Curatorial Statement

In 2017, we have chosen architecture as identity as the overarching theme for the festival. Through film screenings, city walks, lectures, installations, boat trips, conferences, exhibitions, and much more, we inquire into how architecture shapes our city, how architecture creates value, and how we read ourselves into architecture - as everyday spaces, as homes, neighborhoods, cities, or nations. Our society is changing. Where we previously lived in a fairly homogeneous country, diversity has now become a condition. The celebrated Danish welfare state, which has left its mark on both architecture and urban spaces throughout the country, is also under pressure from migration, globalization, and liberalization. We wish to focus on how architecture can express our identity and values, and how we unconsciously connect ourselves to its character or expression. What is it that makes us feel connected to a place?

The festival program presents architecture as experienced on different scales: from the very intimate space surrounding our bodies, through the city's communities, to the nation as an identity-bearing idea. Across all this lies globalization, which enables us all, across borders, to buy the same furniture on the same tablets in the same stores for the same types of housing. We explore how identity emerges when these levels intersect, overlap, are challenged, or reimagined through architecture and design.

We seek out the architectural traces of colonialism, the threat to the world's cultural heritage, and life as a refugee on the border between home and haven. We debate the relationship between plan and life in a large program on the concrete utopias of modernism. And you can get very, very close to Copenhagen, celebrating its 850th anniversary this year, as we engage all senses to rethink our movement in urban space. But we are not just a festival for Copenhagen: once again this year, we welcome extensive programs in both Aarhus and Aalborg. For example, you can learn much more about the character of architecture at the conference 'Architecture as Character' in Aarhus on April 27th-28th, where you can meet one of the designers behind The High Line in New York, Charles Renfro from Diller Scofidio + Renfro, and many other prominent Danish and international architects.

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