Jens Jørgen Thorsen

The Bauhaus Situationniste was founded by Nash and Thorsen in 1960 after Nash acquired the 200 acre farm in Drakabygget in Southern Sweden.

The idea about creating a Bauhaus Situationniste was in the air since Jorn raised the idea of a Bauhaus Imaginiste and the Group around Pinot Gallizio founded the "Centro Sperimentale" which dealt with collective spontaneous painting.

Drakabygget functioned as a total collective the first five years, everybody who wanted to have a share in the experiments could come and work, but they also without responsibility could leave as soon as they got tired of the place. Later the place was totally run by Jorgen Nash but continued to run in the same way.

Here the ideas of CO-RITUS were formed by Nash and Thorsen and the plans for the various actions were elaborated. And a free life was lived which transformed itself into a series of poetry, collective art, pamphlets, theses, posters, films, periodicals, manifestos etc.

In 1961 the German group Spur lived their one-year exile during the Bundesrepublik's case against them for attacking God and the State. And the book Spur Im Exil was edited which erected another case. A great part of the 30 experimental films which the group produced was planned within the framework of Drakabygget and a lot of other groups found an open work place here. The Swedish KRW-group, the fugitives of the Dutch PROVO, the GRUPPO SETTANTA from Italy, the group from ORESTAD EXPERIMENTAL LABORATORY, the MARUNI-group from Corsica, the Mexican Situationnistes, the JOYNES-group from the USA as well as artists and writers from Poland, Japan, France, Ireland, Canada... or in other words from practically all over the world.

Though the Bauhaus Situationniste was the first European collective its ways differed essentially from nearly all the newer ones. Nearly all the new collectives base themselves upon group marriage thus transforming the collective into sorts of pagan monasteries. The Bauhaus Situationniste on the contrary has only one goal: TO ACHIEVE FREEDOM for everybody on the place. Freedom to work, to come or leave, join or not join.