In Copenhagen’s Western Borough - the red-light district - the drug user’s everyday reality is one of criminalisation, marginalisation and resettlement due to gentrification. In this highly charged social field, the artist Kenneth Balfelt in 2002 organised and designed a temporary injection room at Halmtorvet, a square in the process of being smartened up with cafés and “drop sculptures”. The injection room was a functional prototype that existed for sixteen days as a meeting point for debate, as the police did not allow actual injections. The project brought about a wide-ranging media debate. and the question of the legalisation of injection rooms was put to the vote in the Danish Parliament in June 2003 as a direct result of the lobbying efforts of Balfelt and his collaborators. However, the proposal was not accepted, and Danish street drug users are still reduced to injecting under circumstances threatening to both life and health.

Lars Bang Larsen: Could you explain a bit about the actual organisation of the “shooting gallery”?

Kenneth A. Balfelt: I was invited to participate in the public art project ´Contemplation Room’, which dealt with city usages. I decided to create an injection room for mainline addicts, and began extensive research where I talked to drug organisations, especially those that have an interest in injection rooms, be it negative or positive. I also talked to drug users and their organisations, which became an important part of the project, as did a number of other support bodies. Even the police got involved, although in the end they forbade people to use the space for injection.
The purpose was to create a faceted public debate about injection rooms. At the beginning I didn’t intend to work for their legalisation, but that’s how it developed. I succeeded in getting press coverage that activated the politicians. A bill for the legalisation of injection rooms was put to the vote by the opposition, but outvoted by the right-wing government coalition. Of course, I didn’t start the debate about injection rooms myself; it has been there for 5-6 years. I only revitalised it with a physically present contribution to the debate, as well as acting as a facilitator for others to air their viewpoints.

LBL: Why was it necessary for you to conceive of this project as an artistic one, and not as a form
of civic protest or social activism? What is the specific artistic effort in the injection room?

KAB: The artistic position offers a standpoint that is different from other positions in society. To be free of political guidelines imposed by a council, a boss, an education with a limited scope and the resultant normative way of practising, limiting collegial relations, etc. Specifically, the implementation of an injection room was something social workers, activists, nurses, politicians, etc. had not come up with in the six-year-long struggle for legalisation. I also used the artistic position to design the injection room not just according to principles of functionality – we carefully investigated the needs of mainline users and health demands of nurses – but also by using interior design to signal acceptance of the drug user, thereby working with representations of users that are not negative. The project was continued as a political lobbying process. At meetings with members of the Danish Parliament and the Ministry of Health, I carefully constructed a position where my only concern was the health and care of the drug addicts. I was somewhat transparent to these groups of officials, as they did not need to see the project through the filter of an organisation or a certain political interest, for instance.

LBL: You construct your artistic work as being free and socially different. However, even though you may not directly represent an institution or a corporation in your artistic work, you will obviously always represent the art system and the cultural construct that is artistic subjectivity.

KAB: When I talked to politicians, I only argued that I wanted to legalise injection rooms, as this saves drug addicts from getting hepatitis, HIV, being harmed by injections and dying from overdoses.
When I met with representatives of the government coalition parties and the Ministry of Health, they never questioned my position. Because they could tell I knew far more about the subject than they did; the potential problem of representing “the cultural construct that is artistic subjectivity" did not arise. That is a theoretical criticism, not one I met with during the project! There, I experienced far more relevant questions and urgent problems that I had to engage with. Something very interesting happens when I engage with real people in real situations. My position is far more relevant as a whole subject than that part of me that is seen as an artistic subject.

LBL: I have no doubts that your political work with the injection room met high ethical standards. What I would like to probe is the project’s representation of the drug users, and of your evaluation of yourself as an artist involved with social activism. You imply that, with this project, you gave voice to a group of people who normally cannot speak for themselves. This argument creates a hierarchy between you and the drug users – the idea of the victimised drug user vis-à-vis the “functional” artist / citizen / entrepreneur. To put it provocatively, do you not see the risk of "painting with people" in a project like this? Why did you not choose to establish a collective authorial body together with the drug users, rather than taking on the artistic position alone?

KAB: First of all, I was never "alone"; the press received a list with some twenty professionals working in the drug field that were involved in the project. In the injection room there were experienced nurses that the users knew and trusted, and local social workers and the drug users’ organisation were part of the project too. As for the representation of the users, I would suggest that you go and ask the drug users themselves how they felt about the project, if they felt respected or not, and how they saw their representation by the media and indirectly by my injection room. One day, a homeless guy, John, came over to me and said, "Are you the guy who did the injection room?" and gave me a big hug. With the drug users’ organisation I also started a petition for injection rooms that was later handed over to the Ministry of Health. We ran this campaign from the injection room and all of the some one hundred drug users that came and saw the room signed it. Some of them even took the petition onto the street. Basically, I think this project did more positive things for drug users than many other campaigns or media debates have. The users themselves were heard and could express their own views in the media that covered the project. I sought to use art to engage in democratic processes on the basis of the users’ needs. One of the nurses said, "It is embarrassing for our society that an artist needs to come and show us how to treat our drug addicts."
After the legalisation bill was outvoted, the debate about injection rooms died and left a lot of people disillusioned – as all good ideas do when there is total resistance from those in power. It was a natural point for me to stop my participation in the project. I left the people that work in the field with a new vision of how the democratic process can be influenced, and they can contact me for new ideas for similar projects – which some have already done.

LBL: It seems to me that much art activism – which is how I would categorise the injection room – doesn’t question its claim to social efficiency; the idea is that the possibility exists for an absolute confrontation between art activism and society. Maybe this is because art activism doesn’t consider itself to be institutionally separated from social practice. But isn’t this position a romantic one in that it in a sense presupposes its autonomy or freedom from the rest of the social body, as you also suggested in relation to your own role as an artist?

KAB: First of all, I am not sure I agree that the injection room project is activism. To me, activism is when someone uses very strong means to fulfil their ideas. I consider the project to be a different kind of contribution to the debate, or a parallel one in relation to the usual kinds of contributions. This is a discussion about the competencies of art and the way it can contribute to society; I see framing the project as activism as closing off a very important discussion. We must develop a way to talk about these issues that opens up the field and develops it as a field where a different type of knowledge is produced than elsewhere in society. If the word activism is taken out of your question, you ask if an “absolute” confrontation is possible between art and society. I believe not, exactly because it should not be absolute. We must maintain a position in society for art, one that allows for this kind of research or for “the production of non-knowledge”, as Sarat Maharaj calls it. From this position I find it very important to interact with societal problems, because I strongly believe that art could potentially be one of the fields from which more ethical and coherent solutions could be initiated. When I make “functional art” it is exactly to use non-art institutions artistically in order to engage with real problems.

 

 

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