As we enter our third week of lockdown, I can’t help but notice how primarily visual our (or perhaps only mine?) indoors pastime activities are: TV streaming, movie streaming, documentary streaming, flicking through stacks of old art magazines, reading, video conferencing, flirting with watercolours and TV streaming some more. It makes me slightly anxious to think that I’d have to go a day with my sight on pause. How do I restore balance to my sensorial intake?

Thankfully, the Odense-based non-profit association Røde Himmel provides a way, with their newly established radio station: Live from Lockdown. Røde Himmel has been around since 2016, when they started as an underground venue for upcoming Danish names, “which wouldn’t play in Odense, otherwise.” This clever condition of necessity makes Røde Himmel unique and, yes, necessary, in Odense. And this is why it’s so important to tune in to their live transmissions – from their lockdown to yours: because, otherwise, you will miss out on some fantastic music; because, otherwise, you might be in danger of succumbing to the tyranny of the visual.

As a side note, I don’t know yet why their sky is red, but I appreciate, again, how this detail interrupts how my visually conditioned perceptions interpret the world. The sky might as well be red, if I just close my eyes, pause my vision and let my senses be free in the ether.

Live from Lockdown is not transmitted regularly – follow their Facebook page for updates!

Photo: Røde Himmel

Creative Space is relatively new to Odense. The café opened early this February, to a flock of excited creative people, whose typical coffee-drinking social togetherness was suddenly elevated to a proper art studio together-time.

Granted – the creative café caters rather to “beginners,” who love making things, but are not ready to buy a pottery wheel. There is, however, some comfort in this – in knowing that your soup bowl will actually hold the soup, having been designed and crafted by Italian ceramic artists. Your job remains to choose colours and patterns and make sure to make memories, during the lovely painting sessions. And, of course, to remember to pick up your creations, once they’ve been glazed and burnt, and keep them from harm for the rest of your life. Easy!

But, with the new world order upon us, the café needs to keep its doors closed to actual sit-in studio time. Instead, they found a way to bring the project to you – literally drop it at your door. Or – carefully place it down at your door, as long as you live in an area where direct delivery is possible. All you need is a well-lit corner, a nice local radio station on, and some craft-loving friends doing the very same in a Skype window next to you. New times, new memories.

Head over to their website and choose the pottery objects, paints and brushes you need. Return it to be glazed and burnt, and enjoy the soup!

Photo: Creative Space

When things we’ve grown to love are taken from us, we enter a process of grieving. Or we should, anyway. Most of us don’t call it grief – a feeling culturally reserved for human loss, almost exclusively of those close to us. But losing things, places, social customs, opportunities we’ve taken for granted as constant should make us feel grief. Or, to appease purists, we should find a new name for this feeling. It’s also very interesting to notice what lost things, places, and options, the people around us lament most often or most loudly – restaurants, cafés, pubs, freedom to picnic in the park, quirky shops. These are venues of tangible consumption, places you leave holding something in your hands, or having been satiated. All places where our money makes a difference.

I haven’t yet seen calls to support our local art galleries – places where we wouldn’t necessarily leave any money, and places we’d leave again, holding intangible value. And sure – support, these days, is all about money; survival is a financial matter; how do we show support, when money is not the channel of support?

(Most) art galleries sell art, but to those who can’t afford it, they offer experience and knowledge, emotions and the occasion to produce new thoughts, in the presence of unique artistic expression. It’s all, however, dependent on access. One must go out of their home, cross the town, enter the gallery and experience it all. With this type of access denied, what’s left?

Museums and galleries around the world are expanding access to their rooms and walls through digital solutions – 3D tours have been around for some time now. Some art venues have already implemented an infrastructure for remote access, long before access became a mainstream problem. Indeed, now may be a time to exercise empathy with people who experience limited access every day, and remember this once we can all move freely again.

In Denmark, the Copenhagen-based digital artspace Artland has been working with this notion of access for a while now – aiming to bring art closer to the public. 3D exhibition tours of Danish galleries are part of this mission. Sadly, I couldn’t find any Odense-based galleries listed, which makes a strong point, in my view, for how Odense and its art spaces see themselves.

But, in any case, remotely engaging with art in current and past exhibitions is important – we can still think about it, emote, reflect, share our thoughts and create an experience. We can support art galleries by making space in our lives for them, even if we don’t get the ego-kick from stepping into the whitecubeness of it all.

But, closer to home, Kunstmuseum Brandts is giving a live online tour of their Pixar exhibition on 1. April. This is a one-off, 30 minutes showing – critically different from always-available 3D tours, when considering the freedom and agency of the viewer, but perhaps a good start.

The split-screen, talking-heads, digital-social-interaction routine slowly seeps in as exclusive mode of being in touch with the people around us. Friends, family, colleagues, bosses – hundreds of people sitting in front of their screen, smiling, nodding, sipping coffee and wishing each other well. Essential elements of interpersonal communication are no longer relevant (or very restricted) – body language, subtle facial expressions, eye contact, posture. We’re partly left dry by conversations that would’ve filled our minds and hearts, when held in person. In this situation, our spoken communication goes in overdrive – heightened awareness of what we say, the structure of our sentence, the logic of our thoughts – they make up for the impossibility of sending other cues.

A perfect place to train all this is the newly established online Mafia Club – the first and only in Denmark. It follows the live (in person) clubs previously active in Kolding and Copenhagen (currently on pause), and precedes, I hope, the live club in Odense.

See, this recommendation is partly a call to arms to those of you in Odense who might want to start a Mafia Club here. I strongly believe we all absolutely must play this game, and before I start sliding into the extreme, let me tell you why.

Mafia is a dynamic group game, which has its players divided into mafia and citizens, the citizens trying to guess who the mafia is, by gathering clues and analysing the moves mafia makes while “killing” citizens one by one. Whichever group stands last wins the game. All the mafia know each other, but the citizens are left guessing, in their quest to unveil the mafia. In between – strategy and collaboration are essential; intuition and emotion collide; memory is crucial and good acting is a bonus. The power to convince and deceive is a strength, while the realization that you’ve just been deceived hits you every time.

Playing the game online eliminates clues taken from movement, blushing, heavy breathing, shaky legs. All that’s left is speaking and the balance of emotional speech and sound arguments. You get to defend and accuse, with the luxury of muting your microphone, in case of frustration. Stress, focus, personality traits are morphed, partly by the medium, but mostly by the game itself. The power balance of knowing and not knowing is so important and it can be your undoing, if you’re not careful.

This brilliant game facilitates unique situations, where we learn so much about ourselves, while we (think we) pretend, for the sake of the game. The game master, Pavel Bavtra, has 15 years’ experience in playing and studying the game. He brings structure, rules, and on-point feedback to every game, which keeps it free from chaos and formal mistakes. I strongly encourage you to join the online version and the live version, once a club is started in Odense.

The next game is on Thursday 2. April, and you can keep yourself informed on the Facebook group.