An interview with ADAMS
Interview by Dan Murphy. Photos courtesy of ADAMS.
Adams: We built a house in Finland in the summer of 2002, and we created a taste for doing more alternative places—We built this house, and when we came back [to Denmark] we did this huge poster for the bus shelters saying that you could come and “live for for free as it should be”—we did a map [that showed] how to find [the house]. We went back there in December, just to check if it was still there. We figured it would be gone. We arrived early in the morning and we saw the house, and we saw smoke coming out of the chimney—a chimney that we didn’t put there. And we came closer and realized that somebody was living in there. It was rebuilt in certain ways. We just stood there looking, and a neighbor passed by and just started talking to us in Finnish. We understood that she was talking to us about the house and she managed to explain it in Swedish.
The thing is, when we built it, the neighbors were really complaining. We thought we were super secret and just built it next to the train tracks with bushes all around it. But [the neighbors] started showing up more and more and wanted us to leave. We were sort of noisy, hammering nails and stuff. But this lady told us a story about these two good boys, one from Denmark—apparently someone understood where we were from—and one from Sweden, who had built this house. “Two good boys,” she said. And, that they stayed there for two weeks, then some days after, these “two bad Finnish boys” came around and vandalized the house. Then this guy living there, with two friends, reconstructed it and he moved in and had been living there ever since. He had installed a heater and mattresses to keep the chill out—because it was like 15 below Celsius. Super cold. And lots of snow. It was extremely inspiring to see that you could contribute and make this practical graffiti thing—so we just wanted to continue doing it.
Did you talk to the guy living there?
He only spoke Finnish, so we wrote him a letter with some questions. But he only answered with one word. He was an old man in his 50s or 60s with a big beard.
Where was he living before?
“Elsewhere,” he said. Anyway, we have been doing this sort of stuff ever since. Building small asylums. This [pulls out a photograph] is beneath the Copenhagen central station. We did this in March 2003.
Why the Central Station?
There is a nice buzz around central stations in general. Then again, poor people and the alternative cultures are forced into the periphery of the cities, so we just wanted to some how reclaim the center of the city. Probably the main reason is [that] so much [is] happening, especially in the center station. You can sit there for hours and just look at people—people traveling, people hanging out and people begging. It’s just an inspiring environment.
Also, we both have a history of doing graffiti, so the train tracks are already close to us, so to speak. We started running around on the tracks, looking for holes and forgotten rooms. Eventually we found this room beneath the Central Station, just next to track number 12. We had the train running on the other side of the wall there. The ceiling was super high, probably around eight meters high. We figured it could be nice to make a hidden room inside the room, like a clandestine loft—so we started looking for material. We didn’t want to pay for anything. We didn’t pay for anything [for the house] in Finland, either. I think we paid for nails then we either found everything or shoplifted it. So, we found everything we needed around the Central Station and on the tracks.
Do you have power in there?
Yes. We found a plug at the station and we [used] a long extension cord, so we had power. We wore this DSB (Danish Train Company) worker wear, so nobody worried or reacted to us walking on the tracks carrying arms full of wood.
Where did you get the DSB outfit?
Just looking around in the yards. Itso has a good memory, and had been looking for that stuff for years.
When the house [was] done, you entered from beneath, we constructed this sort of ladder on the wall with bolts. We found these old mailbags inside the room. We made hammocks out of them, so we had two beds in one part of the room. We had a kitchen in the other part of the room. We had a microwave and we had a stove, a fridge, a table. And we made these chairs out of scrap wood, from a sign for the train going between Stockholm and Copenhagen. We also had a radio.
Was it important to use these recognizable things from around the station?
Yes. We didn’t want to pay for anything, and its nice to say that it’s from the Central Station as well. For example, the table [was] a time schedule for the trains. We had all these pictures on the wall ‘cause we were taking portraits of people passing by and people that were hanging out—junkies shooting up, people looking for recyclables, the hot dog vendor, travelers and homeless people. Like the “penguin.” He was sitting behind this vending machine every night, really well dressed, just having his nose sticking out of the jacket. On the weekends, people just fall asleep there after they have been out in the city partying.
During the period when we were working on the house, we heard noises from the streets. [There was a] metal plate on one of the walls and we figured it would be some sort of ventilation shaft that we could perhaps crawl through to get a glimpse of the sun. But when we removed it, we had this grated window out to the street. So we were just sitting there for hours and hours just watching people passing by.
However, it was torn down some months ago. It was there for four years. We were going there on and off. Itso referred to it as a sailor’s home. And that’s what it was. It was really cold in the winter, but nice in the summer time. They had been reconstructing the Central Station, and they found it. Now it’s just a construction site.
“Graffiti writers are such fundamentalists with tons of Do’s and Don’t's…I don’t hang out too much with graffiti writers.”
How accessible was the house?
We had two different entrances. One was just crossing the tracks, another way was, we found this old door in the street about 20 meters away from the house, and we managed to drill the lock and get it open. We could go in and out from that door, which was convenient, because we didn’t have those DSB vests all the time. If the train drivers see you running on the track they will call the cops and the cops have their station just 30 seconds away. One time I was spotted running on the tracks, and Itso was coming two minutes behind me. He saw that the cops were on the tracks looking, but they still couldn’t find the house.
After this project, I was really into doing hidden stuff in cities. To get the full picture you have to know that Stockholm, where I’m from and where I do some of my work, is having this idea of becoming the cleanest city in the world. Like the new Singapore or something. There is an instant graffiti removal program and a zero tolerance towards “uglifying” in general. It is quite scary. How ever, surpressed cultures often seem to find clandestine stategies on how to survive. This is where I work from. More and more is getting removed, and you get so claustrophobic in the city, like all the good stuff is disappearing. But if you do stuff that is hidden, then you create some sort of curiosity of the concealed. I think that the mental space is getting bigger and bigger. People’s fantasies are so powerful.
Is it important that what you are doing falls under the title of “graffiti?”
My identity is coming from the graffiti movement. It’s basically the same—working outside, doing stuff illegally in the streets that is communicating. It’s not following the grid. It is creating alternatives for people. I think it’s funny that graffiti is considered to be destructive. When graffiti reached Sweden, people didn’t consider it to be destructive at all. People were really positive about it. But then the media created this idea that it’s bad. And that spray paint is really bed. Even putting up posters is ok, because people don’t really consider it to be that destructive.
I think it’s easier to reach people by using alternative strategies. I still love doing tags, but it’s nice to widen it a little bit.
Have you received negative criticism from the graffiti world about not using traditional methods?
Graffiti writers are such fundamentalists with tons of Do’s and Don’t's… I don’t hang out too much with graffiti writers.
What other projects have you worked on?
I can show you this house from Berlin. This is Berlin Ostbahnhof, one of the biggest train stations. This is in the eastern part of the city. Next to the train station is the river Spree that runs through the city. If you’ve been to Berlin, you’ve seen that there are construction sites all over the city. So it was pretty obvious to us that we could use this material, because it’s all around, and it’s made for building stuff. We are both bike lovers, so we were scavenging and looking for stuff in bike stores, and getting stuff for free. We [found] like hundreds and hundreds of bike tubes that were put in the trash.
Me and Bajki, who I did this with, chose this place because it was a no man’s land until ’89 when the Berlin wall was torn down. The wall was just running next to this place. Actually, there is a piece of the wall still standing in this neighborhood.
We had to build in the nighttime, and this was January, so it was really cold. Every day, we were standing there waiting for the workers to go away from work. When they were gone, we could go in there and work. It was the same idea with this house that it would cost nothing. For example, we made beds out of inner tubes. We built it to blend in with the surroundings, on the edge of the river. People didn’t realize that they were walking out on top of a house. There was a hatch in the ceiling, you entered by climbing down.
What about the boat?
So, here are some photos of a boat I did. I really wanted to build a collapsible boat. I was looking at photos of boats that are collapsible, that were built lately—and they were really slick and built from expensive material. I wanted to use basic material, like wood and metal. I found this really fine looking boat in and old photo dated 1875, and I more or less just copied it with the material I had. I made this collapsible skeleton. I wanted to make it collapsible because I wanted to go down the manholes in the streets in Stockholm and paddle those paths. There are so many different channels in Stockholm. There is sewage, which is really bad to go in, but there are also these channels for rainwater [that] just stretches below for miles and miles.
A big part of your work is documenting what you do and publishing it.
That comes from the graffiti background, documenting your stuff because you know it’s going to disappear. If you do stuff outside, it could disappear in an hour.
I’m just into communication. But I don’t want to tell the whole story. I want the city to be bigger, and unpredictable, as in mental space. What I like least about art is that it’s so fancy and so expensive. I want to tell people about stuff, but I don’t want to do so by selling expensive photos or paintings. So, I do these books instead. I just think it’s nice to spend time doing your stuff. And I have lots of time.
Do you have a job?
From time to time I do stuff to get money. But I haven’t been working for a year and a half now.
