In her first institutional solo exhibition, Kaja Lahoda turns the walls of Tranen’s exhibition space inside out. Her works are not just hanging on the wall. What she presents within the walls of the building points to what is inside the walls of the building. Lahoda is not concerned with bricks, concrete, wood and plasterboard. It is the stone wool hiding behind them that she examines, cuts, moulds and works with. In the stone-dead material, figures emerge to the surface. In Within The Wall, the insulation, which no one usually takes notice of, comes to the fore, and the lifeless material is animated by spirits and all kinds of bugs. The wall takes on a life of its own.
Stone wool, patented in 19th century USA and today synonymous with Danish Rockwool, is used for insulation. The material has made people’s cosy homes and buildings even warmer and drier. But as Lahoda notes, insulation has also further isolated man from his surroundings. The walls that draw a line between outside and inside increasingly fortify the divide between human and animal, nature and culture. In modernist architecture, this demarcation is perfected so that the boundary becomes invisible, such as here at Henning Larsen’s beautiful, clean and clear Gentofte Main Library. All the technical installations, including Rockwool, that serve humans’ arrangement of their own little world at a comfortable distance from the big wide world, are hidden away in walls, ceilings and floors. When the outside world intrudes, the discomfort is all the greater.
The mouse, fungus or puddle that could be a minor attraction outdoors is greeted on the other side of the wall with a small shudder as an inappropriate intrusion indoors. Lahoda stages the discomfort of misplaced organisms and pests. The architecture of Tranen turns into something close to its opposite, a cartoonish version of the haunted castle.
Lahoda is concerned with an element of gothic horror, recognising that even we modern humans inhabit houses that harbour uninvited guests. The walls become breeding grounds for beasts and not least the imagination. In her work, the walls that should separate life inside from life outside become porous and signs of failure in the supporting structure. What Lahoda digs into beyond the stone wool is also humankind’s new insecurity at a time when our buildings and cities are threatened by more water, storm and fire. For the so-called “indoor person”, who lives 90% of their time indoors, it’s our entire culture, society and civilisation that falters when the interior is threatened.
An unwelcome guest that appears in Lahoda’s installation is the silverfish. The wingless insect has evolved minimally in evolutionary terms. It is therefore what is called ‘a living fossil’. In the exhibition, Lahoda plays with this piece of paradoxical nature. The silverfish that she forms in the stone wool can be seen both as reliefs depicting living animals and as geological finds that appear in an elevation or depression in a sedimentary rock.
The silverfish originates from warmer and tropical regions where there is a stable high temperature and humidity. But on the heels of humans, it has spread around the world, taking advantage of our increasingly insulated, comfortable homes. Its urges and needs are a distorted mirror image of our own.
In our latitudes, where silverfish can’t make it outside, their habitat is the cracks and dark corners of our built environment, such as built-in, leaky plumbing. Lahoda has studied their silvery grey scales, their so-called exoskeleton. She thinks of it as an intimidating armour that makes homo sapiens, aka ‘the naked ape,’ pale by comparison. These tough little creatures have survived 400 million years on earth and thus outlived the dinosaurs, among others. As such, Lahoda is interested in how they exhibit the fragility of mere 300,000-year-old homo sapiens. We have become animals that seem powerless without our homes.
The oversized silverfish marching in pairs across the centre wall of the exhibition are carved from stone wool. Up close you can see that they have been worked with felted steel wool. From a distance, however, they look more like traces of a sheep’s hooves. Lahoda works with the familiar feeling of not being able to clearly identify the species of a pest, i.e. a threat, which makes it all the more difficult to defend against it. But Lahoda is also concerned with how inhabitants of older houses are always following in the footsteps of others. Walls and internal structures can harbour stories about a building’s previous occupants. As Lahoda herself describes it: ‘I think about how the outside is haunted by the inside, but also how the present is haunted by the past.’
Although humans have sought to rise above nature, we have always coexisted with animals and still do – ‘voluntarily and involuntarily’, as Lahoda puts it. But the nature of coexistence has changed. Since the transition to animal husbandry thousands of years ago, human coexistence with animals has been characterised by domestication. The hoof prints and tufts of felted wool in the rockwool are also traces of the sheep that we humans once lived with in our houses, whose meat we still eat and whose wool we still wear. Even animals that humans have not been able to domesticate or tame have found their place in our homes. The so-called “teddy bear” that lets bears into our homes through the back door came on the market in 1903 after US President Theodore “Teddy” Roosevelt couldn’t bring himself to shoot a captured bear on a hunt. The dangerous bear has become a pacifier. Lahoda’s teddy bear, however, is made of rock wool.
One force of nature that man has never mastered is volcanic eruptions. Nevertheless, humans have benefited so much from the more fertile soil and heat sources of volcanoes, among other things, that their destructive potential is often superseded. Rockwool is also a product of volcanic activity. The main component of rockwool is the basalt that lava leaves behind when it cools on the earth’s surface. Bringing volcanic material back to life is therefore also Lahoda’s way of listening to the forces whose nature we can exploit but not control.
Toke Lykkeberg, Director of Tranen
