class trip, plus surrealist landscapes

I spent the early part of Wednesday in Hirtshals, home of the previously discussed Nazi bunkers. Gregory and I took a number of his students to the beach to try our hands at some collective land art projects, as a precursor to a larger project we want to undertake together next month. The beach at Hirtshals has great stones with sand in between and a beautiful layer of gray-green clay in the cliffs above, so we used those materials to build a small arch. The students gathered stones and embellished with smaller stones and mussel shells. It was a successful day, and they have asked me back for a longer field trip next week.




The lighthouse complex at Hirtshals is quite gorgeous. This stretch of shore is quite rocky and treacherous for ships of every size, and the lighthouse has been a sign of safe haven for a long time.


Gregory teaches at the boarding school in Horne. His students, like most teenagers, were difficult to motivate. However, once we turned their potential energy into kinetic energy, things began to happen.


We didn't invent the arch, but we built a quick little one on the second try! Gregory seems please.


It's no Andy Goldsworthy (http://www.rwc.uc.edu/artcomm/web/w2005_2006/maria_Goldsworthy/TEST/index.html), but it's pretty nice anyhow, and the idea can be scaled up with great success.


The real treat came later in the evening. Janice took Susumu and I along with two of Greg's boys to a really special place on the coast. The Rubjerg Knude lighthouse was built at the end of the 19th century, and began it's life in 1900. About sixty five years later a great deal of sand began to swallow the surrounding landscape, and the lighthouse was formally closed in 1968, though the surrounding buildings remained open and in use up until the early 2000's. The sand dunes surrounding the lighthouse are enormous (about 50 meters), and they rest on the edge of a pretty large clay cliff that tumbles down to the sea (about another 50 meters). It was really hard to get good photos that give an impression of scale. It was actually terrifying to stand on the edge of the dunes and see shattered remains of brick buildings that have tumbled all the way down to the beach below. For the urban explorers out there, the lighthouse is shut up tight, so unless you have a ninja grappling hook you won't be going inside. Too bad, right?



The scramble up the dunes was pretty tough. Little Keiran made it all the way up, then fell all the way down, then made it all the way up again, all on his own.


Denmark is a relatively flat country, so the top of these dunes provides a really incredible panoramic view. As always, it is a lot easier to understand the landscape you live in if you can separate yourself from it for a short while.


The dunes crawl move about quite a bit, as this is an extremely windy place. We lucked out: it was sunny and there was almost no wind.


Susumu packed a picnic of rice balls and fried cod, which was delicious and the perfect reward for climbing up there.


The lighthouse is really quite large (again, about 5om). I desperately wanted to get into the top and poke around a bit. The lower doors and windows are bricked shut.


You can see remnants of the destroyed buildings all around the lighthouse. When it became apparent that they would be ruined, the local authorities removed the roofs so that the sand could fill them up, thus making it a bit safer for people to walk about on the dunes.




These are pictures I found online showing the lighthouse as it was in the 1970s and 80s. Janice has lived in the area for over 30 years. She told me that she knew the last people to actually live in the buildings, and she and her husband Peter used to frequent a restaurant located there as well.








This is the proof that I was actually there. It was a very surreal experience. It's estimated that the lighthouse will fall into the sea in about 20 years, and there is really no stopping it. The same thing is happening to a 1000 year old church about a mile up the coast.