The piece “BO92/landscape” is a drawing on the window of the artspace
OTTO.
It is a mirrored drawing of the outlines of the plants in the neighbouring
shop window. The neighbourhood Vesterbro in Copenhagen, where OTTO was located,
was formerly a traditional working-class area, with apartment blocks and small
shops. The former shops are now used for different private purposes such as
meeting-places and clubs of different kinds for the citizens in the area,
and some times simply for living.
Common for all these places is that they in some way or another try to deal
with the empty shop window, since there is no longer any commercial use of
the shop and of course no products to exhibit.
The artist run space OTTO used such a former shop as an exhibition space for
6 months in the summer 1999, and the work “BO92/landscape” was
produced for the exhibition Hasta la Vista.
The shop space next to the gallery is completely symmetrical to the gallery
space, and has for some years been housing a social project called BO92. It
is a meeting point and support centre for a group of mentally handicapped
people living alone in flats in the area, and the social workers connected
to the project. Their window is filled with a collection of different plants,
producing a jungle of more or less pretty and appealing plants. The drawing
points at the way the plants function, at the way they become the objects
on display instead of the missing goods, as well as a shield against looks
into the room from the people passing on the street.