"Getting much more than a song contest". Attempts at enacting a competitive state through project events

In the 1960s and 70s, the large Burmeister & Wain (B&W) halls on Refshale Island in Copenhagen stood as iconic symbol of the Danish industrial society (Nielsen 2004). A few decades later, in 1996, the shipyard filed for bankruptcy and the island was left almost bare for decades. Within the last 10 years however, the area situated only a few kilometers from the Town hall square and close to the increasingly popular Copenhagen harbor front has reinvented itself as a temporary site for a range of creative industries and city planning experiments. Also, it is the unconventional venue for the Eurovision Song Contest of 2014. In this paper, we explore the coming together of the ESC on Refshale Island.

This seemingly ‘out of the box’ choice of venue is described by the partnership of organizers as a creative trip up. By unraveling the connections made between ESC actors, we see how the project seeks to engage not only devoted ESC fans, but also a larger public, comprising citizens, planners and companies in and beyond Denmark. While according to relations manager at Danish Broadcasting (DR), the ESC event is to “unite and develop the Danes as well as DR”, the Refshale Island Holding Company see Copenhagen and Denmark getting “much more than a song contest” with this particular choice of venue.

We propose to explore the ESC and the choice of Refshale Island as the ESC venue as enacting a specific issue of public concern (Marres 2012), namely the competitiveness of the Danish state. We discuss the implications and consequences of organizing the event in this way, arguing that the B&W halls take part in envisioning a new kind of creative and competitive project state rooted in the cultural economy.