Copenhagen, 2016

During Art and Architecture Day 2016 at Pakhus 48, Danish artist FOS presented Clutch, a temporary architectural intervention that will turn part of Kvadrat’s showroom into a recording music studio. Using 190 meters of purple Divina, colour 692 and 984, the artist will build a temporary room, a musical-womb of sorts, where, over the course of four days, his ongoing musical project Small White Man will record its second album.

Conceived in 2010, Small White Man is a musical project based on a ‘conducting’ framework for musical improvisations through a simple system of colored light bulbs that are switched on and off by the artist. This system allows him to conduct and co-compose musical improvisations with a group of musicians playing together for the first time. The success of this strategy relies strongly upon the participants’ intuition by erasing the separation between players and conductor, who together become a third unity.

 FOS says: “Compare this to a social event where an architectural frame establishes the cultural values and costumes. What sets it off into what is impossible to calculate, is each participant’s references and reactions to the situation, and others’ re-reactions leading it into a myriad of causalities. Nothing becomes something by itself.”