions what it means to ‘follow’ those who came before, exploring the positionality of the architectural historian/filmmaker.
Offering an insightful account of the life, work, and theory of a key thinker, Following Norberg-Schulz is also essential reading for those interested in practice-led research methodologies, particularly in the practice of film-making and the essay film, providing a highly innovative example of scholarly research which bridges the text-film gap.
The book was celebrated with two book launch events. The first took place 15 March 2022 at The Bartlett School of Architecture, with Lilian Chee (the National University of Singapore) and Claire Thomsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies) chaired by Jane Rendell (The Bartlett).
Book Launch Following Norberg-Schulz 15 March 2022 at The Bartlett School of Architecture, with Lilian Chee (the National University of Singapore) and Claire Thomsen (UCL Scandinavian Studies) chaired by Jane Rendell (The Bartlett).
The second launch event took place at ROM for kunst og arkitektur in Oslo 30 March 2022, with Ingrid Halland (University of Bergen). Photos by Håkon Borg/MAGPIE
[Condições Crónicas: Corpo e Construção] 12 October to 11 December 2021 at Palácio Sinel de Cordes, Lisboa. Commissioned and organised by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale, as part of the Future Architecture Platform 2021, themed Landscape of Care. Curator: Anna Ulrikke Andersen. Design: L’Atelier Senzu.
Visit the exhibition through this virtual ‘visit talk’ followed by a roundtable with Anna Ulrikke Andersen, Abi Palmer and Jos Boys.
Curatorial lines
As we live longer, more people will live with chronic illnesses. Told from a personal narrative of chronic rheumatic illness, the curator of this exhibition asks: how do our bodies respond to buildings?
This exhibition uses the patient perspective captured in recent photographs and original films to revisit a selection of drawings and photographs from leading European collections, part of the Future Architecture Platform. Starting from the chronically ill body, we focus on fluids, joinery and openings, both in bodies and buildings, explored by architects and artists from 1822 to 1983.
A complete A to Z guide into this thematic is not possible. The exhibition highlights that the blueprint we have today is incomplete and should be developed further. Instead, we move from A to X: A for Architecture, to X, the unknown future, showing the way chronic illness affect our experience of landscapes, buildings and infrastructures. How can we configure a new alphabet to help us with the new tomorrow?
MAO – Museum of Architecture and Design, Ljubljana
MAXXI – National Museum for 21st Century Arts – Collezione Architettura, Rome
Museum of Architecture in Wrocław
Royal Academy of Arts, London
S AM – Swiss Architecture Museum, Basel
Films by Anna Ulrikke Andersen.
Exhibition design
Designed by L’Atelier Senzu, the scenography focuses on the use of textile material combined with the upcycling of exhibition elements to create an intimate atmosphere. In partnership with Burel Factory, a set of panels was designed in burel, a Portuguese handcrafted fabric made from Serra da Estrela sheep’s wool, which transforms the Palace’s exhibition rooms and takes advantage of this textile’s unique acoustic and thermal properties. With the reuse of material from previous exhibitions, L’Atelier Senzu challenges our perception of accessibility through some proposals that dare the body to adapt to different positions of the shown elements.
L’Atelier Senzu is a Paris-based architectural firm founded in 2015 by Wandrille Marchais and David Dottelonde. The studio explores different areas of creation to imagine unique responses to climate and societal challenges. The office won the international competition for the transformation of the Chamber of Notaries, located Place du Châtelet in Paris, and recently completed the new Galerie Perrotin in the same city. They are also currently developing the first structural rammed earth building in the French capital.
In 2021, L’Atelier Senzu won the prize “Albums des Jeunes Architects et Paysagistes (AJAP)”, a biennial prize from the Ministry of Culture. They were also granted from the “Academy of Fine Arts” which annually awards five prizes each to young artists in the disciplines of painting, sculpture, architecture, engraving and musical composition.
Featuring works by
Benjamin Robert Haydon
Carlo Scarpa
Jerzy Mokrzyński
Josip Osojnik
Lucía de Mosteyrín Muñoz
Mário Novais
Ott Puuraid
William Home Lizars
Max Rasser
Samuele Tirendi / denkstatt sàrl
Tibère Vadi
Patients’ photographs and quotes
Collection of photographs and quotes: Anna Ulrikke Andersen and Anne Silje Bø. With the support of the Norwegian Arts Council
Collaboration
Norsk Folkemuseum, Minner.no, Norsk Revmatikerforbund Østfold, Bekhterev Norge.
The disabled, queer poet Abi Palmer wrote large portions of her debut novel Sanatorium (2020)from her bathroom in a council flat in South London. Here, she welcomes the reader into the most intimate of spaces, discussing her experience with chronic illness, queerness and disability openly. We are taken on a journey between a series of spaces linked with her treatment, from a luxurious spa in Budapest, through an NHS ward in the outskirts of London, the home where she grew up, and to the bath where she is writing from. She lives with Ehler-Danlos Syndrome, a connective tissue disorder that makes her joints, skin and ligaments lose, and psoriatic arthritis, which cause autoimmune inflammation in her joints. Bathing makes her condition better; her muscles stronger and offers pain relief. Here, she reflects upon the way that stiffness and fluidity meet, the straight and the queer, pain and pleasure. As I meet Abi a few months after she launched her book with an online stream from her inflatable bathtub, I want to hear more. I want her to tell me about her bathroom.
On Being and Bathing is a collaborative project between myself and Palmer, where I engage with her work and writing through filmmaking. The collaboration was made possible with an i-Portunus Mobility Grant in 2019. The film has been screened at Barcelona Architecture Week 2021, Berlin Short Film Festival 2021, and the exhibition Chronic Conditions: Body and Building commissioned and organised by the Lisbon Architecture Triennale 12 October – 11 December 2021.
On Being and Bathing (2021, 09:45, 16mm) Anna Ulrikke Andersen with Abi Palmer.
a project by Anna Ulrikke Andersen and Anne Silje Bø.
Since 1976 the Norwegian government has sent rheumatic patients to Montenegro for climatic treatment at Institute Dr Simo Milosevic, JSC Igalo. The programme, run by Oslo University Hospital, has since expanded to include other locations in Southern Europe, and research shows that the treatment is highly successful in increasing mobility, and reducing chronic pain and fatigue. In 2020, all treatment abroad is cancelled, and the patients must stay at home.
“Ubehandlet” explores everyday experiences of patients living with rheumatic illness during the Covid-19 pandemic, with a focus on how lockdown measures affect their treatment. Andersen and Bø will interview a series of patients of Skype, and the recorded interviews will form the basis of a podcast episode, articles, and in its full length, are securely stored in the archive of the Norwegian Folkemuseum website minner.no. We are interested in the way people feel about not being able to travel for treatment, how their bodies are affected and how being at home makes them think about the southern sites where they previously so successfully have received relief from their chronic conditions.
A sound piece was edited and published through ROM forlag, Oslo. Sound design by Therese Næss Diesen.
The project is supported by Kulturrådet [The Norwegian Arts Council]
Institute Dr Simo Milosevic JSC Igalo. Photography by Anna Ulrikke Andersen 2018.
“Disability is such an essential part of life that we all go through. So we are living longer, we’re living with more disabilities. It’s a more common experience. Just given the nature of the human fragility, it’s just an inevitable and a natural part of life. It is almost life reaffirming because of that. And culturally we tend to think of it as something out of the ordinary. Something different, and something that is not right. It needs to be just heroically normal and a natural, inevitable part of life and society.”
Chris Downey
Architecture Beyond Sight (Andersen, 2019) follows Zoe Legg and Clarke Reynolds partaking on a study week for blind and visually impaired people at The Bartlett UCL, coordinated by The DisOrdinary Architecture Project. Investigating the two participant’s process of making, the film explores the non-visual aspects of architecture shot on 16mm film with sound recorded separately. By highlighting different ways that bringing visually impaired people into architecture and design could benefit the profession, the project is based on the assertion that to have a vision does not require sight.
I wanted to explore the process of welding, of bending metal and joining different sections using intense heat. My aim was to understand the experience of bending a stiff material and, thus, get a better sense of what a joint might be.
I welded a series of boxes, replicating cardboard packaging of Methotrexate in metal. This included a box of one single injection and the larger ones which housed six prefilled injections. Further, the drug came with a cytotozix drug spill kit. If the patient accidentally fails to inject the liquid into her body, she should clean the toxic liquid up using the spill kit.
The kit contains the following items:
1x FFP3 face piece 2x pair nitrile gloves 1x eye shield 1x plastic apron 1x pair overshoes 1x grey absorbent pad 6x white lint-free wipes 2x 20ml sterile water pod
The side of the cardboard box holds the following instructions:
When I eventually came around to photographing the boxes, time had passed. Rust had overtaken the metal, and the surfaces felt rough and rugged when I touched them. The metal that once had felt so flexible and clean, now felt old. I took the photos before disposing of the boxes, the kits and the remaining injections. For now they were no longer needed.
Cytotoxic Drug Spill Kit (for home use) by Cairns Technologies.
Metex 10 mg, by Medac, Wedel, Germany.
Metoject 10mg, by Medac, Wedel, Germay.
Thanks to: Kathryn Abarbanel, Katarina Burin, Lucien Castaing-Taylor, Mikkel Due, Abi Palmer, Julia Smachylo, Christian Struck, Åshild Marie Vige, Legs, Advanced Critical Media Practice and Film Study Center Harvard.
Christian Norberg-Schulz was sittingat Piazza Navona in Rome after having spent the morning in the valleys north of the city. He was enjoying a Campari and watching life in the piazza, when he was struck by a sudden feeling: that the piazza and the valleys that he had visited earlier in the day, were the same. Not similar: the valley was rural with steep tufa- rock formations in the landscape; coloured yellow and brown. The piazza was surrounded by buildings, filled with fountains, sculptures, restaurants and people. In an article discussing the importance Rome had on his authorship he describes the moment:
Suddenly, I had a feeling of still being in a ‘tufa-valley’: this is the same, (despite not being similar)! So started my study of the genius loci. Because of sudden inspiration, and not at all a logical line of thougth.
(Christian Norberg-Schulz, 1999: 102)
The unedited rushes are both depicting me ordering anddrinking a Campari at Piazza Navona. I: Campari-Moment was shot with a Blackmagic Design Camera, and one Philips Radio-Microphone recording into the Zoom H4n, with the help of Mikkel Due 16 September 2014. II: Campari-Moment was shot with a Blackmagic Design Camera, and one Philips Radio-Microphone recording into the Zoom H4n, with the help of John Øyvind Hovde 15 February 2016. Language: English. The storyboard is created with references to the work of others: the poem Les Fenêtres IV (1927) by Rainer Maria Rilke, Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s sculpture Fontana dei Quattro Fuimi (1651), the film The Miracle worker (1964), and Federico Fellini’s advert for Campari (1984), as well as stills from my own footage.
Anna Ulrikke Andersen 