Between Empathy and Antagonism: Subjective Imagination in the Situationist Drakabygget

Abstract

In the summer of 1963, a group of Northern European artists known as the Scandinavian Bauhaus Situationists – or Drakabygget, named after the farm in southern Sweden where the group was based – mounted an exhibition entitled Drakabyggarna, at the Galerie St. Nicolaus in Vejbystrand, Sweden (Fig. 1). Although scant information exists regarding the specific works on display, it consisted largely of expressionist paintings, drawings, and collages.1 Yet, on a warm summer evening in August 1965, the same group of artists paraded through the Strøget, Copenhagen’s high street, accompanied by the Danish folk musicians Caesar and Paul Dissing, who performed as part of a spectacle featuring between 80 and 300 folk singers, as thousands of people danced and sang in the streets around them. Sadly, scant visual records exist documenting the event – referred to as ‘the Situationist life, song and love’, and it came to an end when local authorities arrived to shut down the eruption of public revelry.2