MAPS X UFFE ISOLOTTO

Welcome to MAPS x The Artist

MAPS x THE ARTIST is a new artist-driven format in which contemporary artists working within public art bring MAPS and an understanding of the field into contemporary debate. The format is the material—and anything can happen.

Who do we create public art for? The past? Those of us living now? Future generations? Humans—or the non-human life we share the Earth with?

Visual artist Uffe Isolotto transforms MAPS’ new foyer and café into a pop-up talk show with an infinitely high ceiling, in collaboration with curator and writer Jacob Lillemose.

Jacob Lillemose is the host, and Uffe Isolotto is the guest.

The point of departure is Isolotto’s work Horizontal Cathedral, inaugurated at Aalborg University’s campus in autumn 2025. The work consists of four 12-metre-high, tree-like steel structures topped with eelgrass and solar collectors.

During the talk show, Isolotto and Lillemose explore the work’s deep time—its distant past and future—through a series of found objects. Some from the past, others from the future. Additional guests will also join the studio, each bringing personal experiences of the work’s deep time.

In other words, the evening offers an exploration of public sculpture within an expanded temporal perspective.

MAPS BAR will be open, offering snacks, beer, wine, and soft drinks. Admission also includes access to MAPS exhibitions. 

BUY YOUR TICKET HERE

About the artist: 
Uffe Isolotto (b. 1976) graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2007. His artistic practice revolves around the ways in which technological, biological, and social systems shape our present. He works across media, including sculpture, installation, digital elements, and time-based works.

A recurring motif in Isolotto’s work is the body—often presented as a composite or hybrid entity. Through these figures, he explores the boundaries between the human and the non-human, the organic and the synthetic. The works point toward a posthuman condition in which humans are increasingly entangled with their own technologies, while simultaneously experiencing a growing distance from both nature and themselves.

Uffe Isolotto has exhibited widely in Denmark and internationally, including at ARKEN Museum of Contemporary Art, Den Frie Centre of Contemporary Art, Nikolaj Kunsthal, Tranen – Space for Contemporary Art, O–Overgaden, and Malmö Konsthall. His works are part of the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Denmark and Holstebro Art Museum.

In 2022, he represented Denmark at the 59th Venice Biennale with the exhibition We Walked the Earth in the Danish Pavilion. He has also realised permanent public art projects, including at Vendsyssel Theatre in Hjørring and at AAU Campus East in Aalborg.

About host and guest Jacob Lillemose: 
Jacob Lillemose holds a PhD in Art History from the University of Copenhagen. He is an author and has written extensively on contemporary art in Danish and international media. He is the founder of the exhibition platform X AND BEYOND—now ART X BEYOND—and curated the Danish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2022. He works across disciplines to foster exchange between art and other fields of knowledge and production.

MAPS x The Artist – Edited and organised by Karina Lykkesborg

About the work Horizontal Cathedral

Imagine a building that stretches across the entire campus and, like a gigantic cathedral, towers high in the landscape. It breaks the scale of the buildings you move between and inhabit in your daily life. At the same time, it belongs to another time. Or rather: either it no longer exists—or it does not yet exist.

The only visible elements are four enigmatic metal structures standing at the edge of the campus. Made of rusted steel, they are topped with a leaf-like white crown filled with eelgrass. If you squint and focus, you can see how optical fibres, powered by solar collectors, illuminate the underside of the eelgrass—as if it were an experimental greenhouse for the seeds carried by wind and birds.

The organic, almost archetypal tree-like form of the structures suggests that this is not a building in the conventional sense. Rather, they resemble cornerstones, support structures, or platforms for an imagined cathedral. And imagination is key here, because the building does not exist—at least not physically. Instead, it exists on a grand scale within the imaginative space that Uffe Isolotto unfolds with Horizontal Cathedral.

Researchers across a wide range of disciplines—from philosophy to quantum physics—suggest that we are experiencing a crisis of imagination. As individuals and as a society, we struggle to imagine the consequences of the destructive ways in which we inhabit the planet—and therefore also struggle to imagine the actions needed to set the world on a more hopeful course. This is a crisis that art, through its speculative forms, narratives, and images, is particularly well equipped to help us address. Not alone, but as an important part of a collective of disciplines—especially those fostered at AAU.

At first glance, the title may seem paradoxical. A cathedral is not defined by its horizontal extension, but rather by its verticality. Horizontal Cathedral, however, is no ordinary cathedral, and the title should be understood metaphorically. You are invited to imagine a cathedral with both an infinitely high ceiling and an infinitely wide horizon.

In this sense, the work serves as a reminder of the value and necessity of adopting a broad perspective—in time and in space. Of using imagination to think beyond the processes and logics of everyday life. But also of allowing imagination to become the starting point for a form of “cathedral thinking,” where perspective and purpose extend beyond the present toward future generations and the world they will inhabit.

And at its core, is this not precisely what a university is? A place where research leads to new discoveries, cultivating and sowing knowledge that may benefit those generations to come.

Uffe Isolotto, Horizontal Cathedral, 2025. Foto: David Stjernholm