Fin de Copenhague

FIN DE COPENHAGUE

this book by the Danish Cobra artist Asger Jorn and the French philosopher Guy Debord, is the first in a series of two and was published in 1957, shortly before the authors founded the Situationist International. According to Jorn, upon arrival to Copenhagen, they stole some newspapers and magazines, got drunk and in less than 48 hours created this book. It includes 36 pages of collages, which were first printed in an “edition de-luxe of 200 copies” and bound in a compressed mass of paper. In the discourse of the Situationist International, Fin de Copenhague is usually presented as a psychogeography, not least because Guy Debord is officially named as a “technical adviser in détournement.” Without a table of content and no line of thought it seemingly represents an attack towards any rational method to convey knowledge about the city in architecture, literature, geography, history, etc. and is therefore considered as an anti-book.

This research approaches the book from a different angle, by making a comparable analysis with the actual development of the city of Copenhagen. The fact that Copenhagen´s center underwent an enormous depopulation since the implementation of the fingerplan in 1948 and the increasing appropriation of the urban space by commerce hint at Jorn´s critique on the functionalist city from the 1940s and anticipates some of the issues that Debord will raise more than a decade later in Society of the Spectacle. Therefore, the hypothesis is that the book not only relates to Debord´s and Jorn´s theories but in its representation of the environment as a range of geographic, social, political and economic dynamics but also proposes a vision of the future city as a multi-layered network in a state of constant transformation.