A concrete bus shelter stands in a small clearing in the forest – too low for grownups, too big for children, as if it had fallen out of its own time. Or as if past, present, and myth had all been pressed into its layers.

The four sides of the bus shelter consist of concrete reliefs in which mysterious creatures lie alone or together, hold each other’s hands, or lie tightly curled together. A relief is neither a freestanding sculpture nor a flat image, but insists on being both at once. This quality is reflected in the figures themselves, who are neither wholly human nor wholly animal, and who express a range of ambivalent states – appearing at once anxious, friendly, unsettling, and endearing.

The work’s layer of the past begins with the Vamdrup Stone, a medieval gravestone inscribed “Here lies Ebbe’s son.” The stone left its grave site as part of a project to centralize historical knowledge in the capital, but it never made it into the collection, as it was lost in the Copenhagen fire of 1728. Olivia Rode Hvass used the story of this stone as the starting point for Path of Desire, which now stands in Deep Forest Land Art, a short stretch from Vamdrup. As if the grave of Ebbe’s unnamed son – cast out, or simply not worth mentioning? – had finally found its way home.

The creatures’ contours mimic one another across the four motifs, in what queer theorist Leo Bersani calls a ‘correspondence of forms’: a relational dynamic of visual echoes, shared aesthetic patterns that create closeness without demanding other kinds of kinship. With this gesture, the work seems to reach out to Ebbe’s son across time and invite him into a new community.

The story continues into the present with the familiar yellow bus sign, which also refers to the work’s title: path of desire points to the paths that emerge in the landscape because someone, again and again, chooses a different route than the one laid out – created by desire rather than planning or norms. The artist has covered the bus shelter with spray-painted tags and symbols that reinforce the sense of the stop as an alternative meeting place. It stirs memories of youth: trips to and from school, parties, friends, partners – especially in the provinces, where taking the bicycle is not always an option. In the middle of it all stands the name “EBBE” in screaming orange: an echo of the boy whose grave was never found.

Ebbe’s son is thus written forward into the present and into the closeness the shelter’s creatures invite – lying curled into one another in a community larger than the couple, the nuclear family, and other reproductive forms that otherwise lay claim to life’s closest relationships. Here, tenderness exists on equal footing with them – but within an excessive, branching sociality that needs no center to hold together.

— Joachim Aagaard Friis