mem-brane ['membrem] (lat. membrana): soft, thin, pliable skin-like covering or lining; or connecting part, in an animal or vegetable body; [U] tissue of which such coverings are made fx, retina or cornea. Thin sheet witch can be set en vibration and thereby produce sound (eardrum; tympanic membrane) film, parchment, prepared skin.

by Nanna Gro Henningsen

Amager's old deserted industrial districts, Reykjavik, Copenhagen's inner and outer districts... These photographs don't show distant, exotic places (unless you consider Reykjavik exotic, and even if you do, the Reykjavik depicted here is not exotic).

They show places I know - yet don't know. I wander through the pictures, recognise and don't recognise, discover new spaces. I recognise spaces that have never existed. It's hard to get my bearings. As if in a dream the spaces change their character depending on how I focus.

The space I saw first, on closer inspection doesn't exist. It's a mirage, which still intrudes, a castle in the air. I can't tell where what is reflected is located. I am neither in nor out, I am in transit. I am a traveler without responsibility, and free too from the stigma of the voyeur, for there is no-one here to spy on, only my own indifferent state is reflected in the known and unknown, real and unreal architectonic landscapes that are filled with intentional and unintentional signs.

All architecture carries ideologies, acknowledged or not. Here, in these pictures' space and fluid partitions - in the membranes - meanings and signs are evoked in new ways. The panes; The buildings' empty, glazed eyes reveal often unfulfilled intentions, greater dreams and expectations than the buildings could ever and can ever bear. Photographed by a stranger in an obscure moment, many of the failed, insufficient attempts by the architecture to create respectability, greatness or beauty are revealed. Paradoxically, in many of the photographs, it is precisely the beauty in the doubled space of the reflection that reveals the lost cause, the futile gesture, the anachronism.