00:04
Simone Fabricius
I chose the painting Dead Wildfowl from the 17th century by Jakob Biltius.

00:10
Simone Fabricius
It's a Dutch kitchen — dark backgrounds, arched stove, and then you have the different animals, game, and birds hanging. They are dead, but they look like they're sleeping. It's a loving scene of death, and even if it sounds so grim, there is a beauty in that.

00:29
Simone Fabricius
I feel you can linger on these paintings for so long, and your gaze can really lock into certain details. And this 3D-like scene, this drama and this sense of depth, is fascinating to me.

00:45
Simone Fabricius
Since I was a child, I've always loved still-life. I have been fascinated with the technique, the compositions, and how life and death lives side by side in such a beautiful way. It's poetry. It's just incredibly beautiful.

01:12
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
My name is Tina Jøhnk Christensen, and I'm the host of Danish Originals, a podcast series created in partnership with the American Friends of the National Gallery of Denmark and the National Gallery of Denmark. Our goal is to celebrate Danish creatives who have made a significant mark in the US.

01:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Today, our guest is Simone Fabricius, a Danish creative director. Welcome, Simone.

01:36
Simone Fabricius
Thank you. It's an honor to be here.

01:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
It's an honor to have you here. So we are talking to you online. We are not in the same room. You are in New York and I'm in Los Angeles. Where are you right now and how would you describe the room that you're in so that our listeners can get a little bit of atmosphere from where you are sitting?

02:00
Simone Fabricius
Right now I'm in Greenpoint, which is the very north point of Brooklyn. It's almost touching Queens. And I'm sitting in my living room doing this because my studio can be quite echoey and loud. The room I'm sitting in, I think it's a cliché of being both Danish but also being a designer. So lots of little design objects and art, and just behind me we have a Bjørn Wiinblad poster from the '70s in Aarhus. Yeah, so that's the vibe. Very cozy. Hyggeligt.

02:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Hyggeligt is a very well-known Danish word right now. It's from Aarhus Teater. Do you have a lot of posters like that, which remind you of your Danish upbringing and your Danish roots in your apartment?

02:54
Simone Fabricius
I do have a lot of Danish posters, but I don't have them here because I don't have a lot of wall space. But I used to collect vintage Danish posters from all over. That would be old movie posters, posters from the Louisiana museum, all sorts of posters, which I have in storage right now.

03:11
Simone Fabricius
But Bjørn Wiinblad was a very significant artist for me because my parents were collecting these yearly porcelain plates that they used to hang on their walls. And I used to always get lost in the patterns and expressions and his very cartoony way of making faces, and his choice of color was always very inspiring. So that was the only poster that I picked to hang.

03:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Speaking of New York, you moved there in 2010 after a decade in Paris. What made you decide to move to New York City?

03:47
Simone Fabricius
Well, I think first of all, I've always had this deep love and fascination for New York. I'm a child of the '80s. So I grew up with American movies, very often set in New York. And it was anything from Wall Street and Cocktail, which is the end of the '80s, maybe beginning of the '90s. And lots of gangster, mafia films, Goodfellas, and lots of that kind of thing. Scorsese's depiction of New York was always fascinating.

04:19
Simone Fabricius
After a decade in Paris, I was at the crossroads in my life, where I had just broken up with my French boyfriend, and I was considering, should I stay, should I become a real Parisienne and buy an apartment or should I really get some roots here. I decided to come to New York, and that was sort of how I got here.

04:41
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How did you feel about leaving Paris? I mean, most people dream of living in Paris, but for some, the language is a barrier. Why leave this gorgeous city?

04:52
Simone Fabricius
That's a really good question, especially these days in the political climate. I really feel that I was ready to leave. I felt the need to do something new. I arrived in Paris with a Danish boyfriend, who was a correspondent for a Danish newspaper, for Politiken. When that ended, I then had other boyfriends.

05:17
Simone Fabricius
I felt that Paris wasn't completely mine. I felt it had a lot of fingerprints of other people on it. And I had this need to find a place that was just mine, and my own adventure and my own way of breaking down doors and barriers and all of that. Plus, I was that much older, and I felt I had a really good grasp of my career and what I wanted to do, and I thought New York would be an ideal place for that next chapter.

05:44
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was it like landing in JFK or maybe Newark with a few suitcases, and have your new New York life in front of you? What do you remember from that first day or maybe few days that you were completely new to the city?

06:00
Simone Fabricius
I remember feeling incredibly excited. Everything was so new, everything smells different, everything looks different, people dress differently, and that was my landing in JFK. But I had been in New York quite a bit the years leading up to when I arrived, so there was also a lot of familiarity, knowing what to expect.

06:19
Simone Fabricius
But that particular day when I arrived, which was, I think in January, it was in the middle of a snow blizzard, and there was so much snow. I remember in the cab coming to the place where I was supposed to stay, I couldn't even get my suitcase over the piles of snow. I had to walk down the full block just to find a hole into the snow and then turn back and go in and find my building in Chelsea, where I was staying, until I had my own place. So that was a very cold experience.

06:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I've been in New York during a blizzard and it's rough.

06:56
Simone Fabricius
It's not like a Danish winter. It's very brutal and very aggressive. Yeah.

07:04
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What was your first place in New York like and how soon did you manage to feel completely at home in the city?

07:13
Simone Fabricius
Sometimes I'm not even sure if I'm quite at home yet. But my first apartment, let's start there. I got it relatively quick. For some reason I've always had a lot of luck with real estate. I don't have a lot of luck in other things, but that seems to be one of my things that the universe helps me with.

07:30
Simone Fabricius
A few months after I had arrived, I had a really sweet colleague at my agency who said, Hey, I'm going to move in with my girlfriend. Do you want to take over my apartment? I didn't even ask where it was. I was just like, sure, yeah, I'll take it. And that was in East Williamsburg. And so at that time, East Williamsburg was just up and coming and changing and there was still a lot of crime.

07:56
Simone Fabricius
There was still definitely some dicey moments and you hear people being stabbed and raped and things like that, so that was a little bit of a thing. I remember when I went to see the apartment and I came out of the Grand stop on the L train. I had been living in Paris for so long, you're just not used to the amount of trash and rats and grittiness that Brooklyn and New York has.

08:26
Simone Fabricius
So I remember coming up and feeling quite like a little princess, walking up the stairs of the subway and being like, ugh, I don't want to touch anything, it's gross. And then, I was stepping out of the subway and this rat ran across the step in front of me. I was like, Oh God. The streetlights were broken. It just felt really grim.

08:46
Simone Fabricius
And then I found my way. And I came in and I saw the apartment. It was just so cute. It was an old, very classic, East Brooklyn apartment. It was a one bedroom, with a living room and a kitchen and all that. Now when I look back at it, it just had a lot of personality, but it was also old and it wasn't well taken care of, moist and mold on the walls in the bathroom. But I had a little bathtub that had little lion feet on it and I just loved that.

09:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The little things.

09:14
Simone Fabricius
Yeah, no, but it was just a really cute place. It reminded me a little bit of Breakfast at Tiffany's. Very quaint, lots of personality and I had a fire escape that had a really big peach tree just outside. No, not peaches, apricots, and it had so many apricots every year that the branches would almost break off. It had so many fruits. And so me and my friends would sit out on the fire escape and smoke cigarettes and eat directly from the tree and have white wine.

09:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That sounds romantic.

09:44
Simone Fabricius
It was very romantic. It was super cute.

09:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sounds like a scene out of a movie that you were talking about before.

09:52
Simone Fabricius
Yeah. It felt like that too, and I feel like there's a lot of that in New York. When you walk around in different neighborhoods, it feels like you are in a movie set. I still feel like that. It still feels really fresh in that way.

10:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You graduated from Copenhagen's School of Applied Arts. What kind of foundation did this education give you?

10:17
Simone Fabricius
I think the foundation of this particular education was that you get a very deep knowledge in print production, and generally, the technicalities that go behind anything printed. So my education was apprenticeship-based, that meant that I was partly going to school, but also working in an advertising agency.

10:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Which one?

10:41
Simone Fabricius
Which agency? It was called Advance, and it was on Landemærket, and we did a lot of LEGO and Mærsk Air advertising, and Coloplast.

10:51
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Big brands.

10:52
Simone Fabricius
Lots of Danish brands. So that foundation was actually really great for me. I didn't realize it at the time, I was so young. I think I started when I was 19. That's so long ago. A lot of my friends went to Grafisk Højskole, the more academic graphic design education in Copenhagen, or the Danish Design School as well. And those two were very popular, they're very known. And so doing what I did was very different among my peers of creatives.

11:21
Simone Fabricius
And they always asked why I wanted to do that. There was something a little less fine about doing what I did, because at my school at the time, that was where all the printers were educated, that's all where the photographers went, bookbinders, all of which had a lot of craftsmanship behind it. And so that's what it gave me, I think, a solid foundation of the understanding of the history of print.

11:45
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Did you always know your career path? Or did you once have a dream of becoming a firefighter or policeman or something completely different from what you do today?

11:58
Simone Fabricius
I've always known deep down, even if it was a little hidden, that I would want to do something like a visual art something. I wasn't sure what it was at the time, but I definitely, throughout my school years, flirted with a lot of different ideas of different professions. And one of them was actually to work on the ocean and be a navigator. And at some point I applied to the Danish Navy to try that.

12:27
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
So I was right. Something completely different.

12:30
Simone Fabricius
Yes, yes, yes. And I was an intern on a cruise ship for some time after my business college years, trying to test that out to see if it's something I wanted to do.

12:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And how was that test?

12:44
Simone Fabricius
It was really great and I applied and I got in. However, the school counselor there, this was a school in Svendborg, a navigation school. She was a woman and she said to me, Simone, this is a really big career commitment, and at that time, there weren't a lot of women in that industry. And it was maybe one woman out of ten men.

13:08
Simone Fabricius
And she said, Why don't you have a think about it again? She laid out all the academia and what needed to be done and how my practical training would be, which would include four months on a tanker, with no one else than maybe two other men. And she said there's a lot of that, for a really good amount of your career, where you're going to feel very alone.

13:31
Simone Fabricius
And I feel like I had this romantic idea of what it would be to work on the ocean. But when she really broke it down for me, it wasn't that romantic. And so I told her that I would call her back and I took my summer vacation. And then my parents were like, you should maybe not do that. And then I never came back.

13:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Your title is Creative Director. Can you explain to those of us what it means? It's a very broad term, right?

14:01
Simone Fabricius
It's incredibly broad. It's actually so broad that I don't even know how to describe it in shorter terms. I'm not a fan of titles, first of all, but I use this term a lot because it tells you something about experience — where you are, what you've done, what you can manage and handle.

14:19
Simone Fabricius
A creative director would be a creative lead in an agency, typically. It would be someone that guides and nurtures the creative team and sells the ideas to the clients. And generally leads the day to day, the creative ideas and vision of both the agency but also on the client side.

14:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You have a studio in Brooklyn. When did you decide to start your own business? And was it a tough process to build a client base, get your footing in the business, so to speak?

14:56
Simone Fabricius
Having my own studio wasn't a choice to begin with. I actually lost my job when I was eight months pregnant.

15:03
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Oh.

15:05
Simone Fabricius
I was thrown into the notion of doing my own thing really quickly and abruptly. And so that was where it happened. I could have maybe applied and become a creative director in another agency, which was maybe the easiest option. But I was already at that point very fatigued with how agencies are being run and the lack of transparency and a lot of issues with how agencies are put together.

15:33
Simone Fabricius
I thought, why don't I just do my own thing, start freelancing slowly? I did that while I was on maternity leave. I started thinking more about how I should get started, make a website, pull out my work and putting it out there and contacting people. And people were incredibly generous with their contacts, and it didn't take me very long to just start working on my own.

16:00
Simone Fabricius
I got a really great network from these agencies that I had worked in. And clients recommended me to other clients. And that word of mouth was just so wonderful to feel and so generous and heartfelt.

16:13
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And motivating.

16:15
Simone Fabricius
Very.

16:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
You work with branding and packaging designs, for instance. Talk about the kind of work you do for your clients and how you approach a job.

16:28
Simone Fabricius
I have a very broad portfolio of different industries that I work with. Packaging work is a big part of it. A lot of very commercial work, something that I feel came from my past in the agency world where I've done a lot of work, and still do. I work a lot with Pepsi, for example, and I did the redesign for Ben & Jerry's ice cream.

16:47
Simone Fabricius
And I have years of working with Campari Group in San Francisco and doing a lot of alcohol brands. And then, on my own, I have then now ventured into doing a lot of hospitality work. So lots of hotels and restaurants and bars and things like that. So that's very exciting. And that's something I'm very passionate about.

17:08
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
The hospitality world— I feel hotels have changed a lot, their image and, how do you say, their brand. It's become more cozy and homey. Is that a right observation?

17:23
Simone Fabricius
Oh, definitely. Hotels have had to, I think, expand on their offering of just being a bed where you come and you sleep and you leave, in a very, very basic way of explaining that. Now it is becoming more of a destination, besides the traveling and besides going out and sightseeing or whatever you do. The fact that you have this experience in a hotel, I think it's becoming increasingly important for everyone.

17:55
Simone Fabricius
Choosing the hotel, you need to try different vibes, different moods, different styles. All of this, I think, is incredibly exciting, that you have all these choices. But also I feel like hotels have become part of the urban fabric in a way that a hotel lobby is more than a hotel lobby. It's a library, it's an office, it's a place to hang out and meet your friends for a drink. 

18:19
Simone Fabricius
And all of that I think is very cool and so well needed to have that. And also a lot of hotels I work with, especially on the west coast, they try to only use local produce. They try to get other local entrepreneurs to do their towels or to promote their soaps. And so once you are in a hotel, all of a sudden you have all these other cultural aspects of being pulled in, that you're actually a community-based philosophy. That's very nice.

18:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
How does that influence your work and your approach to your work?

18:53
Simone Fabricius
I think hotel design and branding has suddenly exploded. Hotels are more curious about being different. They're taking a little bit more risk in terms of how they want to look and how they want to sound. And that's really fun for me, that it's always a different challenge, it's a different assignment. And none of them are similar. All of them have incredibly complex and interesting stories that they want to convey. And all of that is really fun for me.

19:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What are the creative projects in your career that have stood out? What are you the most proud of? Or what was the most fun to work on? Or the most challenging projects that stood out?

19:40
Simone Fabricius
That's tough because there are so many and they're all really wonderful in different ways. I would say I did this identity design for a hotel in Silver Lake in LA called Silver Lake Pool and Inn. That was one of my, I think, most significant, at least from an emotional perspective in my career. That was where I really found a style and a way of working the creative process.

20:11
Simone Fabricius
It opened up a new chapter of my life that included a lot of illustration. And it sparked something in me of wanting to do more hospitality work. It was almost like coming home. It felt all of a sudden a type of project that felt very easy to me to do. Both exciting and adventurous, it just felt like playing.

20:34
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is on your desk? What are you working on right now?

20:39
Simone Fabricius
I have a couple of Italian clients that I am just finishing up. One is Max Mara's fashion group that I did an identity for, and that's almost done. And a makeup brand called Clio Makeup that is the equivalent of Glossier here in the US, which includes both identity work and packaging and some in-store work as well.

21:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you have anybody working for you or do you have to manage doing all this by yourself?

21:08
Simone Fabricius
No, I have two other designers that I work with a lot. I've known them for years. Actually one of them, I used to be her design director and she was a junior designer at the time. So I've known her for 15 years now. And we collaborate a lot and she helps out a lot. I'm not alone, but I also have a lot of other very specialized collaborators, like typographers and illustrators and photographers and strategists and copywriters and all of that. So, yeah, not alone. Not always.

21:39
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you like teamwork?

21:43
Simone Fabricius
Well, it depends. No, I do. I do like teamwork. I think that's also why I maybe have left the agency world because I didn't want to be anybody's boss. I think I like to play with other people, I like to play with other creatives. That's how I see teamwork being done. And that's what I have with my other designers.

22:01
Simone Fabricius
I feel even though I am a little bit more experienced than them, it's totally the same eye level and it's fun. It's nice to get the challenge. It's nice to hear other people's perspective and you moving the needle a little bit sometimes, that's nice.

22:15
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Where do you go to get inspired? Do you go into nature? Do you travel? Do you walk around New York? Do you go to art museums?

22:25
Simone Fabricius
Well, I do all of that, but I don't do that to feel that it has anything to do with my work necessarily. I was actually thinking about this the other day because I heard this question from someone else. I don't really know what I do, if there is a process. Because there's two sides to this. I have to sit down and do this new project, I need to find inspiration for this particular project. There's that side. There's also the general side of just exploring life.

22:55
Simone Fabricius
I have these two things in myself that's linked to inspiration, which is being very playful. I think I have a very childlike mind and I'm incredibly curious and I'm also very observant — great attention to detail. So when I walk around or taking my son to school, I see all these things on the street, like, Oh, this color combination is really cool, this dead rat looks kind of funky. There's all this that comes in naturally that flows and then there is the side of when I actually have to sit down and work.

23:30
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Have you become an American citizen, and how would you define yourself? Danish, American, something else? What is Simone?

23:41
Simone Fabricius
Oh, I'm definitely Danish. 100%. I don't want to be American. That sounds like such an insult, but I'm quite happy with being Danish. To not be so jokey about it, I'm incredibly proud of being Danish, let me say it that way. And it's something that I am very, very fond of telling people if they ask.

24:03
Simone Fabricius
I feel my voice even changes a little bit into a higher pitched note because I'm so proud. Even if my son is born here and I have a lot of love for the United States and it's a deeply fascinating country and it's very inspiring and my dad loved the United States and also I think partly why I'm here, that doesn't make me American, and I don't need to be.

24:28
Simone Fabricius
I also didn't feel that I was 100% French. They also didn't want me to be French. That's a different story. They would remind me that I'm not French.

24:37
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Do you also feel like you have a Danish approach to your work?

24:42
Simone Fabricius
Oh God, yes, very. Again, a really great selling point for clients. They love it too. The approach, I think, also is two fold. The approach is one, aesthetically, and the other side is the work ethics. I'm someone who is never late. I never deliver my work late. If anything, I deliver it before.

25:03
Simone Fabricius
Very buttoned up, almost anally buttoned up. And I think that's a very, not for all Danes, but I would say predominantly, there is an organization skill that Scandinavians have. So that I have, and clients also really love that because I'm someone they can count on.

25:20
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Danish design is famous.

25:22
Simone Fabricius
Danish design is its own brand. It's its own unique style and approach, and the aesthetics and the way that things are made has so much integrity. And there's also not a whole lot of fuss about Danish design. It's very functional, and it's very simple, and it's very elegant and elevated. And that's something that I definitely can feel that I have in my approach of designing.

25:51
Simone Fabricius
Working in Paris was a bit of a mind boggle for me because they love anything very decorative, and more ribbons and more colors and the logo has to be bigger. Oh my god, I was so overwhelmed with that aesthetic. But it also taught me a lot. And the American type of design that I have encountered is very bold. It's very in your face, it's walk down the supermarket aisle and everything loud screams at you. And I'm just like, Oh man.

26:23
Simone Fabricius
I mean, that is changing a little bit aesthetically. I feel like such a nice contrast for American clients to have someone like me that gives them a different perspective or making their brand work a little bit better and harder because I strip everything down. I make it more functional. I clean it up and still trying to elevate it as much as I can.

26:48
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What do you feel are the pros and cons about being an expat?

26:54
Simone Fabricius
The pros and cons. Now sitting in the United States, I feel there isn't really, I don't really feel it that way. I could feel it when I lived in Paris. I could feel that there were so many pros and cons. All the cons were just being like, I'm just different, I'm just a foreigner, I don't speak French purely without an accent, I look different. Everything was just different.

27:22
Simone Fabricius
I drank differently. I drink more than French people. You know, all of that. And here, New York is such a melting pot of diversity. So here, there are no lines, really. Had I been living in Missouri or Arkansas or Kentucky, then maybe this would be a more interesting question.

27:42
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah, LA and New York are definitely different in that. There are a lot of immigrants. You're almost weird if you're from New York or LA. It's like, oh, you were born here? Wow.

27:57
Simone Fabricius
Exactly.

27:57
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yeah.

27:58
Simone Fabricius
The first year I was in New York, it occurred to me that all of a sudden I wasn't very exotic and that was almost nice to feel because I grew up with an Asian mother and a Danish father, so I look a certain way. I was the only dark haired child in the first many years of my school photos, sticking out like a black sheep or something. And in Paris also, was constantly told that I was different. And so that was refreshing to be in New York, and suddenly meeting so many that was like me.

28:29
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What would you say are the main differences between your birth country, Denmark, and your current home country, the US? Or, you know, at least the country you're staying in. I don't know if it's the home country because it sounds like Denmark still is.

28:45
Simone Fabricius
The difference between them? I would say the scale and the size of the country is daunting. It's massive. And coming from a country where I feel politically and in every sense seems lighter, you can change things much quicker — and then also the size of the United States comes with a lot of different types of people and different backgrounds and different religions and all of that, that in itself can feel very overwhelming if you come from Denmark.

29:18
Simone Fabricius
But workwise, this was one of the most motivating and inspiring things, that the country was so big. Going from doing advertising or branding in Denmark, five million people, all of a sudden up against 300 million people doing branding has such an impact being seen on such a scale. I had a couple of years where I did advertising for the Super Bowl halftime show. And that's something where you'll be like, yep, I've done that. That's pretty significant.

29:49
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
That's millions and millions of viewers.

29:52
Simone Fabricius
Yeah, I don't even, yeah, it's up in such a number that it almost doesn't matter anymore. It's so wild. That is something that at the time, I think I needed for my ego. I needed to do that. I needed to feel and see the changes I could inflict on products and branding and feelings. And all of that was just really cool to me to do that.

30:16
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When in New York, do you gravitate towards other Danes? Are you part of a Danish community?

30:23
Simone Fabricius
I have a few Danish friends. I know a lot of Danish people. It's really hard to not get to know everyone when you've been here for so long. This is a really interesting question. Do I gravitate toward them? Usually I say no, but I know that as soon as I find another Dane in a party, we end up standing in a corner getting really wasted and just having a lot of fun.

30:46
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
As Danes do!

30:47
Simone Fabricius
As we do. So maybe I should just say yes to this question. Yeah.

30:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
When in the US, what do you miss the most about Denmark and vice versa, when in Denmark, what do you miss about the US?

31:02
Simone Fabricius
Oh, I miss Danish humor. I think Danish people can be so fun. There's something quite disarming about speaking with other Danish people. They're very humble and at the same time hilariously funny. Their view on life and not taking things too seriously, not taking themselves too seriously, and seeing the funnier side of things. That is a really charming aspect of the Danish fabric.

31:34
Simone Fabricius
When I'm in Denmark, and I miss New York, or I miss the US, I think being in Denmark can feel a little bit like going to a really small town with, I'm sorry to say, a little bit smaller-minded sometimes. I have another expat Danish friend who always says that the ceiling is not as high in Denmark as it is in other places. That I miss.

32:01
Simone Fabricius
I also miss that I can't just get an Uber Eats when I want to, I'm missing that I can't have a delivery when I want to. I hate that I can't just walk down the street and buy confetti if I need that for some odd reason. I hate that everything closes so early in Denmark. The unions are so strict. I'm walking around on Strøget or whatever, and I'm like, Hey, why is everything closed? Come and take my money, I need to buy stuff. And that I really miss in Denmark.

32:28
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And Strøget is the main shopping street in Copenhagen, so that ought to be open.

32:35
Simone Fabricius
Yeah, that should be open, but it almost feels like when I'm home visiting my mother and she lives in the suburbs, and that's really definitely a rush for time to get to the supermarket, because they close at six, and that's just how it is. And if you don't get what you want, then you're really in trouble, so.

32:53
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
What is your favorite word and does one's relationship to one's mother tongue change when one lives abroad?

33:03
Simone Fabricius
Oh, I don't know if I have a Danish word. Oh, I do maybe have a Danish word, actually. It's a name. Does that count?

33:11
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Yes it does. It's your favorite. Everything counts.

33:15
Simone Fabricius
It's just because it's so unique in sound. Oehlenschläger, that's one of my all time favorite looking names.

33:26
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And that's a famous name, right?

33:27
Simone Fabricius
Yeah, it's a very famous name. And the way that it's spelled, it also says a lot about our past, I think, of how our cultures and countries and all of that back in the 1600s have changed, how we've been fusioned with so many different other alphabets and languages.

33:47
Simone Fabricius
And so that I really like. I like walking down at the opera and just looking up at the big statue of Oehlenschläger, just looking at his name. I even pointed it out to my son to see if he could spell it or say it. Of course he couldn't. Nobody can.

34:02
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
And my final question to you, if you and I get to talk to each other in ten years, where would you be and what would you be doing if you could create a dream scenario for this?

34:16
Simone Fabricius
I mean, realistically or as a dream — you said dream scenario?

34:19
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I said dream scenario.

34:23
Simone Fabricius
Oh, I think I would really love to have a creative collective of a lot of designers and artists under the same roof. I would love to collaborate on various different projects, learning from all these amazing people, having a transformative space that is a gallery and a kitchen and a pool hall and a library, something that feels very transformative. I would love to have that.

34:50
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Sounds great.

34:51
Simone Fabricius
Yeah.

34:52
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
Thank you so much for your time, Simone. We really appreciate you being with us on Danish Originals.

34:49
Simone Fabricius
Thank you for having me. It was so much fun.

35:01
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
I'm glad to hear it.

35:07
Tina Jøhnk Christensen
For today's episode, Simone Fabricius chose Jacob Biltius's Dead Wildfowl or Dødt fuglevildt from 1674 from the collection of the National Gallery of Denmark.