AMCN exhibition 2025

the Tower that used to be a Well
By Bodil Skovgaard Nielsen

Others have been here before. Here, in the gravel pit, where one feels strangely close to the Earth’s most ancient interior, everything is nonetheless new. Rises and falls have been created by the persistent work of excavators. The lakes, with their square shores, did not rise from rock—they emerged because someone dug too deep and hit the groundwater. Here are mountain bikes and horses, and out on the big roads, the trucks rush by with new loads. What they carry both creates and removes. The landscape that used to be flat is now hilly; out there in the world, someone has commissioned a new highway. Above the engine noise, the songbirds.

At Tarup-Davinde Natural Area, different times and places intersect: stones and bones and dirt hailing from eras before humans even existed, unearthed by high-tech machinery. What is left is a wounded land and a small miracle. As the extraction of gravel gradually comes to an end, and in collaboration with municipalities, associations, and locals, the area is transformed into a nature reserve. Here you’ll find bathing lakes, riding trails, and a communal meeting spot with kitchen facilities, where you can buy firewood for cooking over an open fire.

And now, there is also art out here. Seven artists from the Anne Marie Carl Nielsen program for art in public spaces at the Funen Art Academy spent a year studying the site, the landscape, its inhabitants and its users. Over the course of six weeks, they evoke ways of seeing and moving in the landscape. Their works are not as much interventions, as they are invitations: to view the gravel pit as a repository of the past, of form, function, and movement. They summon what once was back from the grave. And what could become, they make space for.

Hole and heap

Imagine a tower shooting up in an otherwise barren and flat landscape. Like a beanstalk from a fairy tale, it sprouts towards the sky: it looks magical. But as you move closer, a different chain of causation reveals itself. The tower is not a tower at all, but a previous well, several metres deep when it was first excavated, now several metres tall. As the groundwater has receded, and as the surrounding soil has been excavated or has eroded, the well’s once-hidden shape has been exposed. Now, it must contend with being a tower, the same way we must contend with inhabiting an increasingly destroyed planet.

To destroy is to create, to create is to destroy. The reciprocal logic is constantly at play in the gravel pit, in which two fundamental and interconnected forms exist: the hole and the heap. Every time you dig a hole in the ground, a heap emerges next to it. This is the logic of the sand box and of the mole. And the heap can be used to fill a new hole.

Much of the land art of the 1960s and 1970s, where artists reshaped natural materials within the landscape, aimed at pointing out the relationship between heap and hole—humanity’s drive towards carving out a space for itself (to shovel away), and the mounds of slag (the heap) that inevitably follow. Some of the works now inhabiting Tarup-Davinde Natural Area, like Laurits Malthe Gulløv’s salt sculptures, investigate what the gravel pits have become elsewhere: the infrastructure of modernity in the shape of roads and control towers. Other works, like Therese Bülow’s resting platforms for tensioned truck springs, or Anna Walther’s bed for those overwhelmed by the outdoors, are preoccupied with withdrawing into oneself. Breaking the cycle of hole and heap, hole and heap, forever. They stop for a moment: take a break. Reassess things anew.

Ladle and shovel

The word utopia sounds grand, but it doesn’t have to be. It can also simply mean a local initiative that frees the land. Several of the artists are drawn to the kinds of communities emerging in the area without a central governing body. Like Zuzanna Kozłowska, who has draped a riding club’s equipment in heavy, billowing tarpaulin, hinting at a stockpile of secrets that inevitably arises when people gather. Or Lotte Rose Kjær Skau and Emilie Bausager, whose works revolve around the meal as both a stage and a simmering conflict. There is nourishment in the pots, but also a battle over territory, division of labour, and care. To make soup you need something shaped like a hole—a pot. A soup ladle is the excavator of everyday life. The shapes are ambiguous.

Primordial soup. Something will always come to the surface when you start digging in the ground—it’s a misconception that skeletons hide in closets. A solid mix of micro plastics and glacial deposits and antique silver lurk underground; in constant risk of exposing itself like the tower that used to be a well. Several of the artists’ works invite us to travel in time: like Erdal Bilici, who has launched sets of porcelain teeth in one of the lakes: they look like relics from a distant civilisation. But maybe that civilisation isn’t so distant after all. The excavators that created this landscape have claws so massive they bring to mind a yet-to-be-discovered dinosaur.

Even in moonscapes, someone has always been there before us. Something else has always preceded us. What kind of places do we wish to leave behind for those who follow in our footsteps?