Decenter II – the movie documents the 4 day long living workshop Decenter II in the park at Marienborg Manor, Møn, DK. In the movie all talk is cut out and only the actions of the artists in the park are left, accompanied by an acoustic soundtrack (drums and horns) improvised in real time to the movie.
About Decenter II
In 2010, I invited twelve artists to move into the manor's park where they stayed and worked for four days. Tents, backdrops, a temporarily installed kitchen and a chalk line of the former castle’s floor plan formed a scenography for the artists' activities.
The idea behind Decenter II is to reinterpret the ideas and the landscape around the former Decenter. The project is an experiment - several of the artists meet each other for the first time and every thought and action, which occurs on the site, happens through improvisation and interaction with each other.
Decenter: South of Copenhagen, on a small island called Moen, is Marienborg Manor. Here the Danish writer and debater Elsa Gress lived with her husband the artist Clifford Wright and their children. They were invited by the former count Peter Moltke, who functioned as their patron.
During the period 1972-84, they extended their family with artists from around the world who lived and worked at the manor. They called their place Decenter. In the middle of the manor’s park there used to be a large Italian Renaissance castle, which the artists used for joint dinners and presentations.
One of the ideas behind Decenter was to create a space for radical and uncompromising thoughts and actions, where art could be created within informal settings and in interaction with others. Elsa Gress believed that art played a key role in the awareness of a civil society, so that a fear of the foreign or unknown would be unable to set the agenda. She based this idea on her early travel experiences from the inter-war period Germany and post-war England and the United States.
With the counts and Elsa Gress' death the story of Decenter was forgotten and Marienborg Manor passed to production agriculture.