“Twenty-Two Metres of Warm Carpet and a Fridge Full of Contempt,” Says Mirela Sund
Henrik Solvang's new corridor in a Copenhagen tram shed has one humming fridge and a ceiling built to make tall people apologise. Mirela Sund timed how fast everyone left.
The carpet starts at the door and does not stop. Floor, walls, ceiling, all of it rust-orange wool, 22 metres of it. By 11:20 on a Monday morning I was inside, bent at the neck like a woman hunting for a dropped earring. Henrik Solvang calls it Mellemrum. It sits in a former tram shed at Fyrrevej Kunsthal and costs 140 kroner to enter.
Last month he gave us Ankomst, a white room with a damp grey carpet, and I assumed he had done his worst. Damp was an honest insult. Warm is a lie. The wool here is dry, the air is 24 degrees, and the ceiling is 1.9 metres, which is exactly low enough to make a tall person apologise to it.
At the far end stands one cream enamel fridge, door shut, a dent in it the size of a saucer. It hums on a single flat note, somewhere just under a B. A bare bulb hangs over it. You walk toward it for 22 metres because there is nothing else to do, and then you open it. I opened it. Inside there is a shelf, and the little light works, and there is nothing else. The working light is the cruellest detail in the building.
Here is my verdict, and I will give it slowly for the people at the back. Solvang has grasped something most artists in this city miss, which is that comfort is a sharper weapon than discomfort. Then he has done nothing with it. Mellemrum is a good idea held by a man who stopped at the idea and put a fridge on it.
At the ninth metre the carpet seam on the left wall lifts and curls like a tongue. I wanted it to be deliberate. I knelt on the wool in a good coat and checked. It is not deliberate. It is the only honest thing in the room.
The fridge is the sole performer, and it knows it. It hums the way a waiter coughs.
I timed the visitors from the entrance, with the patience of a woman who has sat through four-hour operas. Going in takes them about eleven minutes, single file, whispering, touching the walls. Coming out takes forty seconds. A man in a green anorak did it in nineteen, walking backwards, as if the fridge might follow.
