Elena Stanciu

This is Odense • 16th November 2020

Art in transit

Well, good news for you who also observe the unspoken rules of urban transit publicness – the new trams we’re all so patiently waiting for will come adorned with bespoke visual art by Kristian Djurhuus, who goes by Mormor, and poetry by Odense’s own...

This is Odense • 16th November 2020

Shapes of Light

A lichtenberg figure is an organic-looking pattern created by an electrical discharge on a surface. In nature, they are found at the spots of a lightning strike and can remain on the skin of lightning strike victims for 24 hours. They also occur on...

This is Odense • 16th November 2020

Open Words

I’m very happy to recommend this open mic event at PåTaget, dedicated to the poets of Odense. Talented people should have their time in the limelight and they should be recognised as such without delay! The event (now at its second edition) sounds...

This is Odense • 16th November 2020

Dear You

Writing a letter – an old-fashioned, pen and paper letter – is not an easy thing. Or, rather – writing and sending it is not easy! It takes courage – first, to sit in silence with yourself and your words; decide what thoughts will make it on the...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

A story in sheep's clothing

From the introduction to this exhibition, we find out that “on the Faroe Islands sheep are a permanent part of the landscape;” that “no matter where you go, there’s always a likelihood you’ll meet the four-legged woolly creatures.” This has had a...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Barfly - Young Art at Odense Harbour

The idea of a bar that exhibits art is just as appealing to some as it probably is scandalous to others. The latter are those whose reading of an art piece must be done against the clean and sharp white wall. Ironically, the white wall is an entity...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

The Good and the Bad – a busy week for polarising cinema

As the current decade draws to a close, the pressure to categorize “the best and worst” cultural products looms over many a clickbait editorial policy – in Hollywood, the pressure is tenfold. We’ve recently been told that the star of the decade is...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Romanian Trouble

“It’s a new thing for me – being Romanian. It’s quite a novel concept, because when I was back home, I was just a guy. Came over here and became Romanian.” - Victor Patrascan He’s not wrong. What else, if not being an immigrant, will push your...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Lovers of the Light

Odense is not normally a flashy place. Summer festivals and winter light decorations are about the only occasions when the city “allows” some sparkles. Otherwise, everyone seems to have come to terms with the low-key charm of summery Odense, and its...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

3D Art Tours

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,...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Sense and sensuousness at OFF

Someone once said: “Good film music is the one you don’t notice.” For a long time I didn’t know what to feel about this, torn between agreeing that music should elevate the story in a wholesome, cohesive way, on the one side, and on the other,...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Walking is broken

Referring to a handstand artist, circus artist and professor John-Paul Zaccarini writes: “She creates a piece about a person who walks on her hands in a world designed for people who walk on their feet.” This desire to turn the world upside down, by...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Spoken Allegories

There are few things as tightly connected to existence itself as the spoken word. Biblically speaking. It is the creator’s illocutionary speech act that creates light out of darkness; it is the naming of everything that gives legitimacy and meaning...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Bodytecture - Archaeology of today

“Bodytecture” is a touching series of works by artist Dan Stockholm, currently on show at gallery M100. Moving around the selected works is one of those rare and beautiful experiences of discovery, of poetry jumping out of your body, when you didn’t...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

View from the mud

“A world [is] the sum of many things – the people, the dirt, the growing things, the moons, the tides, the suns – the unknown sum called nature, a vague summation without any sense of the now.” - Frank Herbert, Dune Looking at Thomas Klein’s...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Women to remember

The stories on screen are not of grandeur or of changing the world at the helm of some Western super-power; they are not biographies of women who beat the odds and opened doors otherwise historically closed to them. These are stories that write their...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Local asparagus

Today, asparagus is more than a nutrition-packed, cancer-fighting, vitamin-bomb vegetable. In early April, a sliver of the usual invisibility of European economic migrants became violently visible, as the “asparagus flights” started landing at a Dutch...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Reading in the time of lockdown

Rebecca Solnit is one of my absolute favorite authors – sharp and rigorous in her arguments, she shows intellectual integrity in her critical accounts of left and right thinkers and opinions alike, and advocates for a clear, unambiguous and...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Not a Bigot. Full stop.

Gender and sexuality are today’s most significant battlegrounds. That they are battlegrounds at all, as we step into a new decade of the third millennium, is baffling. Capital punishment for homosexuality, transphobic discourse, limited civil rights...

This is Odense • 12th November 2020

Archaeological afterlife

Time is a funny thing. It either races on, charging like a loose bull into a crowd of foolish optimists running ahead of it - or it slows down, patient, joining us at walking speed through generations. With this mind of its own, we hardly know what to...