Birdhouses

I often get asked, ‘What’s up with the birdhouses?’ Before I made trolls, I was doing street art, and before I did street art, I painted graffiti. One day, I was hanging out with my friend Christoffer in his apartment. He was like me, not the best technical graffiti writer among our friends, and gained his respect by doing a lot of wild stuff like painting trains and other more daredevil stuff. While I was sitting there with him, rolling a joint on a piece of paper, I noticed the Danish Railway logo on it. I read further and saw that it was a fine of almost 1 million kroner. Christoffer explained that he had gotten a sentence and now had to pay this huge fine for graffiti. This episode made me realize that this also could happen to me. I didn’t paint graffiti for the sake of graffiti; I did it because it was fun, exciting, creative, something to do with my friends, and a great adventure.

At that time, I was working in a warehouse, and at the warehouse, they threw out all these plywood pallets every day. So, I started collecting them until I had a couple of hundred plywood boards. My grandmother always fed the birds outside her window and I thought it would be nice to make something that had a purpose – and then, over two weeks, I made 250 birdhouses and brought them on tour with my rap band and hung them up all over Denmark. I figured no one would call the police on me if I just put up birdhouses, but it would still allow me to do alot of the things I liked about graffiti : being creative, expressing myself, going on a mission, and doing art in the public space.

From that day on, I didn’t do graffiti in the night anymore. I put birdhouses up in the middle of the day, brought the birdhouses on the trains around the country, and the train staff helped me carry them into the train. At some point, while I was climbing up in an electric pole putting up another birdhouse, a policeman came by and gave me a chocolate milk and a banana and said thank you for the nice work. Birdhouses became my first big recycled public sculptural project. I must have done over 5000 pieces by now. It’s in my logo, and I still put birdhouses up today.

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