AT THE HEART of Danh Vo’s farmhouse in Brandenburg, Germany, is an oven. Not simply any oven, although. This wood-burning clay furnace, the scale of a Volkswagen minibus, painted a darkish azure and bisecting the big residing space, was one of many few issues Vo knew he needed to have in the home: a contemporary model of a conventional Russian range, which was used for each cooking and heating. As soon as, these spectacular items of masonry have been the locus of the house and the inspiration for a number of Russian fairy tales. Many had giant cabinets or flat-roofed extensions, reached by small ladders and topped with mattresses. Vo’s has a platform that juts out within the rear, radiating warmth, with room to seat 4.
The monumental domesticity of such a bit little question appealed to Vo, 46, a conceptual artist who typically makes new objects out of previous ones, just like the washer, fridge and TV his grandmother acquired from a Catholic charity upon arriving within the Nineteen Eighties as a Vietnamese refugee in Germany, which Vo stacked atop each other and mounted with a wood crucifix, refashioning them into artwork (“Oma Totem,” 2009). “Duchamp did stoves,” notes Vo. However the clay oven additionally spoke to a different need he had for this home: that or not it’s a spot the place folks may collect. “I really like when within the winter everyone seems to be routinely drawn to its heat,” he says. “That is what I want to purchase as a substitute of a flowery automobile.”
Vo’s property, known as Güldenhof, is just a little over an hour’s drive north of Berlin, previous huge rapeseed and rye fields and the tiny village from which it takes its title. It was as soon as an East German agricultural collective, however most of its buildings had been deserted for nearly 30 years when Vo came across it in 2016, and its uncultivated fields are actually punctuated with artwork. In the course of this 7.5-acre repurposed farm is a grassy football-field-size courtyard, framed on either side by a distinct construction, all initially constructed within the 1800s. Together with the gut-renovated, three-story, 7,000-square-foot farmhouse, the place Vo lives, there are three lengthy stone-and-brick buildings, previously used to accommodate cattle and retailer feed. Over the previous few years, Vo has remodeled the property right into a cultural incubator. It’s the place he invitations folks to make issues, be they artwork or sauerkraut, and the place he himself is at all times experimenting with issues, too.
Vo has by no means actually had use for a conventional studio. His groundbreaking work “We the People” (2011-16) is a life-size re-creation of the Statue of Liberty that exists not as a single object however as a collection of shards of round 250 copper items, which Vo won’t ever permit to be proven altogether in a single place. His artwork typically plumbs the intersections of collective historical past and private historical past — or, as he’s known as it, “the tiny diasporas of an individual’s life.” Born in southern Vietnam, he and his household fled in 1979 when he was 4 aboard a hand-built wood boat that was ultimately picked up by a Danish freighter. After a number of months in a refugee camp in Singapore, they settled in a suburb of Copenhagen; he considers Danish his mom tongue. He has spent his grownup life in many various locations seemingly — he has a home in Mexico Metropolis, an house in Berlin and a rustic home in Denmark. However “if folks wish to see Danh’s work,” the Thai conceptual artist Rirkrit Tiravanija says, “they need to come to Güldenhof. In a manner, what he’s doing right here is his apply.”
IT WAS TIRAVANIJA, Vo’s pal and mentor, who first instructed that they purchase some property within the countryside, a spot for them and different artists to retailer work, and for Tiravanija, who’s finest identified for interactive installations that middle on communal rituals — like cooking meals or conducting tea ceremonies — to construct a ceramics studio. (He spent weeks at Güldenhof final summer time making items for the tearooms he’s arrange all over the world.) However Tiravanija acquired caught up with different tasks, says Vo, so he was left to renovate the compound himself.
Vo’s longtime studio supervisor, Marta Lusena, enlisted the architect Pietro Balp of the Berlin-based Heim Balp Architekten, who had beforehand helped renovate Vo’s Berlin house, which he shares together with his companion, the German photographer Heinz Peter Knes. However in contrast to that grand, art-filled Artwork Nouveau area, Vo didn’t need Güldenhof to really feel treasured or polished. Right here, partitions can be cement or plywood. Lengthy steel LED develop lamps, typically used to domesticate marijuana, would grasp from the ceiling, as a result of they “make such a powerful, lovely mild,” says Vo. There have been two preliminary directives for the renovation: to rework one of many barns right into a functioning archive that might retailer every part from images to sculptures, and to transform the farmhouse into a correct residing area that might accommodate nonetheless many friends needed to remain there.
Right this moment, the farmhouse’s footprint stays the identical, however the exterior plaster partitions have been painted matte black, the pitched roof is now corrugated steel and one accesses the area by a small greenhouse-like entrance, clad in polycarbonate. As soon as inside, guests both climb the unique pine staircase (to the upstairs semiprivate areas) or head towards the kitchen to the suitable by a small adjoining sitting room containing one other clay fire, engineered to warmth a bench on the kitchen desk on the opposite facet of the wall. The partitions within the kitchen are adorned with principally handmade instruments that Vo has collected over time: a brush constructed of pure grasses and bamboo from Thailand; two straw egg baskets from South Korea given to Vo by his pal the artist Haegue Yang. Past the kitchen is the big residing space and the blue range.
The highest two flooring are devoted to studying, working and sleeping: No less than a dozen beds (the quantity fluctuates together with the variety of friends) are scattered among the many home’s small non-public rooms and bigger lounge areas. (Vo himself doesn’t have a chosen bed room.) A plywood stairway — “a homage,” Vo says, to Tiravanija’s farm in upstate New York, most of whose interiors are utterly lined in plywood — leads by a triangular opening to the third ground, which serves as a library and sleeping space: yet one more place to mattress down for the night time.
VO’S TRANSFORMATIVE ENERGIES prolonged past the property strains, and as Balp and his crew have been engaged on the renovation, the artist was in search of out folks from the encompassing space to assist reimagine Güldenhof: like Falko Martens, an engineer and artisan who makes bespoke wood-burning clay ovens; or the cabinetmaker Fred Fischer, who now has a carpentry store in one of many previous barns and made a lot of the furnishings within the farmhouse, together with the beds normal out of plywood. Vo calls his knack for locating such collaborators “luck,” however Tiravanija says that bringing folks collectively is certainly one of Vo’s nice expertise. Certainly, Güldenhof is at all times buzzing with folks Vo has introduced into his world. On any given day, there is likely to be between 4 and 12 guests, like Claus Meyer, one of many creators of Denmark’s New Nordic Cuisine manifesto, and the Michelin-starred chef Dalad Kambhu, discussing fish sauce and fermentation. Or Yang, who frolicked on the farm studying methods to make ceramics with Tiravanija. Or a gaggle that features Luise Faurschou, the founding father of a Copenhagen-based nonprofit known as Art 2030, and the Berlin-based restaurateur Oliver Prestele, serving to harvest cabbage from the neighboring farm of Vo’s mates Lena Buss and Philipp Adler. “I don’t develop many greens anymore, as a result of I’d fairly assist Lena and Philipp,” says Vo. The most important occasion takes place on the summer time solstice, a two-day-long celebration that draws greater than 100 folks.
However Vo’s most essential collaborator at Güldenhof would possibly effectively be Christine Schulz, who moved from Berlin to Brandenburg to commit herself to gardening and beekeeping. (“She’s going to transfer ladybugs from one facet of the backyard to the opposite by hand,” says Vo.) She helped remodel one of many barns, topped with a clear polycarbonate roof, right into a kind of inventive greenhouse, the place cup-and-saucer vines with lilac-colored flowers develop up over wood ceiling beams, creating natural inside partitions. In the summertime, these “rooms” are generally utilized by visiting artists as studios.
On the Cowl
Vo’s personal work appears more and more certain up in Güldenhof’s panorama. For a 2020 solo show at London’s White Dice gallery, he put in grasses and sage rising out of tubs illuminated by develop lights, and he’s at present planning one other present by which he’ll create a backyard and a flower store. “Finally, I’d get to the purpose that when a collector asks to purchase a piece of mine, I’ll say, ‘Develop a backyard as a substitute,’” he says.
Güldenhof has additionally reminded Vo that generally the very best inspiration may be discovered when every part appears fallow. “For the primary time, I’m making a degree of returning right here earlier than the winter solstice,” he says. “I’ve been drawn to learn to adapt to the darkness and the coldness. I’m all of the sudden loving being right here on the darkest day of the 12 months.” Particularly when it may be spent with just a few mates by the range.
