Hiding in Denmark’s forests are giant trolls waiting to be discovered. The towering sculptures range between 15 and 20 feet, and are part of a treasure hunt devised by their creator Thomas Dambo, a self described “recycle art activist”.
Since 2014, the Danish artist and sculptor has been constructing colossal troll characters out of salvaged wood and recycled materials, with projects in the US, Puerto Rico, China and South Korea.
His latest one, The Great Troldefolkefest or The Great Troll Folk Fest, has 11 trolls, including one that he says is “extremely hidden” in his native country’s secluded green spaces and parks, for the curious to seek out. To help, Dambo has plotted out an online troll map with directions to his creations. He also shares clues on his social media, encouraging visitors to post their finds.
His treasure hunt project began over the summer, while Dambo was waiting out the pandemic in Copenhagen. Together with his team and some volunteers, he scouted out locations, obtained permissions for use of land and collected scrapwood. He unveiled the 10th troll on Instagram at the start of October.
The artist has given each troll a name and a distinctive appearance – some come with a mass of hair made of twigs, one has a nose ring, others flash toothy smiles. Drawing from his experience and imagination, he even invents backstories for the creatures.
Hans Hulehand, for instance, builds a children’s fortress. As Dambo’s story goes: “Once there was a little child who lived in the city with his parents, but he didn’t want to be in the stone house that humans have made. So every night, the child goes out into the forest where he has a friend, a big troll. Together, they build a fortress where the child can sleep at night.”
I think the biggest thread to mankind is that the new generation is living inside a digital world... but the modern world will not exist if the natural world ceases to exist
While he recognises the influence of Nordic mythology – which includes tales of trolls living in forests – Dambo says he is also weaving his own tales that fit into his environmentalism, the driving force behind his work.
“The trolls are characters that represent nature in a modern-day folklore that I’m writing. In the old days, we used magical creatures and fairy tales to explain phenomena that we couldn’t understand… I use my trolls to explain and talk about serious issues we have, which people might be bored of talking about.”
For Dambo, the trolls and their homes in lush forests or hilltops are there to remind us how vital nature is. “It’s important that people get challenged and explore the world that we’re living in. Too many of us spend time in front of our computers… If you’re disconnected from nature, then none of us will care to take care of the planet, because why would we take care of something that we don’t understand or we forget exists?
“I think the biggest threat to mankind is that the new generation is living inside a digital world. Some of them might think that the natural world has no importance because they never walk into it. But the modern world will not exist if the natural world ceases to exist.”
His reverence for nature is why Dambo uses recycled material in his work, to create from waste instead of adding more of it. One of his favourite sculptures, Isak Heartstone, was constructed by a hiking trail in Colorado, made by local volunteers who helped Dambo and his team dig through trash to gather wooden pallets and discarded lumber. The troll, whose name comes from a heart-shaped stone given to Dambo by three children from the town, became an instant attraction, though it was eventually moved by the US government to another location in the forest.
Dambo's knack for fashioning art out of what may otherwise end up in landfill sites started when he was a child. “I always liked to find things and turn them upside down and inside out, and make them into something else,” he says. Growing up, his home had a small workshop in the basement that his parents would let him use and where he learnt to build trinkets and toys. If he wanted something, he would rather build it than buy it.
“I would create something for my action figures. Maybe I needed a chimney for the fortress of my actions figures, so I’d go out into the neighbourhood and look into trash cans until I found something that was perfect,” he recalls.
Dambo went on to study at the Design School Kolding in Denmark and soon took on street art projects, such as assembling giant tree houses and birdhouse totems in urban spaces.
Among his earlier works is Ben Chiller, a recycled sculpture made for a music festival in Aarhus in 2015. Since then, his projects have become more grand and global, such as It Sounded Like a Mountain Fell for the Lanba Art Festival in Wulong, China, centred on trolls Marit and Kjeld whose homes in the mountains are at risk because of resource extraction and environmental destruction.
Dambo's previous treasure hunt, The Six Forgotten Giants, scattered sculptures across Copenhagen, from meadows to woodlands, and even on riverbanks under bridges.
Having completed at least 70 troll sculptures, his work continues to gain popularity, though Dambo still sees his practice through the perspective of environmental activism, one that requires others to take part, too. “I know that no matter how many sculptures I do for the rest of my life, I will never be able to recycle a tiny per cent of the mountains of trash that we are creating. The most important thing to remember when you think about what I’m doing, seeing it as a success or as something to admire… remember that in all the cities and countries of the world, there is enough trash for you to do the same as me,” he says.
"In some way, I have become like a trash celebrity. But there [can be] a million trash celebrities or trash rock stars."
More information on The Great Troll Folk Fest can be found on trollmap.com or thomasdambo.com
Key facilities
- Olympic-size swimming pool with a split bulkhead for multi-use configurations, including water polo and 50m/25m training lanes
- Premier League-standard football pitch
- 400m Olympic running track
- NBA-spec basketball court with auditorium
- 600-seat auditorium
- Spaces for historical and cultural exploration
- An elevated football field that doubles as a helipad
- Specialist robotics and science laboratories
- AR and VR-enabled learning centres
- Disruption Lab and Research Centre for developing entrepreneurial skills
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Results
5pm: Maiden (PA) Dh80,000 (Turf) 1,600m; Winner: Aahid Al Khalediah II, Pat Cosgrave (jockey), Helal Al Alawi (trainer)
5.30pm: Handicap (PA) Dh80,000 (T) 2,200m; Winner: Whistle, Harry Bentley, Abdallah Al Hammadi
6pm: Wathba Stallions Cup - Maiden (PA) Dh70,000 (T) 1,600m; Winner: Alsaied, Szczepan Mazur, Ibrahim Al Hadhrami
6.30pm: Emirates Fillies Classic – Prestige (PA) Dh100,000 (T) 1,600m; Winner: Mumayaza, Antonio Fresu, Eric Lemartinel
7pm: Emirates Colts Classic – Prestige (PA) Dh100,000 (T) 1,600m; Winner: Hameem, Adrie de Vries, Abdallah Al Hammadi
7.30pm: President’s Cup – Group 1 (PA) Dh2,500,000 (T) 2,200m; Winner: Somoud, Richard Mullen, Jean de Roualle
8pm: President’s Cup – Listed (TB) Dh380,000 (T) 1,400m; Winner: Medahim, Richard Mullen, Satish Seemar
Uefa Nations League: How it Works
The Uefa Nations League, introduced last year, has reached its final stage, to be played over five days in northern Portugal. The format of its closing tournament is compact, spread over two semi-finals, with the first, Portugal versus Switzerland in Porto on Wednesday evening, and the second, England against the Netherlands, in Guimaraes, on Thursday.
The winners of each semi will then meet at Porto’s Dragao stadium on Sunday, with the losing semi-finalists contesting a third-place play-off in Guimaraes earlier that day.
Qualifying for the final stage was via League A of the inaugural Nations League, in which the top 12 European countries according to Uefa's co-efficient seeding system were divided into four groups, the teams playing each other twice between September and November. Portugal, who finished above Italy and Poland, successfully bid to host the finals.
Company Profile
Founder: Omar Onsi
Launched: 2018
Employees: 35
Financing stage: Seed round ($12 million)
Investors: B&Y, Phoenician Funds, M1 Group, Shorooq Partners
Sole survivors
- Cecelia Crocker was on board Northwest Airlines Flight 255 in 1987 when it crashed in Detroit, killing 154 people, including her parents and brother. The plane had hit a light pole on take off
- George Lamson Jr, from Minnesota, was on a Galaxy Airlines flight that crashed in Reno in 1985, killing 68 people. His entire seat was launched out of the plane
- Bahia Bakari, then 12, survived when a Yemenia Airways flight crashed near the Comoros in 2009, killing 152. She was found clinging to wreckage after floating in the ocean for 13 hours.
- Jim Polehinke was the co-pilot and sole survivor of a 2006 Comair flight that crashed in Lexington, Kentucky, killing 49.
Attacks on Egypt’s long rooted Copts
Egypt’s Copts belong to one of the world’s oldest Christian communities, with Mark the Evangelist credited with founding their church around 300 AD. Orthodox Christians account for the overwhelming majority of Christians in Egypt, with the rest mainly made up of Greek Orthodox, Catholics and Anglicans.
The community accounts for some 10 per cent of Egypt’s 100 million people, with the largest concentrations of Christians found in Cairo, Alexandria and the provinces of Minya and Assiut south of Cairo.
Egypt’s Christians have had a somewhat turbulent history in the Muslim majority Arab nation, with the community occasionally suffering outright persecution but generally living in peace with their Muslim compatriots. But radical Muslims who have first emerged in the 1970s have whipped up anti-Christian sentiments, something that has, in turn, led to an upsurge in attacks against their places of worship, church-linked facilities as well as their businesses and homes.
More recently, ISIS has vowed to go after the Christians, claiming responsibility for a series of attacks against churches packed with worshippers starting December 2016.
The discrimination many Christians complain about and the shift towards religious conservatism by many Egyptian Muslims over the last 50 years have forced hundreds of thousands of Christians to migrate, starting new lives in growing communities in places as far afield as Australia, Canada and the United States.
Here is a look at major attacks against Egypt's Coptic Christians in recent years:
November 2: Masked gunmen riding pickup trucks opened fire on three buses carrying pilgrims to the remote desert monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor south of Cairo, killing 7 and wounding about 20. IS claimed responsibility for the attack.
May 26, 2017: Masked militants riding in three all-terrain cars open fire on a bus carrying pilgrims on their way to the Monastery of St. Samuel the Confessor, killing 29 and wounding 22. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attack.
April 2017: Twin attacks by suicide bombers hit churches in the coastal city of Alexandria and the Nile Delta city of Tanta. At least 43 people are killed and scores of worshippers injured in the Palm Sunday attack, which narrowly missed a ceremony presided over by Pope Tawadros II, spiritual leader of Egypt Orthodox Copts, in Alexandria's St. Mark's Cathedral. ISIS claimed responsibility for the attacks.
February 2017: Hundreds of Egyptian Christians flee their homes in the northern part of the Sinai Peninsula, fearing attacks by ISIS. The group's North Sinai affiliate had killed at least seven Coptic Christians in the restive peninsula in less than a month.
December 2016: A bombing at a chapel adjacent to Egypt's main Coptic Christian cathedral in Cairo kills 30 people and wounds dozens during Sunday Mass in one of the deadliest attacks carried out against the religious minority in recent memory. ISIS claimed responsibility.
July 2016: Pope Tawadros II says that since 2013 there were 37 sectarian attacks on Christians in Egypt, nearly one incident a month. A Muslim mob stabs to death a 27-year-old Coptic Christian man, Fam Khalaf, in the central city of Minya over a personal feud.
May 2016: A Muslim mob ransacks and torches seven Christian homes in Minya after rumours spread that a Christian man had an affair with a Muslim woman. The elderly mother of the Christian man was stripped naked and dragged through a street by the mob.
New Year's Eve 2011: A bomb explodes in a Coptic Christian church in Alexandria as worshippers leave after a midnight mass, killing more than 20 people.
At a glance - Zayed Sustainability Prize 2020
Launched: 2008
Categories: Health, energy, water, food, global high schools
Prize: Dh2.2 million (Dh360,000 for global high schools category)
Winners’ announcement: Monday, January 13
Impact in numbers
335 million people positively impacted by projects
430,000 jobs created
10 million people given access to clean and affordable drinking water
50 million homes powered by renewable energy
6.5 billion litres of water saved
26 million school children given solar lighting
The Vines - In Miracle Land
Two stars
Opening day UAE Premiership fixtures, Friday, September 22:
- Dubai Sports City Eagles v Dubai Exiles
- Dubai Hurricanes v Abu Dhabi Saracens
- Jebel Ali Dragons v Abu Dhabi Harlequins
The%20specs
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The specs
Engine: 5.2-litre twin-turbo V12
Transmission: eight-speed automatic
Power: 715bhp
Torque: 900Nm
Price: Dh1,289,376
On sale: now
Company Profile
Founders: Tamara Hachem and Yazid Erman
Based: Dubai
Launched: September 2019
Sector: health technology
Stage: seed
Investors: Oman Technology Fund, angel investor and grants from Sharjah's Sheraa and Ma'an Abu Dhabi
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