Ambrosius Fjord [Jens Jørgen Thorsen]

CO-RITUS was the first attempt to get rid of the spectator in the creative process through transferring him into a participator and thus attacking the consumerist structure of the actual society and artisitic and urbanistic life. It was an attempt to base activities on folklore creativity.

The first CO-RITUS manifestations were organised in Copenhagen and Sweden in 1962 by situationists from the Second Internationale Situationniste. But the theory was elaborated in the CO-RITUS manifesto of 1961.

Among the experiments we shall mention:

THE FIRST CO-RITUS CONCERTO AND MANIFESTATION. The start was made by leading the visitors into an empty room. All kinds of materials were presented to them and the next fourteen days followed with collective spontaneous activity by all visitors, poem-reading by the people in the streets near by, mutual music. And the end was the attempt of conquering the inner town of Copenhagen to be a creative field for the people instead of the architects and their brothers the businessmen. This was brutally stopped by the police. In this last event participated among others the SPUR Group from Munich.

THE FOURTH CO-RITUS Concerto in Uppsala1963 for four hundred vistors, empty beer cans, garbage-organs, five film projectors, jazzbands, swedish double trumpets, holowers, car-horn organs, wandering collage and spontaneous public. The public started dancing, painting , building and working on the huge movable collage among huge piles of empty cans while others formed groups for playing or acting on the orders given by the film-projectors. This event was made in order to muck the 800 year jubilee of the archbishopdom of Uppsala and the christianisation of Scandinavian culture.

THE SPIRAL LABYRINTH, Malmo Town Hall. Quite a series of situationist labyrinthes have failed. The Spiral Labyrinth in the Malmo Town Hall combined the spiral and the labyrinthic possibilites of being both finished and unfinished. The visitor's work in completing the Labyrinth was stopped by the town hall authorities.

THE 12TH CO-RITUS MANIFESTATION, 1965. Set up in the most crowded street in Copenhagen this manifestation toppled totally the police forming a feast for more than 3,000 people, folk musicians, painters and musicians. A huge audience-made collective painting formed a barricade across the narrow walking street until the crowd marched towards Copenhagen police station in order to free an arrested demonstrator. He was immediately set free. Later the demonstrators stormed the Ministry Of Culture but found the doors shut.

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