Maj Horn
  • Maj Horn
  • Work
  • Printed Matter
  • About
  • Maj Horn
  • Work
  • Printed Matter
  • About
MILK SNAIL PAVILLON
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2020
Vollsmose, Denmark
A public art proposal commissioned by the Danish Arts Foundation and Odense Municipality

​Collaborator: Søren Nordal Enevoldsen | SNE Architects
Local counseling: Kim Nielsen
​Landscape architecture counseling: Elzélina Van Melle
Text editing: Miriam Weistrich
3D/photoshop: Jonas Bentzen
Illustrations: Lucía Merlo
​​Graphic design: Studio Hanna Bergman
Financial support: Odense Municipality and the Danish Arts Foundation

Milk Snail Pavilion is a garden pavilion in a new green area, created for social and artistic acts. The project will consist of four parts, that partially will overlap: 1.) The pavilion's construction process itself, where local youth and professionals will jointly develop and create. 2.) The pavilion as a free space, a bridge between the private sphere of the blocks and the public open spaces. 3.) The pavilion as a platform where Vollsmose's schools and associations can do outdoor teaching and other events. 4.) A one-day art event and the outline for a long-term art program.

 
A diverse group of local youth will be invited to participate in the workshops, where the green area and the pavilion’s furnitures will be jointly developed and created. The young people are invited on the basis of interest and qualifications and they will receive a fee for their participation. The intention is to create a stronger project based on local knowledge and labour forces, which is also central to the project's social sustainability. The choice to pay fees relates to the fact that the project takes place in a district where unemployment is high and is thereby aiming to engage others than those who have surplus for volunteering. Artistically, it is about investigating and asking about citizen involvement defined as voluntary. What does it mean artistically if we make the project's underlying economic reality visible? We see this focus as a key element alongside the materiality of the project. 

Milk Snail Pavilion is based on the conviction, that the built environment is of great importance for the quality of social meetings, how we experience art and culture, and our susceptibility to teaching. We want to create a pavilion that has a friendly, playful appearance and a pleasant and inspiring climate. 

 
The project proposal is developed on the basis of dialogues with local residents and a number of institutions, Camp U, Mulernes Legatskole, Vollsmose Sekretariat, and others. It also resonates with studies conducted by the Aarhus School of Architecture in 2019 on Vollsmose's architectural heritage, which concludes that “Vollsmose has large areas of recreational nature, but the functions of these are relatively invariant with no clear function and with few hang-out options and playgrounds”.
 
The project is named after a common land snail with a patterned house, called milk snail. The colours of the pavilion are inspired by the snail's house, and the name is a reference to the social processes of the project, working methods which can be termed “slow research”. Less concept-heavy, the name is also a picture of this new "strange snail" that will find its way to Vollsmose's green area.
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