00:04
Thomas Dambo
I picked a little woodcarving by a Dutch artist named Adam Dirksch. It's created in the 1500s in the Netherlands. It looks 8x8 feet from an altar in a church. And then when I look closer, I could see it was 6x4 inches.

00:21
Thomas Dambo
The carving, folding out in the middle, has two sides to it. One side is a religious depiction of the crucifixion, and the other side, the appreciation of magic. The carvings have multiple figures, really detailed, and then different ornamentations inside and outside.

00:37
Thomas Dambo
And it humbles me as an artist to see somebody put so much love and technique and craftsmanship into such a tiny, tiny little object. It's just amazing how you can carve something that small, and carve such an intricate story into it. It's definitely made by an expert with a technology that mostly is forgotten.

00:58
Thomas Dambo
I remember from my own childhood how a physical object could hold a big value. I think with the whole fast production and consumption of everything, much of that appreciation has been forgotten. Back when an object took such a long time to produce, it holds such a significance so that you really cared about it. Now, you take it, and you throw it away, and you don't use it anymore.

01:29
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.

01:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is recycle artist Thomas Dambo. Welcome, Thomas.

01:53
Thomas Dambo
Hej hej, and thank you for having me.

01:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Hej hej.

01:56
Thomas Dambo
And I must say that I feel really much at home because I'm sitting under the exact same lamp and the same colors that I ate my dinner at my parents' house from when I was 5 till I was 18. The famous PH lamp.

02:10
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes, we're in my home in Los Angeles, which is why there's a Danish inspiration in the house. So, we revealed that we're meeting you in Los Angeles. Thomas, what are you doing in the City of Angels?

02:25
Thomas Dambo
I'm here with my wife. My wife, she is from New Hampshire, but she used to live in San Diego. So we have just attended a wedding in San Diego, and then we are doing some different meetings. And then also we are driving around in our RV that I've named the Troller Coaster.

02:42
Thomas Dambo
We purchased it last year. It's a big old one that we used last year for driving from New Jersey to Seattle building ten sculptures in ten different locations along the way. And then we decided to keep it for our Burning Man project next year.

02:58
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh cool. Now that you're here in Los Angeles, may I ask you what you think of the city and maybe from a recycle artist's perspective?

03:09
Thomas Dambo
First of all, it's always fun to come into Los Angeles because Hollywood is so present here, right? Because you come in and then you see all the billboards of all these different movies and all the advertising and everybody's trying to outcompete each other for the crazier and crazier advertising.

03:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A lot of energy is spent on that.

03:26
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, you just see it out the window of the vehicle when you come in, right? From a sustainable perspective, well, I mean, this is the place of unlimited growth, right? It is the place with the biggest trees in the world. And it's the place where we consume the most energy in the world at the same time, and it's the place of the most influential and the richest people in the world. So I guess it's where the problem is the biggest, but also where the solution might be made.

03:54
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Our world is drowning in trash while we are running out of natural resources and you have "waste no more" to be your mission. We all think about the trash we create every day and it's not a great feeling to throw out plastic constantly. We all do it. Are you yourself wasting no more? What is your advice to us normal consumers who don't recreate art or who don't recreate our trash to become art like you have done?

04:26
Thomas Dambo
I try myself to waste as little as possible, but it's extremely hard. And it's extra hard when you're in a place like Los Angeles, because here, at so many places you buy stuff that's wrapped in disposable stuff. And right now, the industry is trying to make us believe that it's okay if it's compostable — which I don't believe makes any difference at all, because if you mix compostable with other plastics and then drive it to the landfill, the landfill will have the same size.

04:57
Thomas Dambo
Personally, I try. I try to waste as little as possible. This year, my goal is to buy nothing. I can only buy recycled things, which I don't know if it's cheating, but it's my way of trying to do it. And this is my personal goal. I'm not pulling it down over my family or my studio. But I'm trying to be a good example and practice what I preach. After the first six months, I completely stopped looking at or thinking about what they sell on the internet and what they sell in the shops. And so it's been really freeing and you also save a lot of money.

05:32
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You are a recycle artist and your journey has led you to create artworks in 20 countries, I believe, across five continents.

05:41
Thomas Dambo
I count 17, if we are counting the Trolls project. Yeah.

05:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Okay. How do you travel to make sure you don't waste too much?

05:51
Thomas Dambo
My travel is, of course, my bad conscience. The initiative that I have put in place is that once I bought the farm where I have my studio, which is a 55-acre farm, we have had an external consultant make our CO2 calculations on my practice, and because of that, we're planting a forest. We planted a third of it. We're going to plant the next two thirds of it in the spring.

06:16
Thomas Dambo
We've made changes in how much metal and concrete we use inside of the foundation of the sculptures. And we've made a really, really big solar power system on the farm. All of this together should make me CO2 neutral when this plan is put into place. So those are the things that I'm trying to do. And that's including all the train, plane travel, and shipping and everything.

06:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You create large recycled projects that put focus on issues we are facing in our world with overconsumption. Some parts of the world are better at dealing with this issue than others. I have been to Bali, for instance, and it broke my heart because all I could see was plastic everywhere on this very beautiful island. Talk about some of the less positive experiences you have had in this regard.

07:08
Thomas Dambo
Once when I was dumpster diving in Copenhagen, behind a big public school, and they have maybe 500 of the same type of office chair or something like that. I go into the school and ask, hey, can I take these chairs? And they're like, yes, you can take ten of them because all the other ones, we're going to throw them out because we already paid for the transportation of the container to go to the dump.

07:31
Thomas Dambo
So then I say, but wouldn't the price to empty it be the same if it's full or empty? And then they're like, yes, but it would be a waste of money if we had an empty container. I wanted to take these chairs, then move them to somebody who needed them because they were still working.

07:46
Thomas Dambo
What I assume was happening is that there is a janitor of the school that sits as the secret hidden middleman, who actually wanted to take the chairs and sell the aluminum by destroying the chairs. So they couldn't be directly recycled. They would be downcycled because the office chair becomes aluminum and all the plastic and all the foam becomes waste. And so it's this short-sighted way of thinking about recycling and the greed of just taking for yourself.

08:16
Thomas Dambo
And another example was I was biking around in Copenhagen and I found a big dump and there were a lot of old paintings in golden frames. I took them out of the dump and I could see they all had a big X cut in the middle of them. As I'm standing there looking at them, a guy comes out and he dumps a pile of another eight into the dump.

08:35
Thomas Dambo
And then I ask him, hey, why are all these cut? Who did that? And it's like, well, I did it, because I had them evaluated and these were not expensive paintings. So I thought that I would save other people the hassle and cut them so they could see they're worthless.

08:50
Thomas Dambo
And I think this is why we have so much waste. One man's trash is another man's treasure. Something that might be worthless for you can be of extreme high value for others. I think that's a sad story, but this is also one of the things that's really easy to change. Share our trash, share the knowledge of our trash. Share it with others, because somebody else can use it, so it doesn't become a problem.

09:14
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you ever dream of trash and if you do, are they nightmares or are they dreams that make you smile? Because I guess trash is your treasure.

09:24
Thomas Dambo
I don't remember any recent dreams about trash. But I remember as a child, if I can take an old anecdote from my childhood. There was this toy store, on Skibhusvej, where I grew up. I had this recurring dream, and this was actually a nightmare, of coming behind the toy store and seeing a big dump, and then going up into the dump. It's filled with toys, right? All my favorite toys, books, and a million rubber turtles or whatever things that small boys they like to have a lot of, right?

09:59
Thomas Dambo
And I'm trying to fit it all on a shopping cart. And then the dump truck comes and the truck operator, he's like, I'm going to empty it now. You can't take any more. You have to leave. And I'm like, no, no, no. And I'm trying to carry it away and I'm sweating and pushing the shopping cart. And this would happen again and again and again. I couldn't take all the trash because it would have to go away to the landfill and be gone. So I guess that was one of my traumas as a child was not being able to dumpster dive.

10:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
A lot of your art is in nature. Your goal is to send people out into nature, where the journey to discover your work becomes the best part of the experience. Why is this important to you?

10:39
Thomas Dambo
I think nature is the best artist, the best sculpture. When you look at some new pattern or you come up with some new idea, it feels like everything is already done by nature. We should remember what nature is and how big and how magnificent it is. It is so easy to forget when you're living inside your phone and your computer and the internet, and then people start talking about that, ah, it's a simulation and everything is made by a computer.

11:07
Thomas Dambo
I think human civilization sits on top of a living natural world. And if we don't understand how to protect that, then human civilization doesn't work. If we're disconnected from the natural world, we won't be able to understand how to protect it. Sending people out in nature and play out in nature, I think that's a big part of how to solve that.

11:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You mentioned Skibhusvej, which is a street in Odense where you were born. You have described your upbringing as growing up in a cozy collective. Describe what you mean by that, and what did that kind of foundation mean to you later on?

11:44
Thomas Dambo
My mother was first a seamstress and then she was working in a kindergarten. And my father, he was working in a factory where they made metal parts. Later he made recycled bicycles. They worked together, lived together in a collective. And then that's when I came. First it was a bigger collective and then we moved into a smaller one where we were three families in one house and then three in the next house.

12:04
Thomas Dambo
And then we lived together and then shared our backyard. In the beginning, we ate more together than we did later when the kids got older. There were always other kids around, and there were always other adults around, to help take care of each other, and play with each other. Yeah, that was really good for me.

12:24
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You went to a little hippie school in the country, you have described it as such. How did that shape you?

12:30
Thomas Dambo
I was diagnosed with ADHD in second grade. And my mother felt I didn't really fit too good in the public school. Then I came to this other school called Rynkeby, a little free school in the countryside, I think we were 60 kids. And each grade wasn't called the year, it was called a different animal instead.

12:48
Thomas Dambo
I was in haletudserne, which means the tadpoles. We went on two excursions every year, and stayed for a week. We had to go for one week in an exchange apprentice program. At ten years old, I'd been in a candy shop, a toy shop, the military, the zoo and all the things that you want to do as a kid.

13:04
Thomas Dambo
If the sun was shining, then we could tell our teacher, no, the sun is shining, let's go out and play hide and seek or something like that. And then we would do that instead. And then every class had their own treetop house or fortress in the backyard, it was a big farm. And there you could go and get a hammer and some boards and a saw, and you could basically build on this fortress.

13:25
Thomas Dambo
And I remember one time, my class, the tadpoles, and the pandas, we ganged up against all the boys. We went in the backyard and we were like, we are not studying anymore, we don't want to be a part of this. We barricaded ourselves and stayed up there for the whole day. And the teachers just let us be there because every time they came up, we would throw apples after them. And we stole all the girls' backpacks and stuff like that. I think it taught me that I can be a part of making the rules —

13:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And go up against authorities?

13:52
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, go against authority and I can build things. It's not dangerous to try. A lot of stuff like that.

13:59
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It sounds like you have very good childhood memories. And did they help shape you as an artist, you think?

14:04
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, I definitely think so.

14:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In which ways?

14:08
Thomas Dambo
Being able to build a lot of things, also all those values that we were taught. We were taught that the five second rule doesn't need to be just five seconds. It can also be five minutes.

14:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Apples are a good resource —

14:18
Thomas Dambo
Apples are good. Creating, you can create your own things, and those things can make you happy and you can learn how to design yourself. And it's not dangerous to use tools and build stuff. You could probably describe the school as a forest kindergarten or something like that. We could do whatever we wanted. And if somebody stepped a nail up into the foot, it wasn't a disaster.

14:40
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That sounds like an interesting school out there in Rynkeby, which is in the countryside of Funen, right?

14:47
Thomas Dambo
Yeah.

14:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Later on, you got into the very prestigious Kolding Design School. Talk about what this did to your idea of what art is, and how did it influence you in terms of shaping your vision.

15:01
Thomas Dambo
Well, first, if I can explain to you how I got into the school. At this time I was painting graffiti and all my heroes were the graffiti painters in Denmark and in Odense in particular. I was not the person who painted the most, but we went on interrails around Europe and I was standing guard when others were painting. I was painting myself, but not super much, and I could see how we were becoming increasingly criminalized and I could see how some of my friends were starting to have a more criminal mindset.

15:31
Thomas Dambo
And then there is one incident where my friend, he gets a fine of one million Danish crowns, which equals US$150,000. It was 20 years ago or something like that. I guess I can say this now, but I'm making a joint on a piece of paper in his apartment. And I can see that this piece of paper is the fine. And then I'm like, is this a fine? You got a fine, and you didn't tell me. Oh yeah. You know, probably wasn't too happy about it.

15:58
Thomas Dambo
And that just clicked. I'm like, I don't wanna end up like that. I want to try and find another output for my creativity. What is it I love about graffiti? I loved graffiti being creative in the public space, unauthorized, just being able to just go and do it. I was like, maybe I can find another way of doing this.

16:16
Thomas Dambo
And then about the same time, we were going to the premiere of a graffiti movie in another city in Denmark and we jumped on a train with 20 graffiti painters and I meet a graffiti painter from Copenhagen on the train. And I'm like, you're also going to the premiere of the movie? And he's like, no, no, I'm going to the design school, I think for the Christmas party or something like that in Kolding, which is on the way there.

16:37
Thomas Dambo
And I'm like, are you in the design school? I was so street, so outlawed, so far away from somebody who could go to be an engineer, an architect, or designer. So when he tells me that, I'm like, can you do this and do that at the same time? Then some months later, I met him again at another party, and I talked to him about it. He's like, Thomas, you could totally go to the design school. Your ideas are so crazy and you have so much energy and you can see everything in a different perspective, you would go straight in.

17:11
Thomas Dambo
And I'm like, maybe I should do it. I go home and tell my mother, hey, I'm gonna go to design school. And then she's like, yeah, finally something that's not hip hop and joints and graffiti. Then I apply and then I just go straight into the design school. And what formed me in design school was that I got some confinements. I got some names for what is this called and what is that called.

17:31
Thomas Dambo
And I could see that I belonged in design school. As a Danish person, you can't maybe say this because of our famous Jante Law, right? But I could feel that I was good. I had original ideas and I knew how to act on them and I knew how to do it. And I also have that power to go from idea to action. There is no room in between for me. So that just really helped me in design school.

17:56
Thomas Dambo
And I made a lot of great projects there. It was all street projects and all hip hop projects and graffiti projects. And I bent all the rules to be able to just keep doing what I was doing. But it taught me that even though I wasn't the best student, the teachers, they had respect for me because of the way that my ideas were put together and my work ethics, I think.

18:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You thought outside the box, I assume.

18:19
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, I think that's what they like, so that really helped me a lot and then I should just have a lot of smart people and a lot of good tools and workshops and good quality computers and stuff like that around you.

18:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I was with a group of graffiti painters too, and I remember they didn't have to pay a fine, but we had to clean it. So I was helping them clean a lot of walls.

18:41
Thomas Dambo
Yeah. In Odense?

18:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
In Odense, yes. In Sanderum, where I was from.

18:45
Thomas Dambo
Okay.

18:47
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah. You might know them, actually. Let's talk about that later.

18:50
Thomas Dambo
Yeah.

18:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have created awareness around the Danish music festivals, where the audience leave cheap tents, clothes, bottles of liquor, wine and beer, all kinds of things. The trash left behind is a huge problem. How did you use this situation in your art?

19:12
Thomas Dambo
So, I've been to a lot of music festivals, probably 75 music festivals or something along that. And at the end of the music festival, there's so much trash, like you said. One year I did an experiment on how much canned food can I find. The first many years I only went for canned beer. And then we stayed at the festival for an extra day, and then we had hundreds of canned beers that people just left behind.

19:38
Thomas Dambo
I realized maybe the next year, I should try and just collect canned food and then see how much canned food could I find. I took photos of it and then made a diagram of how much canned tuna could I find, how much canned liver paste could I find, how much canned mackerel with tomato could I find. It's Danish canned meats, which I figured are the most expensive things, much more expensive than a can of beer.

20:01
Thomas Dambo
I ended up with maybe 200 cans of tuna, 250 cans of canned mackerel, 100 cans of liver paste or something like that. So much so that I couldn't carry it. And I was like, this is so much protein and it's just laying here. And this is what I found in two hours, just myself scavenging this little tiny part, maybe less than 1% of the festival campsite. And then my friend helped me carry it home.

20:27
Thomas Dambo
At this point we were still painting graffiti and had just moved to Copenhagen and used all our money on paint and weed and partying. And so this was high value meat protein that we had to mix up with our pasta. It was maybe one year's supply of cooking in our little apartment with me and these two other guys, a DJ and graffiti painter. And then I thought I should make it into a project.

20:50
Thomas Dambo
And at that time I had become in charge of the graffiti team at another big festival in Denmark called the Skanderborg Festival, a big festival, 75,000 people, something like that. I asked them if I could do a project where I would go to the Roskilde Festival and then collect different things and then bring it to the Skanderborg Festival and then make a secret bar.

21:12
Thomas Dambo
I called that bar Limbo Land, the things that are stuck in between, and also named after the famous limbo song, which is where you will your way backwards under a limbo stick and see how low you can go under the stick. Then I think I got 20 bracelets or 20 par tout tickets for the Roskilde Festival, and then we went there when the festival ended and scavenged. I gave everybody a code for scavenging after things that look limbo.

21:39
Thomas Dambo
Everything in color, everything flashy, everything shiny. We got all the hats, the frisbees, the balls, the onesies, the tents that had funny colors, the air mattresses with flower prints, the yoga mats in neon green, and a lot of clothes. Because people leave everything behind. A whole truckload of stuff, maybe a 20 foot shipping container full of stuff.

22:01
Thomas Dambo
And then we brought that back to my old studio. That's when I just had a tiny little 1,000 square feet studio. We cleaned it all and organized it all. And then three months later, we brought it to the festival, the Skanderborg Festival, where I had had the graffiti team, but then that year I made the limbo project instead and stopped doing the graffiti. I made a secret bar and you could walk into the bar.

22:23
Thomas Dambo
There was a dress up area where you could then dress up in all these colorful things. And then you entered through these tassels into a catwalk and then there was a whole bar / amphi-stage that was built up around you, where people could then party and hang out. And there was a bar and a secret bodega and there was a lounge and you could go upstairs.

22:45
Thomas Dambo
A big area, maybe 3,000 square feet. I got all the stuff from all the art installations and all the bars and all the different things at the festival. All their scraps from building their installations came over to me. All the dumps were put in front of my installation and then we built everything from scratch.

23:01
Thomas Dambo
And I had a team of 25 people or something like that for 14 days helping me build it. Super much fun, cause I could walk around, okay, let's take all these. Maybe somebody cut 50 circular holes into a wall, and then I got all the discs that were circular, that was scraps from the holes from another bar. And then, oh, let's paint them all red and put yellow dots on them and then screw them up on the wall and then do this and then it becomes clothes hangers or something like that.

23:27
Thomas Dambo
All the time designing and building at the same time. And that's what I love so much about building with trash. It's already broken and you don't feel shameful for building anything with it because you already poked a hole on the blank canvas. I think that we made the best party at the festival, because it was just so cheerful and so un-uptight, because it was just so loosey goosey and so crazy, right?

23:50
Thomas Dambo
And then people came in, danced the limbo dance, and then they had a limbo drink. And then they would cheer for the next people who would come in. Cause everybody came in as the entertainment walking in through the tassel, dressed up and then came in on the stage, basically.

24:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Let's stay in Denmark for a little bit longer. What was the idea behind the Happy Wall in Copenhagen? It was an interactive piece of art where people could send messages to the world, too.

24:16
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, it's a project that I did before I did the Trolls. It actually started with the material. Many of my designs start with what is the scrap that I found and what can I design from it? So in this case I had found a couple of thousand of 1x1 foot plywood sheets that had sat on top of the Danish Tuborg Beers' plastic beer crates.

24:41
Thomas Dambo
So there had been many thousands of these beer crates stacked as an amphi-stage for a temporary movie festival. And to make it more comfortable to sit on these beer crates, which had a little bit of a rough bottom to them, they had cut these plywood sheets and put them on top.

24:56
Thomas Dambo
So then when I went to this movie festival, I could see that this is probably going to be discarded, all this plywood, after. And then I found the designer and the architect who had made it, and asked, can I have all the plywood sheets afterwards? They said yes, of course, because they couldn't use it for anything. They didn't have a workshop or anywhere to store. They didn't have an idea for it.

25:14
Thomas Dambo
So then I brought it back to my studio. This is when they were building the new metro in Copenhagen, and they were making, I think, ten new stops or something like that. So there was a big construction for the digging. A lot of the biggest, most busiest squares and plazas of Copenhagen had these 16 feet tall construction walls hiding the construction site.

25:36
Thomas Dambo
I was asked if I wanted to do artwork on one of these walls and I asked, which is the best location in town? And then, Mimi Larson, who is in charge of the project, she told me, it's Kongens Nytorv. And then I said, okay, I want Kongens Nytorv. And she was like, Thomas, you can't just say you want the most busy one. I was like, I have the best idea. So if you're going to give it to me, I'll give you the best idea.

25:58
Thomas Dambo
And this is the idea. The idea was to cut all these plywood sheets up into, I think, 4x8 inch doors on small hinges and then make 2,500 of these small doors. And then by flipping them, they become a pixel that changes color. By that you have a pixel screen of these 2,500 pixels that you can then go in with an analog interaction and then flip it to change color. You can then create patterns or letters or illustrations that are pixel-based.

26:35
Thomas Dambo
I described it as a democratic graffiti wall, where everybody got to make a gigantic piece of street art in the public space themselves. Mimi, she said, that was a great idea. And that if I could wait one year, she would give me the best spot there on Kongens Nytorv.

26:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Kongens Nytorv is a prime location in Copenhagen, with the Royal Theater and D'Angleterre, which is our five star luxury hotel.

27:00
Thomas Dambo
And also the art academy.

27:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes. It's a very good location.

27:05
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, it was a great opportunity for me to do something there. So I made that 16x100 feet or something like that, big pixel wall there, and it stayed there for a little over a year. Hundreds of thousands of people must have been there and flipped them. And I saw so many different examples of what people did and the different music videos. It was in the, what is it called, the Eurovision, it was featured in, and it was in a music video with Rasmus Seebach.

27:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
He's a famous Danish musician.

27:35
Thomas Dambo
He was at the time, probably the most famous Danish musician. So a lot of different people just used it. And that's actually when I then got picked up to get a wildcard to come and do something for the Life is Beautiful festival in Las Vegas, which was my first installation in the United States.

27:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That leads us to go outside of Denmark. You have made a lot of Trolls all around Denmark and also around the world. And we have a book on the table in front of us that you have made called Trash Trolls and Treasure Hunts. Talk a little bit about how this project started and what brought it outside of Denmark.

28:15
Thomas Dambo
Yeah, by now it's probably the biggest project I've done. It's been running for 11 years and it started with probably the only real job I have had in my whole life. That's when the idea was cradled and born. I was working in this shipping transportation company that moves around different products, and I was driving a forklift, right?

28:37
Thomas Dambo
Out the back of the warehouse, there was always this big mountain of different scrap woods piling up, from pallets to cargo boxes and different plywoods, different wood that you use for shipping the goods that the company was handling. And the company was always trying to get rid of it, trying to give it away or sell it. But most of the time they ended up driving it away for incineration or landfill.

29:00
Thomas Dambo
This was probably 15, 16 years ago. I remember thinking that all of this wood, it used to be trees standing all around the world where all the different products came from. And all those trees, they were forest and got cut down just to become this insignificant piece of transportation equipment, if you can call it that. And then just be tossed in the other end.

29:21
Thomas Dambo
And I thought, how beautiful it could be if I could create some kind of a project that could protect the forest out of that mountain of trash. How beautiful it could be if I could create an army or a horde of Trolls off the mountain of scraps, placed and hidden in the forest, that it's put in the world to protect? I thought there was a really beautiful and easy to understand symbolism in that. And then I just basically started building the first one.

29:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where did you start building that one?

29:56
Thomas Dambo
The first one I built on Skanderborg Festival. I had a door open there because I had a good relationship with the people there and they knew that if I had a crazy idea, they should just let me do it because then maybe something fun comes out, you know. And those are actually called Mr. and Mrs. Limbo because I had learned in the Limbo Land project that Danish people really like the limbo song when they are drunk and when they are on Skanderborg Festival.

30:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which they are very often.

30:22
Thomas Dambo
Which they are very often, yeah. So I thought I'm going to build two sculptures that play on the limbo theme. So they are called Mr. and Mrs. Limbo. And then they basically block the road to the second largest stage. So everybody has to dance limbo under their arms. And then the limbo song played.

30:37
Thomas Dambo
It was silly. It's maybe not my most proud sculpture, but it was the first one in the Troll project. And it taught me a lot. They look a lot different now, the Trolls, but there is some similarities from that sculpture to how they look today. And that's why I picked that one as the first in the Troll project. Cause I've made many different big sculptures. Which one is number one, right? Everybody asked which is number one.

30:56
Thomas Dambo
And I think in retrospect, if I could re-pick my number one, I think I would re-pick it to be the one I've made in Puerto Rico, which has a much better story and has much better sculpture.

31:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Well, tell us about how the Trolls ended up leaving Denmark and becoming an international project. How did it start? And talk about the Puerto Rico one, too.

31:17
Thomas Dambo
Yeah. So the Puerto Rico one came to be when I then was at the Life Is Beautiful Festival in Las Vegas. It was curated by two Puerto Rican curators, called JustKids, who picked all the artists there. So they had seen my Happy Wall and they invited me there. And then the one guy who's called Alexis Bousquet, he's inviting me then to come to Puerto Rico to a festival, a street art festival he's making there that's called Santure es Ley. He then made a daughter festival of that festival on an island called Culebra. So that festival was called Culebra es Ley. It means Culebra is cool, something like that.

31:52
Thomas Dambo
So then I go there and I actually wanted to build a big head of a Troll around a palm tree. So the palm leaves looked like dreadlocks on my big sculpture because I just think it's nice when I integrate what's happening in the real world in the elements, and the objects become part of my sculptures. That's how it was in street art and I guess it's that little bit of a naive thing like if you remove the "p" on the Danish mailbox, then it spells "cheese."

32:23
Thomas Dambo
At that point of my career, I guess I was just a little bit more childish and naive than maybe I am now. But then I couldn't find that palm tree, and then I was like, okay, what's the coolest spot on the island where I can build a sculpture? And then he said, well, that's these stones out here. And then he drove me out over there in a golf cart and we walked out there.

32:42
Thomas Dambo
And then I felt I should build a Troll that's sitting on this rock pier jetty and throwing a big boulder into the ocean. The American Navy, they used to bomb the island for a test bombing. I figured they needed a Troll to protect the island. So it's now protecting it by throwing rocks into the ocean.

33:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Wow. Where else have you placed Trolls?

33:06
Thomas Dambo
So many, so many now. To be honest, for a long time, I was aiming to make a lot of sculptures because I knew this would be good and I wanted to make my book with my first 100 Trolls and then at some point, you have made so many, that it becomes ah, now it's not about making more, making many. Now, it's about making the best ones in the best locations. So I've surpassed that threshold now. I've stopped talking about how many I've made.

33:29
Thomas Dambo
I can tell you which one is my favorite one that I've made. But there's also a lot of favorite ones. One of the most recent ones that I've made is in France. It's called Gargan. There's a local legend about a giant that's called Gargan in France. This one is called Gargan Villeinvisible, because it works both in French and in English. Village Invisible. So Gagan has together with some outcast children from modern civilization, he has created a fortress of trash inside the forest that he's sitting and protecting.

34:02
Thomas Dambo
We went dumpster diving around the city of Rouen in France, together with a group of local young teenagers and different other volunteers. We then created maybe 25 small different shaped houses in a circle inside the forest with a little gateway. You can walk in and then the Troll is sitting and protecting it.

34:22
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Is it a little Troll village?

34:24
Thomas Dambo
It's a village the size of humans, but then the Troll is the size of my Troll. So it's 20-ish feet tall or something like that when it's sitting down. And then all the roofs are made of different types of plastic or street signs or the hood of a car or different metal and plastic. And the side of the houses are made of wood, to give contrast in the buildings.

34:46
Thomas Dambo
I wanted to find some different street signs because they'll give it this decaying urban feeling to have the street signs on it. So then we went to a metal scrap yard and I find all these different street signs there and I'm like, wow, I'm so lucky. I find 30 street signs at the first scrap yard I go to. And then I come back out to the forest again. I asked one of my assistants who's from France, what does it say on this sign? She's like, "Littering in the forest is illegal and you can be fined."

35:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Perfect.

35:14
Thomas Dambo
And I was like, what?

35:17
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You don't build all these Trolls alone. You have a community around building them. Talk a little bit about that. I assume that they are locals and are they recycle-minded people, so to speak? I don't know. How do you get people involved?

35:35
Thomas Dambo
First of all, of course, it's not only me who works in my workshop and my studio. We are 24 people full time on my team now. Maybe half of us is building, and the other half is doing all the administrative stuff and the book and the YouTube and all of that stuff. We take turns from the building team, because now a lot of people have kids, so people can't go traveling too much.

35:56
Thomas Dambo
So France, maybe we go six people or something like that. And then we hire some local people to help us. We have people who come from the art festival who help us. And they help us establish contact to, for example, this school. So it was kids who had a really rough time in their private families. And so they came and helped us. I think 15 kids every day or something like that from that school, the same kids every day for 14 days, which was the build.

36:21
Thomas Dambo
And then different people for one day. Somebody came from the design school and somebody from an office and somebody from the recycle station. We put the program together like that. We always do it together with the local client because they have the local network, you know?

36:33
Thomas Dambo
I can also do a project somewhere in the world where nobody knows anything about who I am, or what is this crazy artist doing, Trolls out of trash wood, then what is that, then why do we need that, you know? And then some places else, we get swarmed, like in Seattle, we had more than a thousand people on the waiting list to sign up to volunteer.

36:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thomas, what motivates you?

36:53
Thomas Dambo
It's motivation for me that I can have such a positive life and such a positive experience and then do something that can help push the world in a better place. Why should I not spend my life doing that? It's everything that I could dream about getting to spend my life on. I'm doing what I like together with people I like, and I believe that it has a positive impact on the world. And it's a success. There's so many people who love it and it motivates and makes people happy and I get so much positive feedback. So I think that's all the motivation I need.

37:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you have role models too that you look up to and that inspire you? And if so, who are they?

37:35
Thomas Dambo
So there are three artists that I think are really inspirational for me. One is a Brazilian artist that is based in the UK. He's called Henrique Oliveira. He makes a little bit of a similar size and similar material to my wooden Trolls. And he works in thin pieces of recycled plywood that he bends into these really big organic, root-, tree branch-type of structures that often interact with buildings, with wide museum spaces.

38:03
Thomas Dambo
And so they grow out of the wall or they strangle a pillar outside of a city hall or something like that. And so it's like nature versus mankind or something like that. They're really striking and really built and really nice. And I remember seeing him when I was in design school. I saw a YouTube video with him or something like that. He was some street art person and he was walking the streets of Brazil and then he found this plywood and ripped the posters off and put it in water and soaked it and used that to create some of the sculptures. I feel like I can really identify with him.

38:37
Thomas Dambo
Then I had the pleasure of meeting an artist called Dave Bird, who lives in Rhode Island, where I made an installation. And so I reached out to him because I had heard that he lived there and he makes that project called Becorns, where he makes these small creatures. And his story as an artist is that he used to work in Lego in Denmark. He quit and moved back to the United States.

39:02
Thomas Dambo
He was mowing his mother's lawn, and realized that the nuts and the sticks and the leaves there could actually be the building blocks for his own little creature. He's doing storytelling, taking photos of how his becorns interact with a flower, watering a flower, feeding a bird, or petting a squirrel or something like that. He waits and hides out and then sneak-takes the right photo at the right moment. He's really awesome. And he's just a lot like what I do But it's on the other end of the spectrum, right?

39:32
Thomas Dambo
He makes these little beacons. It's similar to what I do, but mine are gigantic and we are so many people and it takes such a long time to do them, and they're permanent. His are extremely small and it's only him at home in his garden and they left for a split of a second. But we're still telling the same type of story with the same material. Both of us envy something with each other's practice.

39:55
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Very cool.

39:56
Thomas Dambo
And the last one I want to say is an Australian filmmaker, YouTuber, called Beau Miles, B-E-A-U Miles. He has cracked the code for how to make the YouTube channel that I wish that I had done. He doesn't really build so much, but then he goes kayaking and then finds all the plastic bottles in his local water stream and then he dumps the dives and builds a new office for his wife. And it's an adult type of YouTube, and really meaningful, and what do you call it, like slow — slow TV.

40:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Slow pace TV. So Thomas, my last question to you is, what are your goals for the future in terms of your artistic career? What do you still want to achieve?

40:45
Thomas Dambo
My part goal now is to put one Troll in each state of the United States. Then the next goal is each country and then it's a thousand Trolls. And if I feel I'm running out of steam before a thousand, then I'm gonna open it up and invite more people in to come and help me reach it on my Troll map. So that's the Troll goal.

41:04
Thomas Dambo
Then I would like to make a museum, where I'm imagining something like 60 Trolls, something inside, actually. Been talking about a church in Denmark. I could see starting with a smaller project in Denmark and then make a bigger project. Maybe big old, really worn down, maybe overgrown industrial buildings somewhere in the United States. Something that'll attract in the same way as a Meow Wolf or Experimentarium or a children's museum, or it will lay in that segment, but be more urban, and have more edge because it's less developed.

41:40
Thomas Dambo
So there can be a hole in the roof with water leaking in. You can really take an old smashed building. Then I have a lot of other art projects that I would like to do that's not about the Trolls, but it's in other materials. I'm hoping that some of my different TV videos can help me do some of those things. And that's why I, for example, would like to have a big presence in YouTube, have my own TV show or something like that, because then I could see myself traveling from destination to destination with different corporates, and then turn some of their things into big projects together with locals.

42:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much for your time, Thomas. We appreciate it.

42:23
Thomas Dambo
Thank you for having me. It was a pleasure.

42:25
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For us, too.

42:31
Thomas Dambo
For today's episode, Thomas Dambo chose Adam Dircksz's Miniature-altertavle. Triptykon med kristi passion or Miniature Altar. Triptych with the Passion of Christ from 1502–1528 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.