Danish

Apply

Send your application to hostskolen@orbivraa.dk before Sunday, 12 October. 

Please include  a short paragraph of no more than 10 lines telling us who you are and why you wish  to participate.

If more than 16 apply, participants will be selected based on their motivation statements. 

We want to bring together a diverse group of people and encourage applications from all disciplines, whether you work in architecture, art, agriculture or other fields. We warmly encourage everyone to apply, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or religion.

Price

Participation in the Harvest School costs 1200 kr. This includes food, accommodation, materials and activities.

Facilities

All meals are organised and prepared together. Participants sleep together on the farm in rooms with 3-6 people per room. The farm has a shared toilet with a shower. The farm is located close to the forest and Gram Å, where you can fish and take a cold dip. The barn has a workspace, a workshop and a sauna.

Transport

Participants are responsible for arranging their own transport to the farm. You can take the train to Vamdrup station or arrive by car. From Vamdrup station, it’s possible to book a “flex ride” via Sydtrafik.

Schedule

Wednesday 29/10:  Arrival and dinner

Thursday 30/10 – Sunday 1/11:  Activities (see full list below)

Sunday 2/11: Cleaning, exhibition and departure

Organisers

Leonora Krag
Janne G. K. Dinesen
Line Lyhne
Josefine Bols

Guest teachers

Lance Gofort
Ellen Martine Heuser 

ZOOCHORY

At this year’s Harvest School, we will examine the agricultural areas around Orbi and 

Explore how we might influence their future shape and ecology. The Danish landscape is about to undergo significant changes. Bottomlands are being taken out of production, new forests are being planted, and thousands of hectares will be converted from farmland to nature. 

The Harvest School emerges from a desire to bring creativity and poetry to agriculture. Taking the surrounding farmland as a starting point, the school creates a space for dreams and dialogue about how the transformation of farmland can give rise to new landscapes and nature experiences. 

The school is built around practical workshops dealing with land-use techniques and their overlaps with local building traditions, art and architecture.

We will work with cartography and sculpture as poetic tools to map the land, creating a situationist cartography with the potential to both predict and physically alter the landscape.

Science Fiction Prophecies 

The garden, which has always been an artificial reflection of nature, has now evolved into a form of nature that is both artificial and natural. As nature no longer exists without the imprint of humans, the garden can provide a space for a wildness that does not stand in opposition to the urban and human, but appears as an integral part of our everyday lives.

However, to imagine this wildness and its possible forms requires more than observation alone; it requires imagination. Here, science fiction becomes a tool for exploring how we understand and influence the world. In Ursula K. Le Guin’s novel The Word for World is Forest, dreams play a central role. Set on a planet covered in forest, a civilisation uses both reason and dreams to navigate reality. It’s a story that addresses issues such as resource scarcity, deforestation, colonialism and the rights of nature – challenges that mirror those of today. 

Science fiction now has a subgenre: climate fiction, or ‘cli-fi’. A genre in which art addresses the consequences of climate change, using science as its sparring partner rather than relying only on free imagination. Art has the potential to suggest possible futures and contribute to change by critically portraying the present day.

Combining science and poetry, we will imagine future scenarios for landscape and agriculture  surrounding Orbi.

Cartography  

Cartography is a form of drawing that particularly interests us, functioning on both artistic and scientific levels. Architecture’s ability to question what we know and propose new models for the unknown. Through cartography, we want to consider how engaging with the land in poetic and practical ways can provide new insights into landscape development, and how evolving representational forms could transform the way landscape architecture is conceived, designed and realised.

What do we map? What do we pay attention to? What matters? 

Can you map hope, or create dream maps of places that don’t yet exist? 

Does a dream exist if it has been mapped?

We will map the current landscape, but contaminate it with dreams and wishes for the future. What is now farmland holds the potential to become entirely new landscape spaces. In this way, we will map a collective dream of the future. The maps will be created as wood reliefs using the intarsia technique — a forgotten craft in which different types of wood are inlaid into a surface to form patterns or images.

Bird’s-eye view

Birds play a vital role as seed dispersers (zoochory) and act as ‘ecosystem engineers’, actively changing physical environments. By eating fruits and spreading seeds far and wide, they promote natural succession and re-vegetation, particularly in open or disturbed areas. Their movements link habitats, helping to maintain ecological resilience and biodiversity. They can even indirectly affect wetlands and waterways by altering plant structures and water flow through nesting and other activities.

At The Harvest School, we explore the role of the bird as co-creator and the artistic potential of zoochory through a sculptural “bird caller” workshop. Here, we turn the traditional function of the scarecrow upside down. Rather than scaring birds away, we want to attract them with apples, seeds and winter feed.

Participants will develop a series of drawings, which are then translated into three-dimensional, humorous hybrids between feeding trays, land art, and sculpture. These works will offer not just food, but form—a spatial gesture toward birds and an opening to the landscape. The birds will spread the seeds and become co-creators, and the sculptures will function not only as static objects in the landscape, but as agents in its ongoing transformation. In this way, the works become part of a regenerative cycle in which aesthetics and ecology intertwine within a living eco-system, with the landscape around Orbi emerging as both backdrop and co-actor.

Activities

( 1 ) Guided walk through the landscape and fields with agronomist Janne Dinesen.

( 2 ) Talk on reforestation and restoration with landscape architect Lance Gofort

( 3 ) Artist talk by visual artist Ellen Martine Heuser.

( 4 ) Workshop in cartography and intarsia with architects Josefine Bols and Leonora Krag

( 5 ) Workshop in sculptural “bird callers” with visual artist Line Lyhne

( 6 ) Evening readings, film screenings and sauna infusions.