Borrowed Land
ACT! with Rikke Winther, Ask Holmen and CLAYA won the open call for the Færderbiennale in April 2024 with the project ‘Borrowed land’, an installation consisting of rammed earth columns. The Færderbiennale is an international festival for site-specific dance and architecture, initiated in 2022 by a collective of architects and performing arts curators based in Oslo and Tønsberg. This year's festival took place from July 28th to August 10th at selected locations in Tønsberg and Færder.
‘Borrowed land’ explores the relationship between the built environment, climate crisis, and environmental degradation. Central to the project is the recognition of the natural landscape as a finite resource as well as the issues created by extractivism. Using local materials, such as clay and stones deposited by ancient glaciers, the crafted architectural components are deeply rooted in the land, to which it can decay and merge back into after it has served its purpose. In the context of soil depletion, the project explores concepts of circularity and degradation, contemplating the notion of borrowing resources rather than taking, and returning them back to the earth.
Earth breathes; it stores warmth or releases coldness and has the ability to connect people to their natural surroundings. It is a timeless and circular building material, with rich historic traditions as one of humanity’s oldest building materials. Often considered as a waste from the building industry, the project aims to reveal the potential and beauty of earth as a raw material.
Through experimentation with different earth compositions and densities, by using an ancient earth building technique called rammed earth, ‘Borrowed land’ demonstrates how the material responds to natural forces such as rain, wind and sun. It embraces the notion of decay and circularity, crafting spatial and sensuous scenarios.
