Lakeland PBS presents Common Ground brought to you by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage fund and the citizens of Minnesota.

Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji continuing their second century of service to the Community.

Member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport.

Serving the region with daily flights in Minneapolis St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at Bemidji airport.org.

Welcome to Common Ground I'm Producer/Director Randy Cadwell.

Last summer Danish sculptor Thomas Dambo came to Detroit Lakes Minnesota and created a display of the largest number of troll sculptures in one location, made entirely of recycled material.

I got to follow along with the process My name is Thomas Dambo.

I am an artist based in Copenhagen in Denmark and I am called myself for a recycle art activist and do that because all my artwork is made out of trash and I do that because I want to show us how beautiful and valuable our trash can be so that we prevent from being suffocated in all of our trash.

Well one of our board members happened to be in Breckenridge, Colorado and there is a troll there named Isak Heartstone.

So then he was talking to a landscape architect named Bryan Leininger who was working on another project here in town and Bryan decided to just email Thomas, and just Thomas Dambo's group and just say hey, what would it take to bring you to Detroit Lakes.

And then about that same time we formed Project 412.

Because we're a fairly new organization.

We were only, we first opened our doors basically in September of 2022.

We are a small nonprofit placemaking organization based in Detroit Lakes, Minnesota, and we are founded with a really simple mission statement which is basically to do cool stuff, whatever that might be, in any different ways that we can every day.

It's pretty good mantra for life.

We do have a real mission statement, too , but in essence we are just trying to elevate the cultural and economic vibrancy of Detroit Lakes.

Bryan then tossed it over to me and said hey, Amy, I don't quite know what to do with this because one of our pillars with Project 412 is to do arts, public art and events along with nurturing new businesses and supporting entrepreneurs, and so in that realm of public art this really seemed to fit.

So Bryan said do you want to contact Thomas and so I did.

I kind of jumped in and said hey, you know, could we do a zoom and talk about what it might be like to bring you to Detroit Lakes.

That's always how a project starts.

Somebody have seen some of my work somewhere and then they contact me and ask me if I want to come there and build it.

Yeah, so as a child I was a builder.

I liked to build a big like pillow fortresses and treetop houses and dig underground caves and make a skateboard ramp and as a teenager I made my own furniture and stuff like that so I made a lot of things.

So that taught me from an early time to just that it wasn't about what material I had, it was just more about like what mindset and what creativity I applied to that material.

Also I was taught up by parents who taught me about sustainability and to be resourceful, about only take what you need and clean up after yourself which is what we should all do, but what we have kind of like forgotten to do.

So now as humans we take way more than we need and then we don't clean up after ourselves at all, like on a big scale, right.

After building things as a like as a child and into my early teenage years, I then became a hip- hopper, like I became absorbed in hip-hop culture and the things that I really did was that I was rapping and I was into the graffiti movement.

And then I thought like that this is not my path and then I started making street art with bird houses and made thousands of bird houses of recycled wood.

So the bird houses became bigger and bigger recycled sculptures and then that led me on the path to make big sculptures in recycled wood.

I kind of like knew I want to build some really, really big things.

And I thought that it would be cool if it could be more a fairy tale creature that I could write stories about because I had been making a lot of stories as a rapper, I was like a storyteller rapper.

So I thought it would be cool if I could make like modern legends or modern folklore.

And then in Denmark trolls, they come from Scandinavia where Denmark is, so it was just logic for me that maybe I should just make trolls.

And then I started to build these big giant troll sculptures.

First I'll come, have a meeting, see if I like their side and if me and their partners we have a good chemistry together and if we have the same vision.

Then I'll pick the different location for where to put the sculptures and try and get a feeling of what type of a sculpture should be there.

He, his wife, and their two twin boys came in May of 2023 and we did basically a walkabout.

We went around to different sites throughout Becker County.

And we were just walking around here and like my imagination was just going and there could be one there and there and there, and...

He's delightful, Thomas is just a really creative energetic artist and we would come upon an area and there'd be a tree and he would stand by it and he'd go what if there was a troll poking out like this.

I love this type of landscape with these rolling hills and small lakes and these clearings and forest and like that I think it's a great, great spot for it.

We had originally decided we'd do two to four trolls and then it was for sure four to five trolls and it was four to five for quite a while.

He writes a story and each troll, group of trolls, has a poem, basically.

His story was evolving and we were like hmmm, maybe we should do more, could we do more.

I'm building five trolls: one rabbit and three mirrors.

In effect it's like six really big sculptures and then three little bit smaller sculptures and then I'm also making 600 bird houses.

I was the volunteer coordinator for the troll build.

A few months before they actually arrived I started getting on the zoom calls, or the video calls, with some of the Dambo crew that were back in Copenhagen just to discuss some of the logistics and the things that would be needed, how many volunteers would be needed at each site, what kind of work they would do, so that I had a good understanding of really what we were walking into so when they arrived we could kind of hit the ground running.

Because they really had limited time.

It's not like you could go oh, we're a week behind we can extend this.

No it has to end the day.

When Thomas was here during that first time just looking at sites, looking at materials, he went out to the Becker County landfill and here was this big pile of yellow crates made of plastic.

And they manufacture some type of steel and then they put it in these ones and then sometimes they break like this and then they throw them out so possibly this could be cut for a sheet and that could maybe be something that could be on the sculpture.

I've seen Thomas do this before.

Whenever he looks at stuff immediately his mind is going to what can be made out of that and so he saw those and I think the wheels started turning.

We're cutting the totes and and then cleaning them and processing them so Thomas can begin to build them.

I'd like to take the opportunity to do something forward so that it'll be here for generations and so that's why I want to have a hand in it so that I can be present in that.

So I think it's a really good, it's a good thing that they're doing this and for the county here so.

We were able to get some white oak from the Highway 34 project and that got milled and made into a lot of the dimensional lumber.

The rest of it was from pallets and different material like that that got taken apart and then put into containers to be brought to each site.

They were here for five weeks, but the very first week was just a couple of their folks that came.

They made sure all the materials were going to be in place, all the the sites were prepped, how they were going to get people there and so that was a lot of coordination with them with those things, as well.

Then simultaneously we then built the heads, the feet, and the fingers for the sculptures in my studio in Denmark shipped them over here in some big wooden boxes out of some old wood we had built.

And they arrived here probably maybe 2 or 3 weeks before any of them.

Here's the first troll parts, we got Long Lottie right here.

And Greg's checking out the eyebrows.

Look at the eyebrows on this one.

Which one is this one?

I covered them all with tarps because we were afraid we didn't want people to see them and so they were kind of stowed away in a particular place ready for when the build started.

And then we go into the actual site.

Build a tower.

We had to put in the poles for the standup ones.

Put the head on the tower.

And then start building the body around the tower.

We have 15 people and around 250 volunteers.

So it's so many people so we can actually build and install all of these sculptures in four to five weeks.

But you just have to move I think later there, okay, and then this point I want to be here.

So take the screw out.

Well, the first thing was making sure we had the volunteers and that was, initially when I saw that, I thought how are we to fill 472 slots for volunteers.

Like how I was the first one?

I was kind of stalking the website to see when they were going to post the sign up cuz I wanted to be part of this.

I've seen the trolls online, I thought they were kind of cool, I didn't think I'd ever get to see them in person cuz I thought they were out of the country, but they're here in the country, I haven't seen any here yet and then I heard that they were coming to DL so, close to home.

I had friends that had gone to Seattle that saw a troll there and somehow on my Facebook feed, which I don't watch very often, a thing from Detroit Lakes came up saying they were doing six trolls here in Detroit Lakes.

I couldn't believe they were doing six.

I couldn't believe that Detroit Lakes had the foresight to get hold of Dambo in a timely manner.

I went on the website for Project 412 and there were four spots left for this morning and that was about it and so our two friends and we came, drove four miles or I'm sorry four hours, and that's how we got here.

Typically the people that were either from the Twin Cities or Wisconsin or Illinois or even one lady that came all the way from Austin, Texas.

She just took a week and came up here and worked the whole week, she volunteered.

They follow him and when they saw that oh, this is an opportunity for me to actually be involved in the work, they couldn't pass it up.

And so when they said do you want to come out here and I said yes, really, I can come here.

I'm so proud to be part of your legacy of all you're doing here.

These two sections that I've done here.

You can kind of copy that down below, okay.

We had about 200 volunteers working on the trolls.

We estimate about another hundred volunteers behind the scenes, whether it was providing meals or snacks or housing or whatever it might be.

My job essentially was to split them up amongst the three sites that were active all the time and make sure that the right people were at the right place.

Today's the first day we're going to send a small group to one of the sites that's been really just worked on by the Dambo crew, but he said on Friday maybe they could use a couple people but we're going to need some, especially I know some of you noted you have good woodworking skills.

The two other sites that they are in the second week of will definitely need you there, so we'll be sending most of you to two different sites and then a smaller group to one of the new sites.

I think for right now we found out there as many bird houses as we made we're starting to eat through our lumber for the troll so we're going to try and preserve it until we get another order.

Okay.

So we're going to be cutting triangles for sure.

Should we work on maybe putting the roofs on?

That is another thing we can do also, yeah, we can slap the roofs on.

It's heavy.

Just press it and then shoot it.

The volunteer list on a typical day would have about 14 in two shifts, one in the morning and an afternoon shift.

Nine of them would be what we call just troll builders, they could be anybody with any level of skill.

Then we had carpenters and woodworkers, people that have a little higher level ability or experience in woodworking.

Yeah I have a big, big crew of people.

I have 25 people full-time working in my studio in Denmark.

Some of them come traveling with me here to the United States and some stay home.

And then we also hire local people.

We can photoshop.

Oh yeah call in the world crew.

The crew, even though we often would call them the Danes, they really were some from Denmark but I know some from Puerto Rico and France and Brazil and all kinds of different places.

But there are people that have kind of come together in Denmark with that same kind of vision that Thomas has and become part of the crew and so they travel all over the world to build these.

I think it's really important to have people from different places because people from different places they have different ideas and then it's a bigger pool of know-how to pull from.

But I mean if they say that it's going to hold then but it's just... We can look into reinforcing it.

Yeah.

Then when it's Friday, we have a beer and then we do that four weeks in a row.

Building all week have a beer on the Friday, building all week have a beer on the Friday.

World's biggest troll.

I'll just start from the beginning.

A long, long time ago and maybe just a little, lived a tiny little people everyone considered equal, and every morning every man and woman from the town would go to work and go to rest with bellies warm and round.

But as it is in stories something unforeseen can happen, that's true in this tale too, and then as the thunder started clapping and from across the mountain a golden rabbit came and told the little people things would never be the same.

Now a big old troll came draggin' with a cauldron on a wagon, the troll was called Alexa.

To set the little people free she wrote a recipe for an elixir: start with the songs of three birds and a little bit of herb, add the laughter from a stranger and let it cook while you stir.

So the five ingredients are walk a mile barefoot.

So that's the sculpture that's called Barefoot Frida that has like a loop where you go through the swamp over the stepping stones and a little bit through the forest.

The next sculpture is the one that's called Jacob's Everear.

That's the one that's laying down.

You can sit on his belly up in his hands and then talk, tell a story about someone you love.

Then the next one is called Long Leif.

Leif is a old Danish name but it also sounds like life and that one encourages you to plant a plant and that's the biggest or the tallest troll I've built.

It's 36 ft tall.

And then the other one is Ronny Funny Face.

It's probably the troll with the greatest name I've ever made.

I think it's a really silly name.

It's jumping out behind a tree over in the Dunton Locks.

Its mission and its ingredients is make a stranger laugh.

My name is Ronnie, actually his name is Ron.

I think if every human on the planet would make a stranger laugh every day, right, it'd be a lot more fun.

The fifth one is then Alexa's Elixir that is standing with its big pot, and its ingredients is make a bird smile or make an animal smile because I think that if all of us humans would remember to share the world and the resources and basically our planet with the other species that are on our planet then everything would be a little bit easier for everybody else.

So that's the five ingredients and the five trolls.

And then there is the much lazy evil Golden Rabbit that is actually just made of yellow plastic scraps.

It was the one troll that actually was not made ahead of time and so they actually had to make the rabbit head at a site near here, near Frazee, and so that was even fascinating cuz I visited that a few times to see how they were creating this head and kind of the expression and the size and the dimensions.

We have used 1,700 boxes, cut all the bottoms out and used them as shingles on this big rabbit that's standing behind me here in a much secret location here in Detroit Lakes.

The eyes are actually made out of old motorbike helmets and the whiskers are made of windshield wipers and the teeth are made of fenders, it's all recycled.

And so seeing that come together was quite amazing.

And then the other part about building the rabbit was rather fascinating because when we were ready for that Thomas came up to me and said I need just maybe two or three volunteers that will have the skills but will only work on this the whole time and they cannot tell their wife, they cannot tell their family, they cannot tell anybody the location of where this is at.

But even getting to the site, we delivered all the main materials, and then they all had to be moved by hand, which was just a crazy, crazy task of hauling things by hand, all the materials and of course it wasn't just like a flat like open little space.

There had to be a big hill involved and so moving everything was really quite a chore.

[Music] I don't want paved concrete path and toilets and street lights all the way up to the sculpture.

I want them to be hidden and hard to get to so you get some exercise and you get out in the elements and see how beautiful the forest is.

We have the most trolls in one area.

We're the largest exhibit because there's nine sculptures as part of it and so we hope that this exhibit brings people to town and it certainly has been already.

We hope the local residents embrace it and love it and just are proud that they have this big exhibit in our community and also that it reinforces that message of that we have beautiful landscape here, we should protect it, we should be better at recycling and taking care of our environment.

The simple way of explaining why I do it is that it's all the things I love.

I love to make stories, I love to build things, I love to have a project together with friends that we have to overcome and solve like how to move all the wood into the forest and how to make something really tall and like and now it's raining we have to like make a makeshift shelter and I love this exploration and this treasure hunt of being of dumpster diving, you know, like what's inside the container and the joy of finding that and then turning something that was discarded into something that's beautiful and has big value for other people.

And then of course it's great to come around the world and see and get to work in beautiful places like just here in Detroit Lakes.

Thank you for watching Common Ground If you have an idea for a Lakeland PBS production in north Central Minnesota email us at legacy@lptv.org or call 1-800-292-0922.

To watch Lakeland PBS Productions online visit lptv.org or download the free PBS app Production funding for Common Ground is made possible in part by First National Bank Bemidji.

Continuing their second century of service to the Community member FDIC.

Closed captioning is made possible by the Bemidji Regional Airport.

Serving the region with daily flights to Minneapolis St Paul International Airport.

More information is available at Bemidji airport.org.

Common ground is brought to you by the Minnesota arts and cultural heritage fund.

With money by the vote of the people November 4th 2008