When did you first see Hestelund’s work and what drew you to it? A month later it was published as a novel. They were lying around in the exhibition space, with no name, as if the text was a part of the artwork. When I began to write I quickly realised that it would be more than four pages, and we ended up doing a book. So I asked Lea if I could do something about people working for the exhibition.

At that time I was very unsatisfied with my own job, I worked in an office. I saw these small videos on NASA’s Instagram and found it very inspiring they were so happy, they were so loyal. When I met Lea it was maybe a year before her exhibition and NASA had just chosen new astronauts. She told me that she was interested in making forms that were not really human, but still living. She was going to have her first big solo show in Copenhagen and wanted me to write something for the programme. I was contacted by an artist called Lea Guldditte Hestelund. What was your process of writing The Employees? And they talk about gravitating between attraction and repulsion about longing for ‘normality’ while wanting urgently to break away from tradition. Rosie Ellison-Balaam talks to the Danish author about the significance of Lea Gulditte Hestelund’s sculpture in her novel The Employees and what it means to treat art not as an expression of individual genius, but as a collaborative process of making sense of the world around us.

The employees olga ravn