Brownfield Wonderland

Get ready to build your own messy and unregulated digital architectures, both on and off the building site around the site of Artist run space Spanien 19C in Aarhus. On the screen of any compatible phone or tablet, you can arrange a combination of scaffolding, 3d scans from the site and architectural fragments into an unstable and intangible building mass. Brownfield Wonderland affords a glimpse of a city that flaunts its weightless hollow nature instead of hiding it, superimposing upon the physical reality of the building site the temporary digital ghost of a wonderland built on the messy and indeterminate qualities of the brownfield.

“After the industrial age had passed there was a wonderland of mischief in its ruins. A brownfield of possibilities built on left-over fragments waiting for a predictably boring future to arrive. A temporary crack in the fabric of the city through which it was possible to catch a glimpse of as yet unrealised communities and spaces. A place in which it was possible to see past the glossy steel-and-glass dreams that fill architectural renderings and shape municipal imaginations. Peer into a makeshift wonderland pregnant with muddy dreams of a messy and unregulated future.

After the industrial age had passed there was a wonderland of mischief in its ruins. A brownfield of possibilities built on left-over fragments waiting for a predictably boring future to arrive. A temporary crack in the fabric of the city through which it was possible to catch a glimpse of as yet unrealised communities and spaces. A place in which it was possible to see past the glossy steel-and-glass dreams that fill architectural renderings and shape municipal imaginations. Peer into a makeshift wonderland pregnant with muddy dreams of a messy and unregulated future.
Because the original functions of this Brownfield Wonderland had been lost in time, it was full of indeterminate possibilities and the dreams of those whose desires are not valued. It was an imaginary wonderland of mud that refused to remain settled or become sensible. It was a hypothetical brownfield filled with potential cities we could have built and lives we could have led. If only we had grasped these ghostly dreams of alterity and make them into material and social structures.
But even as a haunting memory it holds the promise of roads not taken and a glimpse of that vast undefined space of possibilities that exists outside of the constraints of a contemporary city that is coming into view where it once lay. An unassimilated and unrealised municipality that might very well rise again. Once the structures imagined by bureaucracy and built by the lowest bidder escape their current use and the site becomes once again a Brownfield Wonderland.”

Please note that Brownfield Wonderland has been designed to work best outside in open spaces, and make sure you're in a safe location and that children are supervised at all times.

Supported by the Danish Arts Council