00:03
Anni Holm
I picked Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen's Family Sha-la-la because it spoke to me in regards to fitting into a community. It's a video of her family dancing to this Sha-la-la song. Some of her siblings really were onto it. Her mom and her dad, a little bit out of sync all the time.

00:22
Anni Holm
Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen, she’s half Filipino, half Danish. Having grown up in the Philippines, Denmark must have been such a culture shock.

00:32
Anni Holm
When I came to the US, I went out with some friends and we went to a place where they put on the Cha-Cha Slide. To the left, y'all, to the right, y'all, and two jumps this time. It was so hard for me to follow directions. But the more you practiced, I started to get it. And it was so much fun to try to fit into this very American community dance.

00:54
Anni Holm
My husband, his parents came from the Philippines to the US. My first encounter with Filipino culture was when I became part of his family. I was typically that one white person. I was also the tall person. I really stuck out in many ways.

01:11
Anni Holm
How do you become part of this so you don't feel like you're so different from everybody else?

01:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Anni Holm, a Danish artist.

01:46
Anni Holm
Thank you so much for having me.

01:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You're very welcome. We're very happy to have you. We're talking to you from Denmark, actually. I'm in Denmark, too, in Odense, in my childhood home, on my way to a film festival. Whereabouts are you, Anni, in Denmark?

02:03
Anni Holm
I'm currently sitting at my old high school, which is in Randers. I'm here on a two-year artist residency in the municipality of Randers. My residency is in Affald and Genbrug, which is garbage or waste and recycling. And it's a collaboration between the municipality, which is a preparatory youth type education, and Randers Kunstmuseum, Randers Art Museum.

02:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And maybe the listeners aren't aware of where Randers is located in Denmark. Maybe explain where it is and talk about the location that you're at. You mentioned your high school. And what is it like to be back there? You've traveled the world and you're back in your high school. That must be a special feeling.

02:51
Anni Holm
Randers is located in Jutland. It's the eye of Jutland. So when you look at the map, you look at the man with the funny hat and the nose with the drip. If you look for the eye, that's where Randers is. It's on the longest river in Denmark.

03:06
Anni Holm
It's a lot of mixed feelings being back here. Obviously there's a lot of positive memories here. But I'm here to do the residency, which is obviously work related. And then I have my kids with me here too, and my parents are here, and they're older and have some health issues. So there's just a lot of things going on emotionally right now. It's a huge mixed bag of things.

03:31
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have been based in Chicago for many years. How did you get from Krabbesholm Højskole in Skive, Denmark, where you went after high school, to Columbia College in Chicago, where you graduated in 2004?

03:46
Anni Holm
Well, after I finished high school, and actually while I was in high school, I started collecting bottles. You know how you can turn them in for money? I saved up the money to pay for my bus card. And all the money that I was receiving in student pay to go to high school at the time, I saved up so I could go to Krabbesholm because I wanted to test out to see if art was really what I wanted to do. When I was in high school, if anybody asked me what I wanted to do, I would whisper, become an artist.

04:17
Anni Holm
And I think I didn't really feel confident enough that that's what I wanted to be. I was at Krabbesholm for four months. And then after that, I came back here to this very school. I got a job for one month cleaning the boys locker room. I had only been gone for six months and that wasn't exactly that exciting. Well, the pay was okay, but I needed to get away again. Going to Krabbesholm was the first time that I left home.

04:45
Anni Holm
So I actually went to work in a halfway house in Kjellerup of all places, in the middle of Jutland, and not a lot of things going on around there, a smaller town between Viborg and Silkeborg. And then I was there for a year living in a house together with different people my own age that were dealing with different issues. Some people had committed minor crimes and were trying to get back on the right path, and some people had probably some diagnosis that I'm not aware of. It was just a halfway point in their life of change.

05:21
Anni Holm
I was there for a year, which was very eye-opening, but I also need to do something completely different. And all my friends had saved up money working right after they graduated high school and then they went traveling the world. I didn't do that. But I still wanted to travel.

05:37
Anni Holm
So I ended up going to the US and I became an au pair for a family on the North Shore of Chicago. I was there and I realized this is where possibly those dreams of actually being the artist that I already was, or growing that, was a possibility. So I was looking around to see what are my possibilities of getting an education in the US instead of going back to Denmark, cause I felt like it was so hard to get into art school here. And that steered me away from that. And then I ended up applying to Columbia.

06:12
Anni Holm
When I was an au pair, I was looking into doing something outside of taking care of three kids. And I took an art class and I was asking around in the class if there were any recommendations for art schools in Chicago, because I really thought that would be something different. Like I felt really comfortable in my own skin being in the US and being in the Chicago area.

06:37
Anni Holm
The recommendation was Columbia College. I got a tour and I instantly was like, this is where I need to be because all of this creative energy that I remember experiencing at Krabbesholm was reignited in me.

06:52
Anni Holm
So I applied to get in, but I wasn't sure exactly how the process was working. I finished out my au pair obligations and then I went back to Denmark and I had already applied to get into a teacher's college. And I started that and I was there for five weeks and then I got into Columbia and I went back.

07:09
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When did you stop whispering that you wanted to be an artist? When did you say it out loudly with compassion and strength?

07:18
Anni Holm
That was definitely while I was at Columbia that I started to say, I am an artist, because I realized that I am an artist, I just hadn't really maybe found my confidence in the kind of artist that I am. And obviously that takes time, but also the Danish Jante Law is very present in Denmark.

07:41
Anni Holm
I grew up on a small farm. So the expectations of me getting a job to put bread on the table was very much present that I should be getting a real education and a real job at the end of this. I had a lot of suggestions specifically from my dad that I should go to business school. But my interests were just not there.

08:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Maybe explain what Janteloven is. It's kind of a career stopper for some people.

08:08
Anni Holm
Yeah, some people say it's an unwritten law, but it is written down. I think there are 10 different rules within this, but the first is that you should not believe that you're better than anybody else. It's this whole thing of undermining you as an individual person to fit in. I definitely feel that the presence of that in Denmark, it's still here, maybe not to the same extent as when I was growing up, but Janteloven is here.

08:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's part of the Danish mentality.

08:39
Anni Holm
Yes.

08:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have also been teaching since you graduated. Why did you get into that and how important is it for you to share your knowledge with students?

08:52
Anni Holm
I got into teaching through an invitation. It wasn't something that I had sought out at all. I was invited by the Chicago Arts Partnership in Education. They go under the name of CAPE. CAPE fosters this relationship between contemporary artists and school teachers in Chicago public schools.

09:14
Anni Holm
So you develop a project together. It's a focus on your interest as an artist and your interest as a teacher. You figure out a way that those overlap or integrate or where your passions connect or cross each other. And then you take that and build a project around that. The idea is really to try to look at education and use the arts as a different way to teach. We're all different learners and me, myself, I'm very much a visual learner. The idea is also to connect with the kids in a completely different way.

09:47
Anni Holm
The first year was very rocky, like I wasn't really sure. And the teacher that I was working with, she wasn't really sure either what exactly it was that we were doing, but we went ahead and did it. And then the second year was a completely different experience. We both became really open to this method.

10:06
Anni Holm
We worked on visualizing sound and because of our working relationship and the way we were bouncing ideas off each other in the classroom, the kids really got engaged in a different way. And even the kids that normally would sit in a corner on a computer because they checked out on this part of the lesson, they were the first ones to greet me in the hallway when I would come, "We're going to work on this now!" So that was super, super exciting.

10:29
Anni Holm
That just fueled this very positive energy and it's not a traditional way of teaching in terms of, now you're going to learn how to use this type of art material, but a very experimental and investigating research type of approach. I really love that. And I love to see what happens.

10:48
Anni Holm
We're all working on approaching this together, as a class, a teacher and the artist together. We're researching this and developing this together. Most of the time we don't know what the end result will be. And that's super exciting. And along the way, the kids just really grow. They find their inner artists too. And that's really amazing and exciting.

11:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What did you learn about yourself as an artist through teaching?

11:15
Anni Holm
I've learned to be really open and to step back and have things run their course on their own without getting too involved sometimes, because that's when some of the magic can happen. If you come into this as a teacher or as an artist with a very set mind, this is the recipe for how I'm going to make this project or this piece, you end up tripping yourself a lot of times —

11:38
Anni Holm
— because you don't let the creativity flow and evolve and turn into something that's even better or larger, or be open to these unexpected things that happen. And I adapted that into my process, working very collaboratively and giving participants an opportunity to have a voice in my work too.

12:00
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How would you describe yourself as an artist?

12:04
Anni Holm
The description has definitely changed. I've gone from thinking that I was somebody who was drawing, to a painter. Then I was in photography, then installation and performance art. I'm a conceptual artist, but I'm moving into areas of social arts practice, social sculpture, collaborative art. So it's changed.

12:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Are you good at selling yourself and your art? I read of at least one method that you used called Getting My Name Out There, where more than 50 people in various parts of the world were holding up signs with your name on it. Explain to us how this project came about.

12:48
Anni Holm
The idea for this project came around the time that I graduated from Columbia. I had this really amazing student advisor, Simon Ogeto. He had been an international student himself from Kenya, and he was giving us sort of the short run of, this is what's really important in America: if you're going to land a job, like after you graduate, you need to really get your name out there and you really need to be good at networking. And so I took those things very literally and I've done projects that revolve around both things.

13:21
Anni Holm
But Getting My Name Out There, I started out by just making a sign. I printed out my name big and mounted it on a piece of foam core. And then I dressed all in white and I went out and I stood in very specific locations that I picked out in advance, just holding that sign around the city of Chicago. And the idea was really to just be funny and silly, but literally getting my name out there.

13:50
Anni Holm
I thought, why don't I invite other people to do the same, like really get my name out all over the world by having one day where people would just make a sign with my name and hold it up and take a picture for documentation and then send that to me? And I wasn't sure, you know, you never know.

14:06
Anni Holm
I didn't get to do it on one specific day, but what was interesting was that the pictures started trickling in. Mostly in the beginning, it was from people that I knew, friends that I'd gone to high school with or different people that I knew would make the sign and take a picture and to help me out, or maybe they felt sorry for me.

14:27
Anni Holm
But then all of a sudden I started getting pictures from people I didn't know. And I remember specifically getting this one from the Antarctic, where a woman had written it on a piece of cardboard. And she was holding it up and I was just really positively blown away. It took this turn of people wanting to be part of it.

14:47
Anni Holm
In 2006, I was a featured artist for the Chicago Artists Month. And I was invited to this lunch at the prestigious Union League Club in Chicago. I sat down and everybody was going around the table introducing, I'm so and so. And I was like, my name is Anni and I'm an artist. Instantly, somebody at my table held up her arms, like she was holding a sign. She's like, you are the Anni Holm. And I was like, yes, that's me. So I was like, oh, it worked.

15:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, Anni Holm wasn't whispering anymore, for sure.

15:21
Anni Holm
No, I wasn't anymore.

15:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How important is self promotion for artists these days, and how much do you think about that when you create your art, that you need to get the word out there?

15:36
Anni Holm
It's definitely important because to start out, it was to be able to get into the exhibits and get the opportunities. But you need to maintain that. It is something that I consider not in the same way, probably as a lot of other people. I'm from a different generation. I'm the generation that was introduced to the internet later in life, but it is something I try to keep in mind.

15:58
Anni Holm
So keeping documenting what I'm working on along the way, posting it to social media, getting the information out there in a way that it's interesting enough that people are maybe interested in participating in it, or just curious about it or want to follow it.

16:14
Anni Holm
Obviously, as an independent person, you need to be able to continue to get opportunities to do your work. So I need to stay exposed in a way that it's easy to find out what I'm doing and hopefully also something that leads to other opportunities.

16:33
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In 2009, you co-founded People Made Visible, a nonprofit with a cultural and social mission. Would you elaborate on this mission and why you wanted to be involved?

16:47
Anni Holm
Yeah, I moved to a smaller town called West Chicago. It's outside of Chicago, usually confused with the west side of Chicago. It is on the west side, but about an hour west. And it's an old railroad town that had its heyday back around 1900. In the 1920s, a lot of Mexican immigrants started coming to town because Campbell's had a mushroom factory there. And so they needed labor also to work on the railroad because it was the first junction in Illinois. That's how the town was founded and grew.

17:19
Anni Holm
There's a lot of Mexicans that live in West Chicago, newly arrived, but also people that have been there through generations. I would say 60% or 70% of the town is Hispanic. And moving there as an immigrant, I very much felt like I fit into this community. It was walkable. It had a lot of Mexican grocery stores. It was easier to get inexpensive food and all this. But I also noticed that it was divided.

17:49
Anni Holm
I ended up in a house in a very mixed neighborhood, but there were parts of town that were just purely Mexican and parts of town that were purely white American, and then we were this group of others falling in between. And I just thought it was really interesting how there was such a divide. There wasn't a lot of interaction between people.

18:10
Anni Holm
I started working in collaboration with the local city museum, the little tiny museum in town. And Sara Phalen, who worked there as an educator at the time, we really connected over this idea of, how can we make people connect through art? That's really how we came to found People Made Visible.

18:28
Anni Holm
Initially what we did was bring Danish artists to come and do a residency in West Chicago. It was a very small, basic residency where you stayed at my house and then you had a workspace at the museum and the resources through the museum. And then we tried within our network in town to connect you with people.

18:50
Anni Holm
Whether you were interested in working with students or whatever, we tried our best to help facilitate that, with this intention that you touched some people in ways that they hadn't had the opportunity to connect with art or each other before, and they had this shared experience that then hopefully we could build over time to try to make it more possible for this interaction between the different groups in town.

19:18
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Anni, how important is community to you? It sounds like it is very important.

19:24
Anni Holm
It's definitely important to me, I think I've been doing a lot of reflection now that I'm staying at my dad's for a while now here in Denmark. And I think it has a lot to do with trying to fit in. And I always felt different growing up. I think I just end up in all these situations. And I thought maybe it's just because I put myself in these weird situations, but I think I am just a little bit different than everybody else. And so being a part of something obviously means a lot when you're accepted.

19:56
Anni Holm
I think it's also the Danish schooling that I experienced when I was a kid was this very inclusive pedagogical approach, like we all should have something together, even though we're different. And I think those are the things that I've taken with me. It means a lot for me to be able to find places where you belong.

20:19
Anni Holm
For a lot of people, I think it's a very essential thing, being part of something, feeling that you have connection, feeling that you have a network. Feeling you have family or a made up family provides a foundation for you as a human person.

20:36
Anni Holm
So for me, I think it's all those things driving me to create these communities to try to make connections, between me and my audience or participants, but also just between the participants. Seeing those things happen, that people meet and have a positive exchange through something that I facilitated, that really brings a lot of joy to me.

21:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Would you say that you are a social person? I think I know the answer to this. And do you like creating art with others? I know that you did an interesting art installation in Randers in 2022 called Tyggegummi Universet or the Chewing Gum Universe, and you did that with art students. What are those experiences like for you?

21:27
Anni Holm
I would say that I am a very sociable person. That doesn't mean that I don't need time where I need to just go and be together with nobody and just alone and recharge. But I do very much enjoy that input and that energy and like what's happening when you're together in a group or with others, and especially when I think back on that particular project.

21:50
Anni Holm
Tyggegummi Universet was an opportunity for me to work with and in collaboration with these students to develop this piece. So even though I had a general idea to transform the bus terminal into this chewing gum universe, because this is where people throw their chewing gum instead of putting it in the garbage, I very much used the input both from the teacher, Marianne, who is an amazing teacher to collaborate with and also the students.

22:20
Anni Holm
Some people say you shouldn't have too many chefs in the kitchen. But sometimes I think some really magical things happen. Somebody gets an idea for something. And if you tune into that idea and that person, you give them a voice in this project, you also just maybe improve the project 50 times or even more, because that idea is exactly what it needed in order to just be even better.

22:47
Anni Holm
Actually for the Chewing Gum Universe, we were going to make a project that would inspire people to throw their chewing gum away instead of throwing it on the street or on the sidewalk, because chewing gum, first of all, contains plastic. When you throw it and you walk on it, obviously it creates microplastics, which is really bad for the environment. But also it just doesn't look that appetizing.

23:12
Anni Holm
While I was trying to figure out how to do this project, there was a budget and it was a large budget. And I was thinking, if I go out there, buy a bunch of stuff and we put it up for this ten-day installation, and then we take it all down. And then what do we want to do with the materials? Are we just going to throw them away? That just seems ridiculous and a waste when we are addressing this idea of throwing things away in the proper way.

23:37
Anni Holm
So I asked one of the people in the garbage and recycling department of the municipality of Randers if it was possible to somehow get things that were thrown away to be used for this. And she connected me with the garbage terminal, where I was then able to go out and collect a lot of bubble wrap that was being thrown away, so I could use that as stuffing.

24:02
Anni Holm
And then I found different plastic objects, like lamps that I could use, 'coz I wanted to make bubbles. And then I was offered to look through, there's something called stor skrald or big waste. That's something that you can have collected at your residence once a month. And I got permission to look through all the textile waste that was coming in and sort through it all, primarily because I was looking for old bed sheets and pink objects, so it would be this bubble gum type white and pink installation.

24:35
Anni Holm
I was looking through all of this material that was endless because it's 500 kilos a day that's thrown away, just textile waste, just in this municipality alone. I was so, I wouldn't say disgusted, but it made me sad because among the things were sweaters with tags on still. And before all this new textile recycling, this would just be sent to be burned. A lot of the clothes were nicer than what I owned myself.

25:05
Anni Holm
I was able to get the materials from there to make the bubble gum universe that I set out to do, but was in my mind as this endless resource of material for future projects. And this is actually what led to the residency that I'm doing now, because I said, there is so much being thrown away, just here in this municipality. All this waste — how can we put more focus on this? which is a residency I'm doing now, just focusing on this whole idea of waste and unwanted thrown away items.

25:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And it sounds like you like art to be in a space where we might not expect it to be and surprise us with its expression. I'm not sure if this is a correct observation. What is good art in your opinion? Is it something that surprises?

26:02
Anni Holm
I definitely do love that you encounter art in different spaces. It's obviously limited who goes to an art museum or an art gallery to view art. I think it's a very particular group of people who are willing and open to seek it out. I like this encounter between the unexpected audience and the art, because I think again, something just happens.

26:31
Anni Holm
It's this being taken out of your everyday lull, observing or engaging or interacting or passing by this thing that triggers a thought or something. It just sparks something in your mind. It just pushes you in a way that's hopefully positive, to think and reflect. I think it's so easy to get caught up in our everyday. We all have schedules and I feel in particular in the US, I can't talk for everybody obviously, but for myself, there was just this schedule, I'm working, I'm doing this, I'm doing that. There's always something.

27:02
Anni Holm
And just this experiencing something where you get taken by surprise a little bit, just helps to push you out of that or move you out of that. So there was actually more sustenance to your life. And that reflection might actually just evolve into something better. You continue to learn and you grow by these unexpected experiences.

27:25
Anni Holm
So for me, good art is art that's really able to grab you. Sometimes it's something very small, could be a performance or something that you observe as you're passing by in the cityscape. And then all of a sudden you encounter something and you just take it with you in your heart or your mind. And then maybe you keep coming back to it and think, why did this happen?

27:50
Anni Holm
So for me, art is the things that move you. I'm also just really taken by things that are really clever, multi-layered, where, as you get more into it, you realize, oh, there's another thing to this. And sometimes it's very basic, right? It's something very simple that just does that for me.

28:11
Anni Holm
So it's hard to pinpoint exactly. There isn't a recipe, what's good art to me. But there is a lot of good art out there and a lot of things that touch me personally and feed me as a human and an artist and make me a better person.

28:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Maybe mention a few of your own art installations where you created art in a space that was unexpected, like you created a forest in the middle of a church, for instance.

28:40
Anni Holm
Yes, a couple years ago I was invited to do a project in the first Danish Lutheran church that was established in the US. It's in Manistee, Michigan. I spent a lot of time researching the history of this church, who founded this, why did they come to the United States.

29:00
Anni Holm
Obviously it was Danish immigrants. And I found out that it was a lot of young men who came to the US, because they didn't have the same opportunities in Denmark. Maybe they grew up on a farm. They weren't the oldest, so they wouldn't inherit the farm. They needed to go somewhere else to find work anyway.

29:16
Anni Holm
And this opportunity in America, maybe, is what drew them, similar to a lot of Mexican immigrants who come more from South America or elsewhere to the United States today is that they ended up in a job situation where they had to do very intensive work in the winter, in horrid cold conditions in the forest of Michigan, living 20 men in a shed.

29:43
Anni Holm
And then they worked from probably sunrise to sundown, cutting down these ginormous trees, because it was the old trees and that was all over the state of Michigan, and took them all down. And they took them all down because Chicago burned and they needed the lumber to rebuild Chicago.

30:02
Anni Holm
So obviously they needed to cut all these trees and they were so big and they couldn't transport them unless it was cold and there was snow so they could use the horses to pull the logs. So all this history was what fueled me into thinking about how to somehow bring this history into this church.

30:19
Anni Holm
It's no longer a working church. It's a museum now. It has been since 1976 or something like that. As I was starting to evolve this idea, first I wanted to put a giant log in there, but I wasn't sure how that was going to work. And then I got this idea of Christmas trees and the plastic Christmas trees. And maybe I could somehow bring the trees back from Chicago to Michigan.

30:41
Anni Holm
And so I started driving around the neighborhood. This is in the period between Thanksgiving and right after Christmas for abandoned Christmas trees on the curb. I put out a call, if anybody has a broken Christmas tree, I would collect it. I collected close to a hundred, but I only needed about 70 to fill the church.

31:02
Anni Holm
And I drove them all to Michigan. Obviously I was very dependent on collaborating with other people to come and strip the lights off, help me get the exhibit ready, set it up. And then towards the end, when the exhibit was done, I gave all the trees away. I put out on social media and I called for people who needed a tree and I invited people to come and pick a tree and I was able to give them all away. It was all around a collaborative art installation.

31:35
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sustainability sounds like it's an important part of your art. Is it also an important part of your life?

31:43
Anni Holm
Yes. I think everything is connected. There is a connection between what I do and what takes place in the rest of the world. We all have an influence on that. I'm a firm believer in that. And in order to really be on board with all this sustainability, it's a part of my life.

32:04
Anni Holm
To some extent, I've always been conscious. I grew up on a small farm, we used everything until it was unusable. I always inherited clothes from my cousins. We didn't have garbage pickup when I was a kid. We were always sorting. Things that could be burned went into the furnace so we could get heat and we could get a hot shower. Organic waste went into the crap pile. I don't know if I'm allowed to say that on this podcast, but for the manure from the cows. We had a guy that came and bought the metals.

32:37
Anni Holm
So everything had its place. And when it came to the US, it was just so much stuff everywhere. I lived with a family. There were a lot of toys, a lot of clothes. It was just a lot of things. And there was also recycling. This is probably the first time that I encountered recycling, but there was an uncertainty about what would go in these recycling bins and what would go in the waste bin and what you would do with stuff.

33:02
Anni Holm
I myself don't create a lot of garbage. We have a lot in the recycling bin. And the money that's collected through this recycling goes to the food pantry. So I'm always trying to think of the whole integration. In the US, I have three composting bins. There's supposed to be this circular economy of sustainability.

33:22
Anni Holm
I'm not the only person in the world. And I sometimes feel like I'm the only one who thinks about it this way, 'coz a lot of people that I encounter on my way — is this garbage and we just throw it away and we never have to look at it again. But that doesn't mean that it disappears. It's still there. And at some point, It's going to reappear or we're going to need to do something with it.

33:42
Anni Holm
Or even here where everything is thrown in the bin that goes to the facility that is burning it, which does create heat, there are some things in there that shouldn't be burned that go into the air and particles and we breathe that and it's all connected.

33:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is it important for you to influence others to think in terms of sustainability?

34:05
Anni Holm
Yes, to me, it is important that other people start thinking about this too. We're going to run out of space to put all the garbage. I have kids, they need to be able to live in this world too. We need to take responsibility. Because we got to live in this garbage. If you haven't cared much about it until now, you could start small. I didn't start all of this in one take. It's a little bit at a time and slowly we can get there.

34:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Can art make a difference?

34:34
Anni Holm
Art can definitely help put a focus on it in a different way, so we think about it differently. The first project that I did here in this residency was focusing on textile waste and I wanted to make a mountain over the course of ten days, so people could see how 500 kilos a day would accumulate. I was thinking, at the end, I would have probably four tons of textiles.

35:01
Anni Holm
Similar to the project with the trees, I ended up opening it up — if you see something you can use in this mountain of clothes, just take it. And the response to that was so much greater than I anticipated. I had so many people who came and started coming every day, looking through. And at the end, we may have sent 800 kilos back so it wouldn't go back as waste.

35:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have the perspective of someone who's lived outside of Denmark for a while. If you were to compare being an artist in Denmark to being an artist in the US, what would the differences be?

35:38
Anni Holm
Well, in the US, I feel like I have to work really hard all the time. And I'm always at work. When you are an artist, it's not something you can really switch off and on because your mind is always going and you're inspired and you're researching something maybe for a future project without you even knowing it.

36:01
Anni Holm
But the sense of being at work, I feel is a lot more present in the US and there's always this scheduling and juggling and also being a mother of three kids, there is an added layer of scheduling that overlaps with that. And I wouldn't say that that doesn't exist in Denmark. It also exists, but it's at a completely different level. I feel much more relaxed here.

36:27
Anni Holm
And I think it's also just a fact that I haven't received the same economical recognition for the type of work in the US that I have here. Applying for this residency and actually having the opportunity to have an income, an actual steady salary every month for these two years, is something that I haven't experienced since I left Denmark.

36:53
Anni Holm
I also feel people feel like I'm working too hard because I'm used to, okay, now we need to go on this, we need to move on this. I tend to have these very labor intensive projects and I'm being told to chill a little bit here. It's hard for me because I think having lived more than half of my life in the US, that work ethic of the immigrant coming to the US, you just work and work and work and you just don't like to say no to things because you just don't know when the next opportunity arises.

37:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And you are freelance, and your product is your art, and you need to make a living from it. I'm the same, and people in Denmark are surprised that we work during the weekend too, and that we always answer emails. I am surprised that they don't. I understand exactly what you're talking about.

37:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Anni, you've been in Denmark doing the residency that you've been talking about. What are your goals for the future? We've talked about the recent future. You're going back to Chicago. Do you have a bucket list of what you would like to achieve career-wise?

38:02
Anni Holm
I have an instant bucket list because I don't think that far in the future. It's more what I'm in now. I might be interested or inspired or excited about trying to do something else. I just feel this residency has been really good for me. And obviously I still have another year left of it. So there was still time to figure out what's next.

38:26
Anni Holm
But I really enjoy this method of working as an artist and being able to not be so dependent on the teaching opportunities, but having opportunities to do these residencies within the school that are more related to the project that I'm working on and getting people involved in that. I'd like to see things evolve more in that direction. Now I said it, so I'm positive. It's going to evolve in that direction, right? Because now I put words to it.

38:56
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is that how it works for you? You put words to it and then it happens.

39:00
Anni Holm
Yeah, I feel I need to put my mind to it. And then things have a way of working themselves out. I just need to be open to receive them.

39:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
We at Danish Originals definitely hope that this will happen for you. And we thank you very much for being part of our podcast series, Danish Originals. Thank you so much.

39:22
Anni Holm
Thank you.

39:23
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It was our pleasure.

39:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Anni Holm chose Lilibeth Cuenca Rasmussen's Family Sha-la-la from 1998 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.