There is a certain smell of rust and welding in this smithery, where there are only three people. And all three of them are women.
This morning Linnea was woken up by the snoring of her boyfriend, making her blow a fuse. Yet, now, her hands are quick and confident when forging into a metal piece the words “I love you (even when you snore)”. They make these signs for tourists to have something small to buy on their quick visit. She stoutly hits the sign with her ball-peen hand hammer, soon becoming slightly impatient. “The more you write, the more heat comes on it. You don’t want to make too big signs because they will bend. It doesn’t have to be really straight. I don’t really measure that much.”
Finishing writing “Nude Bar” on another metal plate, her hands unwittingly begin to search for the cigarette pack through the pockets of her worn-out Carhartt coverall. She doesn’t find it there, but in the corner of one of the worktables, below a notebook with muddy pages. She takes both the cigarette pack and the notebook on the concrete patch in front of the workshop. After lighting one, she starts brainstorming ideas, writing down other expressions or words that she could forge. From time to time, she looks up to see who’s passing on the street, and if there is a local, they would greet each other and maybe even have a talk on the run. Only now a tractor randomly passes on the side road. “Random? Nah, that’s just Charlie.”
Kvindesmedien, which in Danish means “Women’s Blacksmith”, is a smithery run and owned by women, and sometimes, with the help of some men. It’s located in Christiania, a commune of a thousand residents, born in 1971, when a group of squatters took over the abandoned military base in Denmark’s capital, Copenhagen. They made use of the large space by setting up a community independent of the government, based off, one would say, idealistic “hippy” views.
Though situated in Copenhagen, the residents do not consider themselves part of the city, living according to their own set of rules, outside of the laws of Denmark. In 2007, the National Heritage Agency filled protection status for some of the historic military buildings now in Christiania, and after some sharp negotiations, residents of Christiania agreed to collectively set up a fund to formally purchase the land, despite their visions naturally opposed to the idea of ownership. The community made its first payment in July 2012, the squatters officially becoming legal landowners.
Today, Christiania is known, among others, for its unique street art, comprehensive recycling, and Pusher Street, where dealers who wear black masks sell illegal cannabis on makeshift stands. But all of this can and will vanish as soon as someone would shout “Ost,” which means “cheese” in Danish (a signal for police raids, which, despite being a regular occurrence for years now, have failed to stop the illegal trade). You would not have a chance to see their hands briskly packing every trace of an illegal trade, because they have already disappeared and the street is empty and quiet, besides the lazy chirping of the birds.
Linnea first came to Kvindesmedien as a tourist, together with her daughter. “It wasn’t like this back then. It was more… weird art and stuff.” After she was done with her education, she returned and started working at Kvindesmedien when only three women were working there, the owners Charlotte, Gitte and Dorte. She was used to working in bigger companies, between people wearing serious faces and having serious conversations. Here, it was different.
“Oh, let’s have a day where we just make art,” someone in the smithy would shout.
“Yeah! What should we do?”
“I don’t know! Let’s just see what happens if we weld something!”
While working here, she got married, she got divorced, and soon she found herself looking for a place to live. That’s when one of her colleagues asked her if she wanted to move in, “up there.” It was a building just tall enough for one to see the roof of it through the large, dusty workshop’s windows. But if you glance through that window, it’s more likely you would first notice a tall, peculiar tower. It was built when Christiania was not yet Christiania, but a military base, and a couple of years ago it was falling apart at the top. That’s when Linnea’s neighbor, Thomas, put up the scaffolding saying, “Let’s do something fun.” Now, at night, a red light at the very top of it shows Linnea her way home from afar. “I remember reading about it in the newspapers here and I was like ‘Fucking hippies building a lighthouse.’” And Linnea laughs, because in her heart, she loves it, and she thinks it’s beautiful.
At the back of the workshop, there is a shared wall with multiple window doors, and behind them people working their fingers to the bone at the bike shop and workshop called “Christiania Bikes.” Just as Kvindesmedien, they had gone out of space and recently expanded their work area. Both workshops are quite busy and occasionally you can see people with bright faces and big smiles, sweeping from Christiania Bikes to Kvindesmedien, and from Kvindesmedien to Christiania Bikes. Christiania Bikes is known for, well, the Christiania Bike. Also known as a cargo bike, it has a big box mounted parallel over the two front wheels, and one wheel at the back. You can see people carrying all sorts of things in it, from furniture to kids or simply groceries. Linnea takes her bright-colored box bike everywhere, unless in a hurry. “When I pass something and somebody is throwing anything out, like firewood and stuff, then I can just pick it up and put it in the bike and continue. Also, if I go to the recycle station and there are really nice tables and chairs… I can just go ‘bloop’”, she says, making the gesture of throwing a ball into the box of her bike. Old enough to be one of the first models of its kind, she got it for free, but it was in terrible condition. “This is only like three and a half thousand [Danish Krones, ~470 Euro] you would get I think if you would sell it. So, not that expensive.” The bike needed fixing at first, and then some more. Linnea would go to the boys from the Christiania Bikes in that regard, but they would be busy, and Linnea would have to wait endlessly for her bike to get a fix.
“Okay, then can you just show me?” said Linnea after being postponed once again.
From that moment, she and the boys spent a lot of nights over drinking beer and fixing bikes, until she learned how to do it herself. She thought it was not that difficult.
Yet today the bike needs one more fix as it has started to make noises. “I know how to fix it. I just have been lazy. Also, because I made a very quick fix last time. I was like “Okay, I know this is not the right way but it’s going to hold up for a couple of months”. And it does. It works. But just not very good.”
Until then, the bike shines in April’s sunlight. It is painted in a sloppy way, with a dark blue beneath an electric, neon green, pink, and orange by no other than her seven-year-old daughter. Somebody left a box of spray paints in the back of her house, and Linnea gave it to her: “Enjoy yourself.” It turned out “a bit happier than the brown color,” and while nicer, people steal bikes if they are too pretty. After a while, Linnea puts out her cigarette after looking at her bike for a moment and laughs. “It’s called Betty.”
She quit working at Kvindesmedien four and a half years ago and instead started to drive her own garbage truck through Christiania for a living. She wanted more flexibility in her life, and “maybe a day off to have time to drink coffee with my friends and stuff.” If she had the chance, she would book a holiday somewhere warm. But until then, she enjoys coming every now and then to what became her family. “I became freer, but more broker,” says she with a wide smile both on her face and in her voice.
While outside the quietness of the morning is broken only by the distant barking of the locals’ dogs, inside, between hammer blows, Forårsdag by Anne Linnet, a Danish rock song runs in the background, Linnea humming along with it. It’s not a song played by the radio, but by Charlotte’s computer.
Wearing a black, loose-fitting blouse below her coverall, a jade green scarf around her neck and with the blueness of the eyes more obvious from the mascara, Charlotte talks over the phone in her small office, arranging meetings and pick-ups, orders, and payments. Twenty-seven years ago, she and her friend, Gidde, weren’t yet blacksmiths, but they were training and teaching themselves to become one. The two of them started a workshop of fixing things in the early days of Christiania, when the town was still in the building phase.
Back then, their work, besides taking place in a different place to today, paid less. At a time where it was not common to see women doing the job of a smithy, Charlotte started doing it and Kvindesmedien was born, after being a gardener for five years before, and having other interests such as painting or sailing. “We had a lot of newspapers, magazines, people who wanted to make films about us. People started to know about us. And then I said to my friend I think it’s very important that we make a normal company, because otherwise we cannot live from that. So, we did that. And then it was learning by doing.” Despite being poor at first, they made all sorts of things such as candlesticks, sculptures, furniture for cafes, restaurants, bars, or private people. “Even if there was little money, we had a lot of fun and funny things to do.”, Charlotte says. Now there are over one hundred people that did their practice at Kvindesmedien, being trained to see if they wanted to be a blacksmith. Even their boys when they were kids would bring their friends and work in the workshop. “I think I know all the girls that have been into some kind of blacksmith work in Denmark” says Charlotte and she is right because all Danes can see her on the TV in all kinds of shows and news nowadays. Sometimes, when there are a lot of women in the smithy, they have smaller projects, but when they have “the big guys,” then they head to more heavy-duty jobs, such as building glasshouses, where one would need that “extra muscle.” “There are women here now, but before that I said, ‘Now it’s good to take some men in, because we can also be blah, blah, blah, blah.” One of the “wild projects” they had was a prototype for the Swedish artist, Peter Johansen, which would consist of a spinning six meters high house. But for now, she’s working on three big sculptures for Copenhell, a heavy metal festival held annually in Copenhagen.
When she moved in here, if one was living in Christiania, one was working in Christiania. If not, one would have to move out. And that was her luck, because in Christiania there was always something to do, to learn or to weld. “There are a lot of creative people here, and some of them can’t afford to go out and build a café, like we do here.” Charlotte says. They do a lot of free jobs for the other residents, while their main customers come from outside of Christiania. “In the early beginning when we were here, we were really trying to get people into buying things from us or making things for us and we had to really talk a lot to them because they were so scared if they were gonna be smashed by some people here, some hippies, or of all that police situation and all those stories about Christiania. So, we’ve been inviting a lot of fantastic people to come in here and made things for them.”
Charlotte has her own meaning of Christiania. She reads something about Christiania in the newspapers, she feels just the same as the author who wrote it. She thinks it’s too much “with all this Pusher Street” and the relationship between Freetown and the government, full of never-ending tensions because of the illegal cannabis trade that has been going on now for years. One cannot do anything without talking to others first, so, Christianits, the residents of Christiania, are meeting weekly to decide everything together regarding their own commune. “We talk too much. There’s sometimes a meeting and we’re twenty and we’ve been talking for six hours and we’re not agreeing about anything. I think we could go out and build something instead and clean some places where there is garbage or do something else. I like to do things with my hands and not so much sit through a meeting.” Charlotte says, and Linnea agrees with her, as she finds them “very, very boring.” This week, she oversees the laundry service, meaning she must wash all the towels from the building she lives in. Today there were three loads of towels. “Dude, what are you doing with all these towels?” says Linnea annoyed.
Being a blacksmith is demanding work, especially if you’re going to have company with someone else, because it’s not an effortless way to earn money. With every idea comes a new sculpture, and for every product, besides money, she gets a lot of energy to make the next ones. Even so, if she would get the chance to change anything it would be to “make some better prices. Yeah…Always” says Charlotte laughing.
On the largest table in the workshop, Michelle, a shy blonde girl in her twenties, is packing kitchen fronts for “a badass big kitchen.” She sluggishly folds the massive cardboard boxes, while checking from time to time the clock hanging on the wall. It’s less than an hour until it’s four o’clock, the time she is done for today. “It’s a shitty job. I feel like I’m working in a package company right now.”
She had been in the military for three years before realizing she wanted to do something else. Her dad being a blacksmith and her being “really bad at going to school” led Michelle into trying to do something with her hands. “I liked it and then I ended up here,” she says laughing, “not because it was the dream all my life.”
While she does not want to make new yorker walls for more than two weeks and would rather work on bigger projects that require more time instead of small things that are “really boring”, making art is most of the time a fun process. “Sometimes I’m just like ‘are people buying this shit?’ It’s really, we are like what the fuck?”
An unexpected commission showed up when she was still a new one. A “crazy guy” sent them a long email of how he is seeing a girl he wants to be dominated by. He wanted a branding iron. “I think it’s too much to get all her letters on the ass, so we should start with the first one,” he would write. He wanted them to make the letter “D” in metal where she could put in on his ass and burn it. “I was like, what the fuck is going on? And then “Are we gonna make this, right?” “No” the two stony-faced guys that worked there back then would say. “I wanna see when he picks it up, what kind of guy he is, how he looked, he was so fun. But it was so disgusting, he wrote all details of how he wanted it and think therefore was a fetish because he could just say ‘ok I want this’ without telling all these details. It was really, really weird.”
After a while, a tall man with black sunglasses, white hair and beard and a short, blonde, blue-eyed woman, together with their daughter, a freckled girl, with her hair caught in a ponytail show up. They keep Michelle company while she’s doing the easy work of her day, putting a smile every now and then on her otherwise serious face.
The man is in fact her father. He came with his girlfriend and Michelle’s best friend. She laughs when she says that their parents are a couple: “you know, they are from the countryside, so it’s like everyone fucks each other. It’s really funny. So now we’re kind of sisters now.” They asked Michelle if she was okay with this. „I was like „are you ok with this?” I’m fine, it’s not my relationship, so don’t worry.”
Michelle moved from the countryside to Copenhagen. For her dad it came as a surprise that she started going dumpster diving, because “you don’t do it in the countryside, but here people are like “oh, we have to take care about the earth” and it’s even more like that in here”. I was like, ‘are people doing this shit in Copenhagen?’ They were like ‘yeah, yeah, it’s a thing’ and I was like ‘OK, let me try'”. She would find recommendations of various places on Facebook groups from other dumpster divers, jump in the car with her best friend and go there. “I would never take meat, like it’s disgusting. But if it’s inside the package, I’m just like “yeah, why not?” like if I can save money on this, then hell yeah. It’s really nice.” She thinks dumpster diving is a good idea for people who don’t have so much money or are homeless. “I’ve been homeless too.” says she cheerfully. “It was a culture thing. I think a lot of people did that.”
A pile of packages is now covering a large part of the table. Michelle stops for a moment and wipes her nose, noticing the rays of sunlight that were almost nonexistent in the past month. “I have to really drink a beer right now; it’s been totally beer weather.”
She picks up a paper with some guidelines sketched in pencil by Charlotte, walks confidently to the worktable and moves around the paper before saying:
“Can you see what it is that I have to make? Cause I can’t. Like what is this?!”
Throughout the day, all sorts of people pass one after another in the smithery. Parents with their kids, young boys and girls, elderly, and sometimes, one of them would break out that they know them from the television. Once, BBC came all the way from London film them. At that time, though named Kvindesmedien, which means “Women’s Blacksmith,” there were not only women working there, but also a couple of men. So, they asked Michelle if she could talk to them, and Michelle said “no” before they could even finish their sentence. “I was totally new, and I was like my English is so bad, I don’t want to be on a TV in London with my bad English.” But they still asked her why she works at Kvindesmedien. “I don’t know what to do with my life so I’m just trying something” Michelle said, and suddenly three cameras were pointed at her face, and she, all sweaty and breathing heavily. All that was on her mind were the hopes she would not appear on people’s television in London. On the other hand, Charlotte would talk and talk, and then talk some more. “She’s so used to it, I’m just like ‘no.’ She’s also a professional and I’m not. I’m just here.”
Her hands are now putting the chisels and hammers back in the box. On her right arm, just above the elbow joint, is a tattoo of a Tuborg bottle. Her dad, who “doesn’t eat food, just drinks beers,” asked her, because she has so many “shitty tattoos,” why she does not have a tattoo with his name “or something?” “I’ll get this.” But in the meantime, on the tall wall, the hands of the clock strike four o’clock and her eyes are eager to catch them right on time. Taking her gloves off, she smiles. “I think I’m gonna have my beer with my dad.”
