Space for reflection

Interview with Lawrence Ebelle and Marianne Johnstad-Møller with quotes by Kirstine Autzen and Alberte Holmø Bojesen.

The exhibition TANG: TRANSFORMATIONER (Kelp: Transformations) opens as a total installation in Brønshøj Water Tower on 26 May. In the lead-up to the opening, I sat down with curator Lawrence Ebelle and textile artist Marianne Johnstad-Møller to discuss the collaboration and the ideas behind the exhibition. Fellow contributing artists Kirstine Autzen and Alberte Holmø Bojesen also shared their reflections on the creative process as part of the conversation.

In this project, the artists draw inspiration from the colours of seaweed and the alge’s remarkable ability to change shape, size, and growth direction in response to the ever-changing conditions of the sea. Seaweed exemplifies nature’s versatility and adaptability — some species can dry out entirely and revive upon contact with water, offering a striking example of transformation and resilience. This dynamic quality lies at the heart of the artistic exploration.

Each artist contributes a unique expertise — spanning textiles, biomaterials, video, text, scent, and installation — to this collaborative process. Together, they harvest seaweed from the sea and shoreline, transforming it into biomaterial that serves both as a medium for photographic experimentation and as inspiration for sculptural knitted works.

Awareness of the ocean’s vital role — both in shaping the world we inhabit and in confronting the urgent challenges of climate change — is only now beginning to take hold. Through this exhibition, the artists aim at sparking greater recognition of the ocean’s significance and inspire deeper reflection on our connection to it.

Marie-Louise Høstbo (MLH): What do you think, Lawrence Ebelle, is the most important role of the curator today? And do you think it has changed?

Lawrence Ebelle: My role as a curator is shaped by context. While the traditional view casts the curator as a custodian of knowledge or collections, the role today often takes on a more facilitative and relational character — someone who creates spaces for dialogue, encounter, and at times, critical reflection. From my perspective, the role has evolved from one of authority to one that is more tactile and empathetic. Rather than building temples, the contemporary curator creates moments of connection — bridging artist and audience, and fostering meaningful exchanges in between.

MLH: What is your own curatorial approach to the upcoming exhibition at Brønshøj Water Tower?

Lawrence Ebelle: My curatorial approach is deeply material-driven and grounded in collaboration. I’m interested not only in what a work is made of physically, but also in its historical, political, and emotional layers. I often describe my role as that of a weaver — attentive to connections, timing, and the subtle space between the artwork and the world around it. I tend to build exhibitions as ecosystems: interwoven, layered and with multiple points of entry.

Since 2020, I’ve been developing Delte Vande (Shared Waters), a project where cultural and political narratives converge with local dreams and contexts. Central to my practice is an emphasis on the often-overlooked senses — seeking to foreground more embodied, sensorial ways of experiencing art and space.

MLH: Is it a different approach when creating an exhibition of artistic craft compared to visual art?

Lawrence Ebelle: Yes — and no. The core values of respect, curiosity, and dialogue remain unchanged. But when working with craft artists, the conversation often shifts toward the material — becoming more tactile, rooted in technique and tradition.

What fascinates me about Marianne Johnstad-Møller’s work — especially the pieces she has created for Delte Vande (Shared Waters) this year — is how she weaves her Vendsyssel heritage and deep affinity for seaweed into sculptural knitworks. These forms don’t mimic seaweed directly, but echo its colour palette and essence. Her pieces resemble marine life — fluid, delicate, and alive — creating a striking contrast to the rigid, industrial architecture of the water tower. The organic and the architectural meet, amplifying each other in the space.

In visual art, the starting point is often conceptual or discursive. With craft, it frequently begins with the hand — with touch, repetition, and material intuition — and from there, meanings and intentions gradually unfold. As a curator, this requires a different sensibility: one that allows for slowness, for embodied knowledge, and for forms of understanding that can’t always be captured in theory or text.

MLH: Marianne Johnstad-Møller, how would you describe your work? And what outcome has working with a curator contributed to?

Marianne Johnstad-Møller: I work investigatively with knitwear as a transparent material. By layering and colouring knitwear, I explore how the material behaves and how it can create space. The process is central to me – I follow my curiosity and build on my own investigations.

The sea is my source of inspiration and a constant presence in my work.
I’ve been collecting seaweed intensively for three years, and a year ago I started working with the material in a concrete way. I’ve read about the subject and I’ve been fascinated to the point where I’m now part of a sea garden too.

As artists, we have collaborated intensively and have also had periods where we have worked individually. Now the conversations are established with Lawrence Ebelle and the magnificent architecture of the space. The space is monumental and contains a particularly grandiose sensuality. We share that conversation and that space.

Working with a curator has given my work new perspectives and a framework to concretize my ideas in an exhibition format. It has helped me see my knitwear in a larger space – both physically in the water tower and in dialogue with the audience – and has strengthened my own process by opening up for critical sparring and new connections.

MLH: What are the challenges and benefits of creating your own platform in the Water Tower as an alternative to a museum context, for example?

Lawrence Ebelle: Creating your own platform provides freedom, agility and intimacy. You can take bigger risks, respond quickly to cultural shifts and build your own ethic of care, access and inclusion. It’s also easier to realize interdisciplinary, multidisciplinary or experimental formats that may not fit within institutional norms.

That said, it also presents significant challenges: limited resources, questions of visibility, and long-term sustainability are constant considerations. Museums often have the advantage of reach, infrastructure, and established collections — elements that self-initiated projects typically lack. Yet, the autonomy of an independent platform can create space for a more authentic, and at times subversive, curatorial voice — one less bound by tradition and more attuned to experimentation and critical engagement.

Marianne Johnstad-Møller: Throughout my career, I have created several exhibitions on my own, where I have had the opportunity to immerse myself in my work and the material – while at the same time sharing my reflections with the visiting audience. With this project, I have collaborated with artists and a curator, which has allowed for an ongoing dialogue already during the project.

MLH: I’d like to hear your thoughts on generosity as a necessity in collaboration.

Lawrence Ebelle: Generosity is at the heart of meaningful collaboration — it’s about making room for others, acknowledging each contribution, and allowing ideas to evolve organically. It requires us to slow down, listen deeply, and welcome differing perspectives. Without this openness, collaboration risks becoming purely transactional.

As a member of UKK – Organization for Artists, Curators and Art Mediators, I engage in what I call soft activism, using experimental formats like shared meals and open dialogues to spark reflection and connection. One example is What if Diversity Was Not an Issue, developed in partnership with Aarhus Billedkunstcenter and KH7 Artspace. I also create platforms for co-creation, such as the online event Advocacy vs. Policy, where external collaborators can exchange ideas and present their work. In a globalized world, empathy, generosity, and care are not optional — they are paramount.

Marianne Johnstad-Møller: The immediate generosity I get from my material; the kelp provide opportunities for new insights. And working with Kirstine Autzen and Alberte Holmø Bojesen, we have been able to share experiences across age and disciplines.

MLH: Can you learn from sharing your own practice and do you see it differently through the lens of collaboration?

Lawrence Ebelle: Absolutely. Sharing your practice forces you to externalize and clarify what otherwise remains intuitive. It creates clarity – but in dialogue with others, your practice is also mirrored, challenged and expanded. You see your blind spots, discover hidden assumptions and sense where your work hits the deepest. Collaboration acts as a prism that reveals dimensions of your practice that solitary reflection would never uncover.

MLH: What do you want the visitor to take away from the exhibition? How do you want it to be experienced?

Marianne Johnstad-Møller: I hope the visitor experiences peace to open their senses and let themselves be moved by the space and the works. To be in the space and move around and experience the artworks appear and disappear. Both by virtue of the materiality of the works and the tower’s many columns. My knitted works, which are transparent and delicate, can almost merge with the concrete, depending on the angle from which they are viewed. What is made visible to you will vary depending on whether you move up the ramp or around the floor.

I hope that our fascination and excitement for the seaweed can be felt, and that we raise awareness that the sea is important and trigger a reflection on our being and behavior with the sea, which can help create action.

Lawrence Ebelle: I want visitors to undergo a mental shift — a rediscovery of natural materials like seaweed and an exploration of their transformative potential. Delte Vande (Shared Waters ) will make complex issues such as the climate crisis and water scarcity tangible and accessible to everyone — not just art enthusiasts, but also environmentalists, activists, and local communities. Using the water tower as a central symbol, I aim to create ripples that extend beyond the space: emphasizing that water is our most vital resource and reminding us of our collective responsibility in the green transition. The beauty, craftsmanship, and sensory experience of the art should stir emotions, foster connections, and communicate its message on a deeply intuitive level.

Kirstine Autzen, who contributes video and animation to the exhibition, adds:
‘I hope that the juxtaposition of works allows you to walk around the room and move from one thought to another. You might think about light and materials, remember your own experiences with seaweed in the sea, then you see a new work and your thoughts move with it. The sensory is important because it creates time and space for reflection that is very free, that can flow and not be directly focused on a specific thought but allow us to be present with thoughts that develop slowly.

With seaweed as a theme, we have the opportunity to experience seaweed as the super interesting growth that it is, which functions in different ways than plants, and which has both an interesting history closely linked to the beginnings of all plant life, and that it is in this way a very basic and important ‘being’ that we cannot see in our everyday lives. It’s hard to believe that there is something that is both so important and yet lives such an invisible existence.

Alberte Holmø Bojesen participates in the exhibition with new textile works created from seaweed:
‘For me, it’s about starting a dialogue between the visitors and the seaweed. Getting them to reflect on what seaweed is and what it can be. What does our future look like if we invite seaweed into our everyday lives: in our kitchen, our spaces and in materials?

The physical presence of the seaweed material in the space is an attempt to make its invisible presence visible and tangible and get the audience to create a new sensory narrative about seaweed. From something that lies and smells on the beach to something that is undulating, mysterious and poetic at the same time as it is something we and our ecosystem are deeply dependent on and could not exist without.

MLH: As an architect I have to ask; how has the space and the architecture of the building influenced the project and the process?

Kirstine Autzen: The architecture has been absolutely defining for this project. All works were conceived specifically for and inspired by the space: the relative darkness, the moist cool air and the subtle ‘twisting’ that exists in the space, partly due to the placement of the windows.

We all sensed from the beginning the possibility of creating a sense of being underwater. In relation to my works, the concrete surface has the advantage that it is very willing to ‘absorb’ a projection so that it appears to be integrated with the space. Not all spaces will be able to provide the same experience. That’s why I also thought a lot about creating an experience of an imagined, virtual space ‘inside’ the architecture, in the floor and columns.

Marianne Johnstad-Møller: The space has been present from the start, as a feeling of being below the surface, down in the sea. The sensuality and texture of the concrete. As a space and a proportion, the works will be part of.

Lawrence Ebelle: Brønshøj Water Tower, designed by Ib Lunding, is both functionally robust and aesthetically striking. Its towering columns, refined concrete beams, vertical scale, and distinctive acoustics place specific demands on form, rhythm, and suspension — elements that have shaped every installation within the space.

In 2024, I curated the exhibition Sky & Sea with Iben Høj. Her monumental knitted threads floated gently between the beams, suspended seven metres above ground in a unified and poetic gesture. With TANG: TRANSFORMATIONER (Kelp: Transformations), the curatorial approach shifts: this time, the challenge lies in weaving together multiple artistic voices into one cohesive, immersive experience.

The process has required both humility and patience. The artists have worked on/off-site, drawing, testing, and refining their pieces to align with the tower’s scale and atmosphere — allowing the architecture itself to enter into conversation with the organic language of seaweed. My hope is that visitors will sense this dialogue between the raw, industrial space and the handcrafted works — and leave with a drop of that magic in their memory.

About the participants:

Marianne Johnstad-Møller works both concretely and philosophically with layers and transparency in works created in knitwear. She grew up by the North Sea, and her works are often based on the life of the sea and its cyclical movements. She strives to refine a sensual and tactile expression that speaks to and connects the senses, intellect and spirituality. Johnstad-Møller graduated as a textile designer specialising in knitwear from the Royal Academy in 2004.

Kirstine Autzen works with a range of photographic techniques, text and installation to explore change and hybridity. Notions of nature, collecting practices and botanical illustrations play a central role in her practice. Investigations of natural history and the history of science with a particular interest in philosophical questions of creation, growth, memory and loss in a process-orientated investigation of both organic and man-made materials. Autzen holds an MFA in Photography from HDK Valand and an MA in Visual Culture from the University of Copenhagen. in Visual Culture from the University of Copenhagen.

Alberte Holmø Bojesen trained in textiles and has expanded her practice to include seaweed. To create more ecocentric design processes, she develops materials from seaweed. They become spatial installations that play with form, light and changeability. In 2025, Bojesen is researching a special North Atlantic seaweed as a regenerative material. The project will take her around the Nordic region and to a nanomaterial lab at Cambridge University. Bojesen holds a degree in textile and material design from The Swedish School of Textiles, Borås.

Emmanuel Martini is a French/Belgian fragrance and candle designer with international experience and a studio in Copenhagen. Martini works as an independent perfumer after training with French perfume composition houses, specifically in Grasse and Manosque. Martini became a perfumer because he found that the craft itself was a form of beauty. In his own words: ‘It’s a very unusual language that conveys beauty, emotion and a sense of aesthetics. It’s not material, but very abstract, and it requires a real sensitivity.’

Lawrence Ebelle is a French/American architect from the University of Illinois at Chicago, School of Architecture and École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Versailles and an independent curator. Ebelle works at the intersection of architecture, scenography, art and design, creating statements through his ‘spatial’ curating. Ebelle has been affiliated with Brønshøj Water Tower since 2020, where she has curated exhibitions dealing with water and the environment through art experiences and crafts.