New Life Copenhagen: welcome to hospitable Denmark

14/12-2009 Sidsel Godshaw Møller/Marie Sauer-Johansen

New Life Copenhagen is a conceptual art festival that uses hospitality and human encounters as its exhibition platform, instead of traditional exhibition spaces.

Rikke Gaard is a teacher who lives with her husband and their two children in a villa close to the Bella Center. They welcomed their guest, Roz Savage from the UK just before COP15 began.

Mrs. Gaard read about New Life Copenhagen in the newspaper and immediately decided she wanted to be part of the project.

“It’s interesting to meet people from other countries, and I want to teach my children that. You can tell them, but you also have to practice what you say, and New Life is perfect for that,” she says.

Roz Savage is an ocean rower, environmental campaigner and a UN Climate Hero. She arrived in Copenhagen on the special Climate Express train after having walked from Big Ben in London to Brussels, where she boarded the train for Copenhagen.

As a campaigner who travels extensively, she is used to staying at other people’s homes, and did not have any qualms about staying at a stranger’s house.

“But I do think it was very brave of you to sign up. I would love to repay the favour one day. Your generosity is very inspiring to me,” she tells Mrs. Gaard.

Perhaps surprisingly, Mrs. Gaard did not have any worries either, despite this being her first time hosting a stranger.

“My only concern was about my daughter, who is autistic – I feared there would be problems, so I wanted a guest who could deal with that. But so far, everything has been fine.”

Sixten Kai Nielsen, co-founder of Wooloo.org, the art collective behind New Life Copenhagen, is very pleased with the reception of the project:

“We see a lot of gratitude, especially from foreign guests. We made a book with questions and ideas on how to stage the meeting between hosts and guests, and it really gets conversations going. People are telling us that they’ve stayed up for hours discussing questions in the book,” says Mr. Nielsen.

New Life Copenhagen invited the entire city for a house-warming party, staged in collaboration with American activist Marisa Olson, at the Town Hall Square on Friday December 11.