Mikkel Bille - Homely Atmospheres and Lighting Technologies in Denmark

Series Editors: Rosie Cox and Victor Buchli

This exciting new series responds to the growing interest in the home as an area of research and teaching. Highly interdisciplinary, titles feature contributions from across the social sciences, including anthropology, material culture studies, architecture and design, sociology, gender studies, migration studies, and environmental studies. Relevant to undergraduate and postgraduate students as well as researchers, the series will consolidate the home as a field of study.

Living with Light

Mikkel Bille

First published 2019 by Bloomsbury Academic

Published 2020 by Routledge
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Copyright Mikkel Bille, 2019

Mikkel Bille has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.

For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. vii constitute an extension of this copyright page.

Series design by Clare Turner

Cover image: Federica Giusti on Unsplash

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

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A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

ISBN 13: 978-1-350-05718-0 (hbk)

Series: Home
Typeset by Refine Catch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Many people have inspired and shaped my thinking about light over the years. Among these are Victor Buchli, who encouraged my early writings on illumination, and the collaboration with Tim Flohr Srensen, which fundamentally shaped my approach to luminosity. Also acknowledged are the many people who have commented on the manuscript or chapters, and discussed ideas in this book; in particular I would like to thank Andreas Bandak, Bettina Hauge, Casper Ebbensgaard, Tim Edensor, Jonas Larsen, Sarah Pink, Siri Schwabe, Tim Flohr Srensen, and Pernille Wiil.

The main part of this book was written during a three-month visiting fellowship at the Demand Centre at Lancaster University, where I thank Elizabeth Shove and Gordon Walker for providing such a memorable stay. Here Mette Kragh-Furbo, Stanley Blue, Torik Holmes, Noel Cass, Janine Morley, Yolande Strengers, and others affiliated gave constructive comments on my work in progress. Also, discussions with Don Slater during a visiting fellowship at LSE have been much appreciated.

Selected parts of have been published in Bille, M. (2013). Luminous atmospheres: Energy politics, climate technologies, and cosiness in Denmark. Ambiances. International Journal of Sensory Environment, Architecture and Urban Space.

Funding for my research has been provided by the Danish Council for Independent Research (Everyday life of Light, 20102013), the Carlsberg Foundation (Light Culture conference in 2015), and the Velux foundation in the final stages (Living with Nordic lighting, 20182021).

The home is where people are made and undone. As life is increasingly seen as precarious, fluid, mobile and globalized, there is a growing interest in the home: what it is, what it means to various groups of people, how it constitutes them and how it relates to other spheres of life both in the present and in the past. Home is both physical and metaphorical, local and national, a place of belonging and exclusion. It is at the heart of the most seemingly mundane spaces and experiences the site of quotidian activities such as eating, washing, raising children and loving. Yet it is precisely the purportedly banal nature of the home that masks its deep importance for the underlying assumptions that structure social and political life. Home reveals the importance of routine activities, such as consumption, to highly significant and urgent wide- ranging issues and processes such as the maintenance of and challenges to global capitalism and our relationship to the natural environment.

Among academic writers home is increasingly problematized, interrogated and reconsidered. Long understood as an axis of gender inequality, home is also seen as a site; a space of negotiation and resistance as well as oppression, and a place where such relationships are undone as well as made. As a topic of study, it is the natural analytical unit for a number of disciplines, with relevance to a wide range of cultural and historical settings. The home is probably one of the few truly universal categories upon which an interdisciplinary programme of research can be conducted and which over recent years has resulted in a distinctive analytical category across disciplines, times and cultures.

This book series offers a space to foster these debates and to move forward our thinking about the home. The books range across the social and historical sciences, drawing out the cross- cutting themes and interrelationships within writings on home and providing us with new perspectives on this intimate space. While our understanding of home is expansive, and open to interrogation, it is not unbounded. In honing our understandings of what home is, this series aims to disturb and it goes beyond the domestic including sites and states of dispossession and homelessness and experiences of the unhomely.

Living with light

It is an autumn evening in Denmark, the sun is setting, and Cecilia is tidying her place. She makes sure there is no clutter, and that refreshments and sweets are ready for her friends, who are about to arrive. It is fairly common in Denmark to have friends visiting ones home, compared to countries with warmer weather and a more vibrant restaurant, pub or caf culture. Many people in Denmark make great effort to orchestrate a homely atmosphere that is just right for a successful social gathering. Candy, cake, candlelight, music, alcohol, tea and coffee are material props that help to make people feel at ease; at least this is the idea. Cecilia, like other Danes, puts a lot of effort into arranging her home with design objects, and, if space allows, she creates different spaces within rooms for different situations: a reading spot; a relaxing sofa arrangement; a dinner section, etc. With such emphasis on atmosphere, materiality and presentation of self, the home in Denmark is an important place for social interaction and forging identity (Hjer & Vacher 2009; Philipsen 2013; Winther 2005, 2006).

In Cecilias home, two unusually luminous ceiling lamps are lit (one seen in ). Reaching for the light switch on the wall is one of her most common, unconscious, bodily acts, as is the switching on of the pendant lamp above the dinner table, located just next to the kitchen, which spreads a dimmed, glare- free light. This is where she assumes and wishes the guests will sit on arrival. She similarly turns on the two pendant lamps above the sofa arrangement at the other end of the room, even though they will not sit there until later in the evening. The light in the reading spot is, however, not turned on. She stages the lighting in this way to create an atmosphere she calls