Shelter - Fixer room for drug users
Exhibition: Part of ‘Contemplation Room’, urban exhibition with infobase at Overgaden
Curators: Cecillie Gravesen, Lasse Johansen and Kristine Aggergård
Period: Exhibition in May-June 2002, since then the project has continued with various interventions and political actions 2002-2012
One of the major social and urban problems for citizens and businesses in Vesterbro and especially Halmtorvet is street drug users' drug fix and related rubbish. However, the problem is greatest for the drug users themselves, as they have to inject under stressful and miserable conditions, resulting in failing injections, infections and overdoses. I have therefore initiated an art project that participates, with a physical construction, in the debate on how to solve this problem. By collaborating with drug users and related organisations, architecture student Steffen Nielsen and I came up with a model of what a fix room could look like. The protective injection room is usable both functionally and in terms of health and cleaning. The shelters on Halmtorvet (from no. 7) are the physical framework for the project, where drug users today shoot up on top of the mound.
The project was a 1:1 model of what a shelter for drug users could look like. As context and symbolic site, I chose the bunker at Halmtorvet, on top of which drug users have been shooting up for 20-30 years. I used a shelter because of the double meaning of the word - protecting the population from bombs/protecting drug users from disease - knowing there are hundreds of these spaces empty and unused in our cities! The context was included and was meaningful in the work.
The Injection Room was open for 16 days and was staffed by nurses and fully functional. The aim was to contribute to the 6-year-long debate on drug treatment centres by translating all the reports, expert committees and media coverage into something physical and visual. In this way, I contributed to the debate through an aesthetic and artistic lens and in a visual language. The design also had a socio-political proposal on how the physical environment, the aesthetic, can contribute to a more dignified treatment of marginalised people.
Through a visual, physical and artistic contribution, the aim of the project was to participate in the democratic debate in the press to influence decision-makers and politicians. Through a very conscious and controlled process, we succeeded in creating a good and objective social-political debate with an aesthetic contribution.
In June 2003 and twice afterwards, the opposition led by the Social Democrats put forward a motion for the introduction of health rooms, another word for injection rooms. The parliament voted down the proposal all three times.
Having something physical and factual to relate to can give the debate on health rooms a new point of reference. One of the great opportunities in art is to give thoughts and concepts physical form, and thus convey several facets of a given issue. In order to establish fix rooms in Denmark, it must be made legal by means of a ‘4-metre law’. This means that drug addicts must be allowed to walk from the entrance door to the nurse with illegal drugs!
With such a law, like Germany, the Netherlands, Switzerland, Australia, Portugal and most recently Norway have, we are ready to establish injection rooms! In connection with the project, I was in contact with the then drug policy rapporteur for the Social Democrats, Sophie Hæstorf Andersen, MF, Martin Lidegaard, MF, Radikale Venstre, Bo Asmus Kjeldgaard, SF, Family and Labour Market Mayor, City of Copenhagen, Frank Hedegaard, SF, the City Council and a large number of institutions that work with drug users. They all wanted to realise protective injection rooms/user rooms and have either participated in the opening, the press conference or the general follow-up debate from my project.
The Protection Room was open from Saturday 25 May to 9 June 2002, daily from 16-20 and Sunday 12-14.
On 15 September 2011 there was a general election in Denmark. On 13 June 2012, the new government decides to introduce drug consumption rooms, which are both injection rooms (injecting drugs) and smoking rooms (smoking drugs).
Kenneth A. Balfelt
Visual artist