A volume of poetry by Simon Maegaard and Jørgen Wassilefsky

“Jørgen is trying to get at reality in general, […], its more subtle, experienced. There are more statements in my poems, more sexuality, more nakedness and intensity, more critiques of these small societies…you can feel there is a person with an opinion behind the statements. I’m not impersonating dialects, but the spirit of the Danish dialects is in the poems. I’m mapping mindsets.”

Simon Mægaard, Lindved, DK

Simon Mægaard, inspired by the Nordic light of Skagen in Northern Jutland, invited  Jørgen Wassilefsky, to engage Denmark’s “udkanten,” or rural villages, in a cyclical process of daily visitation and inspiration followed by a compositional flurry at dusk. The rules were clear: Choose a village, observe and experience it socially, sensually, philosophically and geographically during daylight hours, and at sunset, write. Write until the autumn sky is dark. Write until the empty page is black. Write until a disappearing place is on the map. Write until you have an artifact.
 
The results are thirty-three reference points on a cultural map of Denmark. There are thirty-three aesthetic reconstructions of real places, ideologies, and the people that inhabit them—thirty-three performances of artists locating themselves center on a temporal-spacial stage, converting daylight perceptions to final judgements through the fading light of dusk.  Simon and Jørgen are giving their readers access to physical and cultural spaces that are otherwise inaccessible to outsiders—a reflexive act on Simon’s part, probing the relationship between culture and the time and place that sustains it.
 
Solar Plexus is an incandescent performance of Danish rurality, firmly anchored in the spaces between pastoral idealism, artistic posturing, and the villages Denmark forgot—a political no-man’s land where Simon’s youth meets Jørgen’s experience to both subvert and support the discourse of rural marginalization in Danish culture.

Ink on Paper; handmade organic dyes

Illustrations for Solar Plexus
by Alina Milišunaite

Untitled, 2017

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