Collective Making 01 / Extreme Sharing

Kunsthal Aarhus presents the first exhibition of COLLECTIVE MAKING, the new artistic programme for 2015-2016, featuring the exhibition Extreme Sharing by the Danish collective N55. Opening 6 February at 5pm

Drawing upon their work since the 1990s, their work is an attempt to "rebuild the city from within" and use everyday life situations as a platform for public events and collaborations. Their projects are released with Open Source manuals and under Creative Commons licenses to allow for further modification.

For two months, Kunsthal Aarhus is transformed by N55 into XYZ OPEN CITY – a prototype for a city that relies on new ways of sharing practices encouraged by open source principles. The emphasis is on rethinking the current economic system and failed production models, and to imagine a possible new system. The underlying question is about how to bring production back to the cities and away from remote globalized production centres, thus allowing us to think about cities differently and to adapt production to what is actually needed – against overproduction, overconsumption and exploitation of the environment and people. What is produced in Kunsthal Aarhus' XYZ OPEN CITY is driven by the engagement and needs of visitors, is made with others, and can be reinvested back into the city or taken home.

N55 talk about their work in a public presentation (7 February) and run a series of workshops on the basic principles of the XYZ Nodes System: how to build anything you need in your everyday life (almost everything) including their bicycle XYZ CARGO (10 - 12 February; 07 - 08 March 2015).

The exhibition is accompanied by a commissioned text by Wolfgang Sützl "About Sharing" (2015), available in print and online at: http://kunsthalaarhus.dk/en/research The Manual for XYZ OPEN CITY and other open source manuals for works by N55 can be found at www.n55.dk.