By Ruben Campos Arjona Ten thousand years ago, a wounded prey is running away from its hunters. Three arrows of a material that is not yet flint are stuck on its side. The beast stumbles, gasps for air and closes its eyes one last time as the frigid waters of the lake claim it. The hunters pass it by, the prey forgotten. After a violent pause and millennia of silence, a bunch of bones are unearthed and reassembled on top…
By Jamie Jackson and Sarah Plauborg As we make our way through town on an overcrowded warm bus, we finally arrive at our destination. The topic that we had begun to discuss on the way there was Nørrebro in the news. Being from two different parts of the world, often gives us an advantage when discussing aspects of Danish society. Sarah being an ethnic Dane, and Jamie a South African. We discussed how the area in question had fallen privy…
By Riia Marette Mäkilä I certainly didn’t imagine they would have me dancing until my feet were sore! I was spending the weekend at my Palestinian friend’s family house in Nablus when I got invited to his sister’s wedding. I felt very excited as I had heard about Palestinian weddings from friends but had never been to one before. I was imagining gender segregation, dancing and a dinner with Mansaf, which is a traditional Arabic dish with rice, lamb and…
by Guðrun Henrysdóttir “museums are structurally neo-colonial institutions” (Robin Boast in his article ‘Neocolonial Collaboration: Museums as Contact Zone Revisited’) Concerned about Robin Boast’s polemic statement I set out to examine this polemic statement myself by going to the National Museum of Denmark in central Copenhagen. My aim was to understand this controversy in regards to the ethnographic collections of the National Museum. Walking through the ethnographic collection of the museum felt tedious. As much as I appreciated the craftsmanship…
By Jessica Silverio Rasmussen, Lea Vyff Blauenfeldt and Arleen Sharon Pushparajah In a time where there appears to be an on-going focus on the depolarisation between Muslims and non-Muslims in Western society, it was especially interesting and enlightening to visit the Imam Ali mosque in Nørrebro as part of our Cultural Encounter’s course. When arriving to the mosque, the construction appeared massive and almost majestic in its expression with its two, blue, beautifully ornamented minarets and dome, which stood out…
By Amalie Glimø Christensen and Anna Gerda Nielsen When visiting David’s Collection as part of the course on ‘Cultural Encounters and Differences’ we got an experience that we did not expect. Our research on the museum beforehand of entering it has given us an idea of what we were about to see, but we were surprised of what we actually learned by being shown the artwork and the use of the museum. We found it very interesting the way Daniella,…
By Jonas Wissing Larsen The topic of this post is the exhibition Rum og Rummelighed (Space and Spaciousness) at the Danish Jewish museum. I think Rum og Rummelighed, is a great title to the exhibition, as it shows how a certain space can contain different groups of people, and how they sometimes clash and learn to live together in the same space. I also think spaciousness, or inclusiveness, is a topic that is highly relevant today as minority groups are…
By Saskia Schindler “Master filmmaker Raoul Peck envisions the book James Baldwin never finished, Remember This House. The result is a radical, up-to-the-minute examination of race in America, using Baldwin’s original words and flood of rich archival material. I Am Not Your Negro is a journey into black history that connects the past of the Civil Rights movement to the present of #BlackLivesMatter. (…).” From the official homepage of the documentary, http://www.iamnotyournegrofilm.com/synopsis On the 1st of April a free screening…
By Mads Neess Priisholm Setting the scene Here is a story and it is true. The story is about a cultural encounter that takes place in the basement of an old industrial facility building in Copenhagen. Where, on the street view, there is a fitness, auto-shops, and a massage-parlour, that also takes ‘late-night-calls’. The whole thing is orchestrated by a guy, who has made quite a bit of the building into a bazar, from where he rents out stands and…
By Shao Zhong Li I knew very little about the local or Chinese religions and their rituals, and seldom visited a temple, until I moved to the Hung Hom. The Kwun Yum temple (觀音廟) is only 10 minutes-walk away from my home. There are many types of temples, this is the largest Kwun Yum Temple in Kowloon-Peninsular* built to worship ‘Kwun Yum’. The following photos show the temple and its surroundings. Summing up my personal experience in the temple, I…