Other Projects
The Lionheart’s Club
In 2022, I initiated the 'The Lionheart's Club', a creative writing program at Anno’s One Fine Day Art Centre in Nairobi, Kenya. The art centre is situated in Kibera, one of Africa’s biggest urban slums, and offer underprivileged kids a chance to express themselves creatively, especially through dance. The creative writing program, which includes reading for the smaller children and writing activities for the bigger ones, provides the children with hope and empowerment through fiction and story telling. In 2019-2021, I lived permanently in Nairobi, but repeated covid-lockdowns prevented the initiation of the program until recently.
Translation of ‘We Crossed a Bridge and it Trembled – Voices from Syria”
The Arab Spring became a long winter in Syria where the civil war lasted for more than ten years. Some years ago, I encountered Wendy Pearlman’s book that curates accounts from the protests, the repression they met, the civil war, and the escape across the Mediterranean. It is both a hopeful, humorous, cruel, and tragic work that gives the stage to the Syrians themselves. I decided to translate the work, but no publishing house engaged. When a publishing finally came along, we were not able to raise the necessary funds. Therefore, unfortunately, the book has never been published in Danish.
The exhibition ‘Two Painting Friends: Børge L. Knudsen & Viggo Tuxen’
In January-February 2018, I co-organized an exhibition in Roskilde Kunstforening of paintings by my grandad Børge L. Knudsen and his good friend, the painter Viggo Tuxen. My grandad’s painting career took off in 1937 when he won the Danish Academy’s little gold medal and experienced great success exhibiting. In 1951, he and my family moved to Paris, and in 1956 to Southern France, where he experienced some initial success as a painter. Later, he engaged himself in a lifelong, auto-didactic research project, the recreation of the renaissance violin. The exhibition was well attended.
Series of Public Talks on the Russian Revolution
‘All Power to the Soviets!’ the battle cry sounded in 1917, when the Russian Revolution culminated with the Bolshevik’s taking of power. To commemorate the hundredth anniversary, I organized four public talks in the Literature House in Copenhagen. The talks were about the significance of the revolution for society in Russia, the construction of the Soviet Man (“Homo Sovieticus”), and Russian literature, culture and art, as well as how it affected Danish destinies.
Organizing Precarious Employed Researchers at the University of Copenhagen
When employed at the Saxo Institute, at the University of Copenhagen, I took the initiative in 2016 to organize the Postdocs at the Faculty of Humanities. The initiative became a spark that started a prairie fire. In the following year, the activities grew to include all precarious researchers, the biggest category of researchers employed at the university, but often not seen or heard by management or unions. My own temporary position ended so I eventually handed over the initiative to other skilled colleagues who took it over and ensured that this employee group became represented and more influential, although it still lives a precarious life.
Det Ny Clarté
In 2006, I took the initiative to form the leftwing magazine Det Ny Clarté [The New Clarté], which revived an old, mostly non-partisan leftwing intellectual tradition in Denmark. The magazine came out in a printed version for almost a decade, the first two years with me as the editor.
