Through a video trail starting in a group of children in a suburb outside of Stockholm, Sweden and continuing to a group of children in a suburb outside of Stellanboch, South Africa a dialogue through film has been created.
This project is about translatability between different layers of mediation: film, language, speech and acting. An attempt to approach teaching in a way that enables learners to represent their own identities.
Narratives make sense of the world around us and our actions in it. Some go so far as to say that we are our stories. Objects witness our actions and hold our stories. They remain through time.
I am interested in how our objects connect us to the past and those around us, and how this is communicated in oral narratives. I explore how objects weave together time and stories to make the past accessible in the present and how this can be used pedagogically.
I constantly find imaginary places around me and within myself. To perceive that which is hidden from my senses, I use my own imagination cast from memory and associations, from the hints, distortotions or alterations of the place.
There are no innocent objects.
They all carry a silent testimony.
As a designer and producer, I move between all parts of production. I am the designer, but also the product developer, the strategist, the visionary, the economist, the co-worker, the project manager, the marketer. But, I am also a consumer, and I am fascinated by beautiful images, eye-catching logos and promises of a better, easier and more stylized life.
You hold in your hands the continuation of a project that started almost five years ago. After having worked as a designer on assignments and with my own productions for many years, more and more questions that demanded answers were cropping up. The result was an essay in book form: Brave New Production, where, among other things, I question prevalent structures and approaches within the multi-layered area that is production. I have now continued further and deeper into certain questions while leaving others behind. This is presented in a new magazine. This format allows me to highlight specific subjects, phenomena, events and people. These may appear to be disconnected, but I believe that they, in the highest degree, influence us in some form on the macro or micro level. It also allows me to work with others who may have something to contribute to the project in the form of new nuances and pieces of the puzzle.
I want to bring our notions of how we value objects to light based on how, where and by whom we believe them to be made. In the long run, it also mirrors how differently we value people. I believe that there are no innocent objects. They all have a background; they have all been touched by human beings and by machines and they are all the result of different systems. Their quality, price and appearance bear silent witness to this. I want to seek out the “dark” side of MADE IN and find out what is behind these significant and often decisive words, both in practice and in our notions and values. We are all part of a larger, holistic course of events; we are all affected, directly or indirectly. We are pulled in as consumers and winners at one end – but as citizens, we often become losers. My intention is not to give an answer as to what is better than something else. I want to ask inconvenient questions and try to find explanations for something which is far more complex than what most of us think, and not leave the discussion solely to those on the other side – politicians, companies, economists and theoreticians – but instead represent a party with different starting points. I want to tackle some of these subjects in ways that may contribute to them being highlighted and discussed by more people from all the aspects they deserve: historically, politically, artistically and economically. I would also like to approach from angles that we may not be so used to. Is it the case that the value we give the objects mirrors the value we give the people behind them?
Margot Sucksdorff Barolo, designer
“By what means are you and I made so obedient and so predictable? The invisible maps and internalized compasses that let us know both where we are and where we are going, not in the visible and material landscapes composed of earth and air, fire and water, but in the invisible universe that is one with what is socially taken for granted – how are these maps and compasses constructed?”*
For the last two years, based on this question, I have researched the world-view: a place in human consciousness that is hard to reach and is of great significance for a person’s personality and actions as well as for their perception of reality. I have conducted an expedition in my internal and external world.
Using my own consciousness as a field of research, I have tried to grasp and understand – but also to tackle and change – the world view that exists in each and every one of us as an internal map and which seems to form the basis of our orientation through life. I have primarily focused on its landmarks and boundaries, symbols which imply that it contains an implicit story of order and power. The Thomas theorem emphasizes one of the gravest dangers and one of the greatest possibilities of the world-view: “If people define situations as real, they become real in their consequences.” By challenging my limitations and embracing uncertainty, I have closed in on a subversive approach which allows me to assume a more active role in the eternal conflict of interest between freedom and control.
The project is presented as travel literature.
* Gunnar Olsson, Professor emeritus of Geography at Uppsala University.
Lågtryck Förlag (own publication)
Graphic form: Niklas Sundberg
Edition: 1,000 copies
Pages: 290
Price: SEK 250
ISBN: 978-91-637-2654-5
Information: www.farligtland.se
Identity versus society is an investigation built on studies of popular culture which aims to study and analyze the factors that affect processes related to the construction and formation of identity.
In my project, I use a visual survey to investigate how 50 different people give more or less attention to different visual elements. The elements influencing their choices are perception, culture and their own experiences. The statistical data generated by the survey have been converted into graphical patterns.
The purpose is to communicate facts in a more direct and visual way than presenting them in numerical form, and to find points of contact between the abstract and the concrete.
Today’s debate on stress among teachers is highly relevant in a time when this profession in particular has high figures for long-term sick leave. Behavioral studies talk about the concept of stressors, external stress factors, one of which is undesired sound, described as noise. In my investigation, I want to find out more about noise and how this affects visual arts teachers in the classroom context.
Through four visual arts teachers’ experiences of noise, we discuss the emotions and thoughts they were subjected to in previous situations they have been in. Questions about how to prevent noise in the classroom seem relevant as this will always be a problem in school even after this project.
Artistic research demands that the characteristics of artistic practice are negotiated within the framework of research. A key question within this negotiation concerns the challenges that arise in the attempt to articulate and communicate research with a strong experiential component derived from methods that may be playful, experimental, embodied, improvisatory, unpredictable or non-repeatable. In the ambition to expose practice as research, the constraints of format and of technologies become important considerations. What are the particular expositional challenges for a form of research that deploys multiple strategies, materials or physical encounters for communicating its insights?
This paper, which was funded by the KU Board, explores the challenges of documenting artistic research and how far existing forms of research publication and dissemination delimit the ambitions of artistic research and the subsequent application of its results. It supplements the author’s work on ‘giving an account’ of practice-based research via hybrid literary forms, arguing that artistic research can develop distinctive or even innovative textual and extra-textual forms of research communication and thereby address audiences beyond established constituencies. The paper will be published in The Exposition of Artistic Research: Publishing Art in Academia [Leiden University Press, 2013], edited by Michael Schwab and Henk Borgdorff.
How can a subjectivization process be given more scope in teaching today? Using writing as a method, to explore how subjects, through actions, can be constituted in education based on social constructionist and post-structuralist theories.
I have examined the most important place in our lives: our home. A place where we live, work and meet other people. How is compact living supposed to fulfill all our needs?
27 m2 = 84 m3
Seeing the room in terms of volume offers many more opportunities than only being restricted to floor space. Like a stage designer at a theater, volume provides the freedom to create the space, function, environment, dramaturgy and setting required by the plot.
A bedroom, a dining room, a study and a dance floor constitute set changes in my story, which begins in my own one-bedroom apartment. I base my work on 27 m2, a concrete ceiling and a 5 m ceiling height. I hoist the table, chair and bed up to the ceiling, one by one, in order to achieve complete freedom to change the room just as I like it.
I investigate the visual conventions of surveillance cameras. Hyper-reality and displacements.
What will kosmos say?
The word κόσμος in the Greek language has diverse definitions beyond the profound known one that relates to notions of the universe or the world. In ancient Greek it stands for jewellery and is equivalent for “the people” in Neo-Greek. By reloading these meanings to the above question, its impact changes. It can have a personal/ private or collective/ public notion at the same time.
Based on these manifold meanings, the title of the work implies several interpretations and sets a bridge between adornment, self-exposure and engagement in the public realm.
The current social/ political struggles of our times emphasize the need to rethink and rebuild ways of operating within the society through the function of “catharsis”. Starting from the individual and leading further, to the “catharsis” of the society, of the whole. The aspect of wearing one‘s kosmos and presenting oneself to others contributes to a hopefully evolutionary dialogue.
We are the only species which consciously, deliberately alters its appearance. This has been true in every respect of human history and will always be so because bodily expression can communicate things which words never can. Found throughout the world and in an extraordinary range of cultures, masks are clearly one of humankind’s most ancient and important inventions.
Our contemporary tendency is to see the function of masks as simply one of concealing one’s true identity. Cross-culturally and historically however, the primary, thoroughly extraordinary function of the mask is that of revealing, rather than concealing; the revealing of a different persona or entity that functions as a mediator between material and more subtle dimensions.
My project is a visual exploration on the ambivalent, performative/transformative role of the mask and its theatrical significance in relation to the daily life performance of the individual.
My project investigates the role and necessity of the graphic designer in relation to the layout of prosaic text.
“Typesetter” is an old profession which traditionally meant manually arranging types into rows for maximum readability. The linotype machine introduced at the turn of the last century and the advent of the personal computer have in many ways replaced this role with artificial intelligence and the “graphic designer”.
Centuries of conventions have led to the modern reader swallowing all prosaic text, often without noticing its visual aspect.
Consequently, the thing most readers know nothing about is a profession and a process that is not only undergoing great change, but also raises issues regarding the purpose of the designer.
How much space should a designer take up in the text? How do you choose typeface? Does creativity belong in designing text? Can text be separated from its visual expression?
I have interviewed a number of designers, writers, poets and publishers to discuss these issues. I have conducted practical experiments to explore the roles and relationship between form and content.
I marvel at the way children view the world. Their honesty, curiosity and ability to say precisely what they think. How children view everything with fresh eyes and how they can explain things in the most obvious ways.
These qualities vanish over time and as we get older, but it is something I want to preserve. With help from children, how can we challenge the design process and bring in different and creative elements to view the world in new ways?
In my project, I want to transfer children’s interpretations and understandings of various concepts into objects.
The work is part of a process investigating the possibility to use the concept Mutual Aid as a basis for a nursing theory approach, for example as an action in preparation for when the civilization of economic expansion collapses in the future.
How do we actually think about the decisions we make? Do we give ourselves space for reflection and do we always see all alternative routes?
In an age where the pillars of our society are crumbling, it becomes clear that we need to re-think. But how? As early as when we begin school and are formed to fit better into our society, blockages start forming in our brains and our creative thinking is drastically restricted. What is required in order to think outside these blockages?
In my degree project, I investigate how an increased diversity of sensory impressions may promote reflection and free thinking in decision-making situations. In the constructed environments in which we live, sensory impressions are all alike and plain. By focusing on small details, I want to construct a path for thinking that can take us out of the powerlessness to act that we are in today.
Liberating objects in a thought-paralyzing environment.
My work focuses on the question of identity; how we form groups and how we construct society. I work with photography, video, sound and text to explore different ways of looking at our existence and why we act like we do. I see the world built up in structural, personal and intersubjective ways. All these different layers exist simultaneously through my work.
We are all affected by the space we are in, especially when we are in an emotionally sensitive state. Can design make childbirth easier and more natural?
A birthing room is constantly exposed to intensive wear and tear. Demands for hygiene and durability have left us with a cold but “functional” environment. But when we give birth in the room, it should also manifest a sacred and harmonic expression. Today’s stress and its view of childbirth have affected women to the extent that Cesarean sections have increased heavily all over the world, resulting in more complications.
In my project, I have investigated the possibility to use design to create a more sacred and harmonic expression to promote more natural childbirth, without lowering standards of hygiene and function.
In my degree project, I investigate concepts related to creative intelligence.
What is inventiveness? What is creativity? Why do we have an interest in creative people and their thoughts and works? How does human intelligence function when an inventive work is created?
My degree project will be an attempt to translate these ideas and concepts to a formed work.
Food always tastes better outdoors. And when you are outdoors the breaks are usually
the best times. Especially when you have a campfire to gather around, just like
people have done since the break of dawn. My work is a set of pots for outdoor
use, adapted to cooking real food over an open fire. Just the right size for a
small company to bring in the boat or canoe, on the hunting or fishing trip, or
just to use in the garden.
What is an object?
Imagine if we could practice and express our creative ability more often in everyday life.
If we would pay attention to details and really observe our surrounding, we might discover that we don’t really know it. Seeing objects from a new perspective means to really observe. Look at them and see them. Disconnect the connections we have to functions and conventions. Put our own reflections in relation to our surrounding and the products around us.
Think, interpret and discover the endless possibilities hiding behind the obvious.
The project is an analysis of the way we see and look at objects.
Three everyday objects have gone through an analysis of two phases (deconstruction and material change) in order to really observe them and somehow show the details we take for granted.
An analysis that became a method to create new form, to create objects to be observed. To be looked at and not to be taken for granted.
Exploring with a Chair
I have investigated furniture and how they function.
I believe that function has a lot to do with how we perceive them.
Perceive by how we see them.
Perceive by what we call them, their name.
What we see and its name makes us understand.
Understand how it functions.
We see, we don’t have to use it.
I build furniture that is the other way around.
I have to use it to understand.
Understand how it functions.
Nor name or how it looks decides that.
It all begins with a thought.
A thought and a chair.
The thought is a seed that grows, the chair is the tool to understand the thoughts.
I pick it apart and build it together, build it apart and pick it together.
The chair and the thoughts.
With themselves and with each other.
I understand something, I understand nothing.
It is confusing.
I look at it all and understand something again.
Understand that small differences makes big difference.
Understand how clear the chair is.
Understand how unclear the others are.
Understand that I don’t understand them by how they look.
Understand that I don’t understand them by their name.
They are confusing.
Not at all like the chair.
Rather like something else, something to explore.
A small series of objects which gives rise to thinking about compact living. Ways for the smart and the different to meet the rational and emotional. Why is traditional, modernist “compact living” so often about hiding and concealing?
Fragmented Elements
Elemetary geometrical forms
Objects taken from nature
Coloring
Symbolic values
Industry
Society
Desirable Objects revolves around objectification in a combination of female and animal trophies. It is based on European hierarchical dualism, where woman and nature are seen as connected, but inferior. They symbolize darkness, chaos and emotions, while the man stands for the opposite; civilization, light, order and intellect. In my work, this view has resulted in a similar exploitation of both woman and nature.
At the center of what I’m doing is the concept of constructing collages. The easiest way to explain my work is: I make soup. What I throw in is different every time and therefore, the outcome is different while the goal is to analyze how things work together.
I’ve always dreamt of a higher form of communication than the existing language of today; something more suitable to our capacity to think in imagery. What if you could see what I can think and vice versa? Until that day, all I can do is to try and present my capacity to create imaginative worlds and what they look like.
Manufacturing Escape is as much a linguistic investigation in visual representations of words as a revival of the traditions and esthetics of psychedelic art.
My degree project is a visual culture education investigation based on reflexive interviews with three non-heterosexual teachers and how open they are about their sexuality at the schools where they teach.
An industrial design perspective on the human relationship to food, investigating the zeitgeist and including movements of localism and hyper-commercialism in future aspects. The result is an exploratory design process that conceptualizes a proposal for kitchen spaces and food consumption.
Everyday architectural structures are highly programmed. What happens when you apply the logic of one structure to another, and as a consequence distorts its original meaning?
I have altered representations of architectural structures by exploring the gap that occurs when translating them from the two-dimensional to the three-dimensional. By shifting scale, material and form, sculptural re-appropriations emerge, proposing a new perspective on our built environment.
I encounter myself in an animal, florid and beautiful paradise garden that makes my closed world expand and explode.
As I dig deeper into the world of the figurine, the illusion is broken. The revelation may be comical, sad or incomprehensible in the sculpture of frozen time.
The imaginary mercilessly penetrates the real. And there I am lost. Forever.
I flee, but the dream pursues me.
The visual impressions demand a lot of my brain power; I make pictures to be able to let them go, to share them.
It’s like a primitive drive – to share by spreading paint on a surface.
“Look what I saw!” is carved out with a brush.
In my work I have focused on various joints and the forms that they can take. A joint is that which binds together different things. The joint can be a seam in textiles, a paper clip for a stack of papers, the meeting of two pieces of wood etc. Joints also exist between us as humans. Something that cements us together in various situations and groups. The joints can arise between humans, animals, institutions, political parties, sports teams, shared interests etc.
To understand the connection between physical joints and those which are more abstract, I have used poetry as a tool. Poems are often very concrete, but concern things that are hard to reach by any alternative means. The limitations and rules that are established when you write a poem force you to adopt an unabashed and direct tone that is also open to interpretation. A very precise poem may also tell us about other things and create understanding on several levels.
You can read joints with your eyes, but also with your hands. This is why it is easier if you are allowed to put them together yourself. This is the reason why I have worked on “dismountable joints” that you can join and break apart yourself.
My name is Artem Christiansson. My original name was Artem Kolotilin. Christiansson is disrespectfully stolen by me from my first Swedish paterfamilias. I consider this theft to be my first and until now, my greatest piece of contemporary art. My second best piece was a small, innocent mustache that I grew during a year in middle school. It did not make me popular in my Swedish school, but was admired as a great achievement in Ukraine.
When I started Konstfack, I was constantly made to feel dumb and insecure. This condition seemed to incarnate the dichotomy of my juvenescent mustache. Becoming ready to wave the white flag, I turned to the seemingly obsolete exoticism that dilutes the blood of the whole middle class.
At the present moment, my artistry feeds off poverty and inferiority no longer known to me. Simultaneously, I feed the ego of eternally good, civilized saviors from the west so that we at least can imagine that some change is made and get on with watching stereotypical videos of stupid, drunk Russians on YouTube.
“In the gift economy, the more you give the richer you are.”*
A gift economy is an economic system in which people give valuable goods and services to one another without explicit agreements for future rewards. Unlike money transactions, in which there are no future obligations, gifts imply future gifts and therefore can establish relations and a sense of community.
This project questions our current failed economical system and proposes alternative ways of thinking, producing, consuming and exchanging by including the principles of gift exchange. The aim is to re-learn gift-giving by shaping a system in a way which allows people to give. What could gift-giving mean for different people, disciplines or contexts? How can experience design trigger a gift economy?
* Charles Eisenstein
The result of increased population and increased welfare is increased consumption. The big challenge lies in how to consume in a responsible way, creating a sustainable future.
I have examined how we can generate energy with our bodies in order to gain a palpable relationship to our energy consumption. If we use our muscles to produce it, our bodies are viewed as power plants that convert carbohydrates into movement; if we then compare how much we can produce with how much we consume, it very quickly becomes clear that the difference is staggering. An inefficient but educational method that may help us reflect on whether or not it is really worth leaving the light on in that room which no one is currently in.
With my project I want to examine the ability to remind us about our responsibility to consume smarter and better with the aid of a simple physical movement.
My project is about different ways of looking at the world and what displacements and fusions of different versions of the world might look like.
Simulation is important to me, and it is by investigating and repeating simulations that I try to understand what things are and what they might conceivably be.
In my practice, I depict places and their architecture in text, drawings and models. I’m interested how these places affect us and in outlining a future that can unfold there.
My degree project is a graphic novel and an architectural model. The graphic novel is titled Picking Up Pieces and deals with loss and psycho-geography; how our environment affects us psychologically.
The story follows a young woman, who in dealing with the death of her lover, finds that the traumatic memory of her loss is tied to a collapsed archive.
Later, she realizes that not only the archive, but other places in different ways similar to it, triggers the same painful recollections. Now at her wits end, she makes a discovery.
In Recycling Memories, Fridrik examines the psychological phenomenon of flashbacks, in search of ways to trigger memories. Flashbacks are immersive, involuntary memories that are triggered through sensory experience. A certain smell, song or sight can evoke a moment or feeling from past experiences, bringing us inward and backward.
By engaging the senses, is it possible to deliberately trigger an involuntary memory?
Can we orchestrate a sensory experience in such a way that we might be transported to a past experience? Can we recycle our memories through the experience of flashbacks?
In this piece, Fridrik tries to capture the moment when the rememberer travels back in time and space, through a sensory stimuli.
This is a test, an experiment if you will. An introverted journey to the center of the self.
If you want air conditioning that does not require a permanent installation, you will today be referred to what is known as portable air conditioning. This product segment is completely flooded with products that all seem to be cast from the same mold and that neither fit into the intended context nor are easy to deal with.
The project has its base in a multidisciplinary team consisting of myself as an industrial designer and the design engineer Jessica Dahlkvist from KTH. On behalf of Electrolux, we have created a proposal for a portable air conditioner based on existing technology and user insights.
The consumption of music has changed drastically with recent technological development. Spotify has changed the way we consume music in Sweden in a major way. A huge amount of music is now available to you without having to go to a store to buy it or download large music files to your computer.
The market is still young and there are not that many competitors of Spotify, but two years ago, the Norwegian competitor WiMP took on the Swedish market. Their service is quite different from Spotify, but is that enough to challenge Spotify on the Swedish market?
In my project, I have investigated how WiMP could develop their service in order to attract more users in Sweden.
Through interviews, observations and other research, I found that the most important things to provide were know-how and motivation. The current process of acquiring the service is too abstract and tiresome for different reasons.
My proposals include a physical start-kit which will provide the consumers with everything they need to get started, thereby providing the service in an instant and helps users who find online registration difficult. The other proposal is an exclusive digital invitation which is more focused on motivating the skilled digital consumer. The third proposal is a unique, new feature which is intended to motivate and clearly differentiate WiMP from Spotify. The users can post events with geographical data and also view all their friends’ activities and events on one news-page.
Why even write when it is so difficult? It’s more fun to draw. But we’re not allowed to do that, are we? You can’t write like that? is a picture book story for children and teachers. The basis of the story comes from my and others’ experiences of living with dyslexia. 6% of the population have dyslexia, and most – 5 of 6 people with dyslexia – can be helped with the right teaching. But really the story is not about dyslexia directly, but rather about being creative and the desire to make your voice heard.
UNDER CONSTANT CONSTRUCTION!
– Engage yourself in making!
You will find a program for speldosan’s activities in front of the object.
Welcome!
During this project, I have been searching for a way to mix my interest for craft-making with time-based, performative and musical activities. The object speldosan, is the starting point for a week filled with improvised experiments with sound and craft and it is also a sculpture in this exhibition. The structure speldosan, is supposed to be reused in another form and another time, like an old carpet you unravel to make a new one, but with a slightly different pattern.
Who is [krig]?
[krig] is a project made by Karin Bäckström and Jon Perman. They named themselves after the tradition of provocative punk aesthetic, an idea about resistance, and DIY ethics. Together they release records, make installations, run an independent gallery and arrange parties using the name [krig] as a shared identity. In the end, all the experiments and events end up in an idea about creating your own reality, by making art and shaping an identity for [krig] that offers alternatives to given ways of behavior.
Can a phenomenon from the digital realm materialize?
An Animated GIF* IRL** springs from my boredom of all things digital and the grip they had taken on my life and work. However, this boredom was also merged with a strange sort of fascination. I got bored to the extent of wanting to escape the digital realm, but without leaving it. Could it be possible to instead escape into it? I wanted it to materialize. How would it look like IRL?
An Animated GIF IRL is about translating between the digital and the physical realm; transcending the digital realm. An Animated GIF IRL is a physical manifestation of its digital self, the GIF.
I was drawn to the GIF because of its connotations with the repeat surface pattern. A few images are repeated in an endless loop creating a pattern that is repeated temporally by transformation and movement. Considering the GIF using the concept of spacetime,*** the GIF is a repeat pattern in which the repetition takes place in the temporal dimension time while the repetition of the surface repeat pattern is taking place in the spatial dimensions.
The repetition of An Animated GIF IRL takes place in the temporal dimension using the body of a physical structure.
*GIF is an abbreviation for the digital file format Graphics Interchange Format. An animated GIF is a short looped animation made from GIF-files.
**The acronym IRL is an abbreviation for ‘In Real Life’
***In physics, spacetime is any mathematical model that combines space and time into a single continuum. Spacetime is usually interpreted with space as existing in three dimensions and time playing the role of a fourth dimension that is of a different sort from the spatial dimensions.
With one percent owning 40 percent and 50 percent owning one percent and a system that facilitates, increases and worships this, the artist is left in a situation of financing and buying her/his own artwork, and most likely, donating it to another setting. The point is that we are educated in a profession that doesn’t exist. So how can we make it exist?
Assuming that we want to make it a profession.
The risk we run is that our domain is equated to other professions. Tasks are dictated, availability is determined, goals are decided; if they were not already anyway. So why not make it a profession, if not only to unite with other professions?
The truth is that there are no professions left.
We have no profession. We have no work. We have nowhere to go to seek recognition. We have no common surface of conflict. The title has no refuge and the content no host. We are homeless in the most thorough sense.
“Heavy yet silent the ravens rose. I followed, as in a haze… into the darkness, the silence, the cold ‘n the solitude…”*
* Pyret, Övre Kågedalen
Based on an Incomplete Collection of Fragments is a project about the method of collecting, exploring properties and finding out when an object changes to another.
It takes its starting point from the analysis of my collection of intuitively chosen objects, or fragments as I call them, and my interest in how space and objects relate to each other and us as human beings.
The outcome of my research is a collection of furniture that wants to interact with you, letting you decide how you want to use them depending on how you perceive them.
My interest in the field of inclusive design began with a simple but problematic observation: Why are ergonomic products that are designed to socially include people with a disability, often visually excluding?
The aim of my work has been to mend the practical focus of inclusive design with a stronger, pragmatic regard to the importance of aesthetics for social inclusion.
The collection of a bar table and stools have been developed in collaboration with people who have been suffering from visual disabilities most of their lives. Having considered the poorest conditions of spatial awareness while designing, the products aim to help people orientate better in a space of objects as well as create not just a physical, but also a cognitive experience of the product. The work, and the resulting collection, helps to raise an issue with today’s inclusive products, as well as serves as an example of the paradoxical dimensions that the problem presents.
How do we experience spaces and architecture? How do they affect us, and could there be further dimensions in addition to the three that we are used to seeing?
My degree project is an investigation into how the world we live in may be expanded, new dimensions and portals opened up allowing us to focus on things that would otherwise be lost in the periphery.
Space-body-time-memory are all the elements that are required in order to experience that which has architectural value, but which is easily forgotten.
Lightness is one of the key features in a wheelchair; however, light wheelchairs are expensive and therefore not available for everybody who would benefit from using one.
In this project, I worked with the new and innovative manufacturing technique of bending carbon-reinforced-plastic. This combines the strength and lightness of carbon fiber with the rather simple and inexpensive technique of bending, resulting in Watson, a very light, yet affordable wheelchair.
Apart from wheelchairs that appear either sporty or technical, there are not very many options for the user to choose from. Common wheelchair design widely ignores the lifestyle or social aspirations of the users and rather focuses on the technical performance of the chair as an aid.
Watson provides a new approach and takes the social situation and the emotional relationship between the user and wheelchair into consideration. The appearance of it is simplified and discreet, though elegant in detail and affords the user to be in focus. It becomes a personal object rather than an anonymous medical aid.
The project, Objects of Ambiquity: An Introduction into the Role of the Object Mediator looks at a possible future situation where the designer has been installed as a creative mediator, working with historical records and artifacts within an institution’s collection.
When doing this, we are instantly confronted by both time and memory. Both of these constantly play against each other and so our attempt at understanding the past must include some degree of interpretation as a means of creatively gaining knowledge from what is left behind by the past; the artifacts of previous cultures.
By reinterpreting these objects and their relation to humans, we can gain new insight into where our history has taken us, its effects on our current situation and even our possible future.
Our products leak. Substances evaporate and are slowly worn off our possessions. Our houses crumble and corrode in the rain, and the air brings with it substances from distant industries. Many substances are toxic even at low concentrations, both to the organisms of the ecosystem and to humans. But toxicity depends on context: a substance in the wrong place. By looking at toxicity in this way, sources of emissions and leakage become an unused and free asset to nature’s ecosystem. A flow of materials that we can utilize, relocate and benefit from, while the toxicity is simultaneously rendered harmless.
What fascinates me most about the human body is its impermanence and how it changes through time despite our attempts to modify it. Michael Jackson was a living proof of a lifelong quest to achieve perfection; a great artist with an amazing life story that left behind a worn, fragile body that was anything but perfect.
My work is about corporeality, identity, life and death resulting from a fascination for the human body. I tend to dissect things, take them apart and put them together. Sculpting an object has become like a surgical incision; with needle and thread I sew layers together, piece by piece, into an organic shape. I am drawn to things in between. I collect fragments. One side of my work is about perfection and control, but also how opposites attract. As much as I search perfection, I look for imperfection.
In my degree project, I work with the inside of the human body. I am fascinated by this hidden world that we all have within us.
The inside of the body is something that human beings are incredibly dependent on; it must function as it should in order for us to survive. Furthermore, in our modern society, we control our bodies in various ways, but the inside of the body is something that we cannot control.
This lack of control of something that we are normally used to being able to influence and our dependence on a system that functions regardless of our involvement, makes our inside a kind of vulnerability that we all carry within us.
“My sister can’t do a ponytail on her own.”,
a friend said to me during a conversation about my degree project. I have given a lot of thought to ideals of beauty and they do to women in today’s society. There is so much with our bodies we should change to be accepted and perceived attractive. I am tired of the ideal and have oftentimes thought that I will not subscribe to these pretend rules – that I will not be part of that trash.
But after the conversation with my friend about what her little sister, with impairments of the hands, was not able to do herself, the thought occurred to me.
That I am in a privileged position to be able to choose what I want to do with my appearance.
In my degree project, I have focused on gender from a different viewpoint. I have tried to solve problems with beauty products/steps that are difficult or impossible to use if you have impaired function in your hands. Just so everyone can have the opportunity to choose for themselves.
The background of this project is about skill, the core concept within craft. The term is embedded in the craft field and loaded with values and preconceptions. How is it discussed today and what does it really mean to the maker? The traditional stone working skill is my most precious tool; it is my fetish and my lifeline. My practice is dominated by one material — stone. The relationship to it is so thorough that it becomes more than just a material to begin with. Yet, what happens when this skill encounters ready-made marble tableware, tacky candleholders or salt shakers from the 80s or mass-produced items instead of raw material? How does it change the work, the values and the control of skills?
Everything around us is changing. It is being transformed in unpredictable and unanticipated ways; nothing remains permanent. It is hard to see how the process goes. The transformation emerges little by little, slowly and silently.
I have been interested in residual and unseen pathways in nature; the details that we do not notice and influence the environment. I think of all things as they are coming into being or dissolving into nothingness. This flux of the moment includes the experience of loss and transformation as objects are changing from one to another stage of being. I attempt to capture these delicate presences and define the boundary of nothingness, which also reflects the moment our emotions experience existence and non-existence. I aim to bring another dimension to objects I create in order to display and discuss this instability in order to widen the awareness of the environment.
As a pattern designer, creating repetition is a central part of my work. Everyday life consists of repeated actions and activities; patterns of behavior and aesthetic choices that help determine our sense of self and the experiences we obtain from our surroundings. Why do we tend not to pay attention to these everyday activities or daily routines, such as getting up, having breakfast, going to work etc., unless something goes from being familiar to being strange?
I see my pattern designs as a celebration of everyday life, its repetition and all things ordinary. By taking a break from the day-to-day activities and appreciating the moment, we enhance our experience and can reflect on the various ways we interact with our environments.
Being a mailman means heavy and tough work. Many different duties have to be carried out, including the delivery of mail by push-bike, running stairs and many heavy lifts. I have myself had experience of this during my time as a bike mailman in Stockholm.
I have chosen to base my work on how the mailmen at Bring Citymail currently work and the problems they experience with their bikes. I have focused on the design of the bike and its accessories as well as how the form signals the features and functions that are important for a mail bicycle.
The goal of my project is to improve the work situation of bike mailmen while creating a post bicycle that mailmen want.
Transparent glass has, over several years, managed to infiltrate every part of modern society, changing both human behavior and language. And yet, it is more invisible than ever. This current status calls for a new perspective on glass.
My work explores glass beyond the object. To understand the immaterial potential of transparent glass, one must look beyond surface and object and into and through the material. It is not about the object, but what happens through the object. With a point of departure in handmade photographic glass filters and photography, I have been researching the immaterial aspects and the ambiguity of transparent glass and how these notions can mediate absence and presence.
In a society of the liberal man, we must ask ourselves again and again: should a smaller group of owners have control over people’s lives, routines, desires, neighborhood, art?
And IF we have to answer yes to that question, IF capital ratio remains the only policy we can refer to and IF we agree that stock prices are the measure – then we must also admit that the culture we live in, not only lacks expression and vitality, but above all breaks our hearts.
A culture where grievances or works of art are interpreted by the incomes of the few.
“I hate this place” and they respond by selling out earth’s last public good. Or just by: but what are you doing here then?
Some of us here can never love without also hating at the same time.
Our period is about collective betrayal: the lack of recognition of certain people’s pain.
Jordbro Stadsteater is a feminist act of resistance. It is a life conservation of another mental and physical logic. A participatory logic, beyond the unpleasant, oppressive, patriarchal and merciless private or semi-owned rooms.
Shared spaces and passages. When you move through these kinds of spaces, I see it as moving through a landscape. How this landscape looks like can be very different and what will happen on the way depends on what you will encounter. I find it interesting how we use basic orientation behaviors to navigate and scan our environment. To find our way, find a place to linger or even to gather around. The objects we encounter in the space will often work as indicators and help us to know how to behave in the space; whether we want to find the fastest route, the most comfortable one or to find a place to linger.
This project is about the creation, use and disposition of spatial objects as elements of a landscape for indoor shared spaces and passages.
Things are so much more than just physical function.
We express ourselves with, fall in love and remember through things.
They also reflect the spirit of the times in which they were created.
Things fill an emotional function and are, in that sense, an important tool.
In my project, I want to demonstrate the value of things and argue that form not only follows a practical function. The result is a collection of tales about the meaning of a cabinet in a small Swedish province in a few moments in history.
The story takes off in the late 1700s fisherman’s home where the magnificent rustic cabinet plays the main role. It then ends in our times where I tell my own “cabinet tale”. My cabinet tale depicts Bohuslän, a cabinet inspired by the pre-industrial product development, customized for our industrial society.
Bohuslän is my homage to the pleasant and sustainable way rural people relate to things.
Knas is the story of the refugee family Korostami. For my degree project, I wrote the script and drew the storyboard for an episode from the story.
Synopsis:
The year is 1986. Sweden’s Prime Minister has been murdered, nuclear fallout rains down over the Gävle area, and Maradona has single-handedly won the victory for Argentina in the soccer World Cup. A plane from Milan lands at Arlanda Airport. On board are a family with two children, they wait patiently for all the other travelers to pass through customs before the father goes to the border police and says: “No passports.” They have fled a war-torn Iran and have arrived to a new life in a new country, Sweden.
Four years later, Khomeini is dead. The Berlin Wall has fallen. The Soviet Union is no more and the Cold War is over. The world is different. Sweden is in a deep recession, and right-wing winds are blowing. Sweden is different.
The family has lived in Borlänge for a couple of years, each member trying to find their place in a society whose traditions, views on family life and what the norm is stand in contrast to those of their homeland. But in the new country, it is not sufficient to adapt, everyone has to redefine for themselves what belonging and a family are – if they are going to manage to keep it together.
Being a welder requires patience, precision and strength.
The stationery welder is expected to work fast and efficiently.
However, observations, contextual interviews and workshops proved that
today’s equipment is not supporting the welder’s way of working.
Their work is based on movement in which they are forced to carry both torch and cable while constantly changing the grip and body position.
In a master collaboration with ESAB, I have been focusing on defining new working possibilities for the welder. These possibilities should prohibit issues often caused by the torch and the cable and at the same time provide a better working environment.
The interest for off-piste skiing has exploded in the last couple of years. More and more people are venturing further out into nature. Many skiers want to get as far away from the resort as possible and instead of using a ski lift they would rather walk up the mountain. IRIS is a ski backpack designed to meet the needs and wishes of these practitioners, both the professional and non-professional, with a strong focus on ease of use, flexibility and safety. No matter what equipment the user carries with him or her, the avalanche safety equipment is always accessible. The extended zipper affords the user to open the backpack very wide, which simplifies the preparation and packing. IRIS is compatible with an existing avalanche airbag system.
The project is done in collaboration with the Swedish outdoor brand Tierra.
When I find something for free in the street or in a bin, I feel like an archaeologist discovering a treasure.
I’ve been collecting clothes in the garbage of Emmaus for several months and designed a landscape out of them. A booklet lying in the middle of the installation gathers research and questions related to this idea.
A TREATMENT ARENA FOR REHABILITATION IN PRISON
In Scandinavian prisons today, there is an increasing focus on the rehabilitation of criminal behavior. Through work, education and treatment programs, the probation services goal is to bring about change and encourage the inmates to live a better life after time served, not simply provide secure custody.
My project is about how interior architecture can contribute to the therapy that is a part of this rehabilitation. With having respect, humanity and tolerance as core values in my project, I want to communicate that everyone deserves a second chance and that we cannot give up on anyone.
Working with the symbolism and philosophy of basic geometrical shapes within the design phase, I have created a separate pavilion on the prison site. The pavilion is the context of the therapy space and is an addition to the existing architecture.
“When we begin to see our world in simple shapes, our reality begins to simplify, and awareness comes about in a natural flow. Observing in terms of reduction eliminates unnecessary judgement.”*
The result is a space that through form, function and material choices has the goal to facilitate the therapy and influence the inmate during the sessions to improve the outcome of the treatment.
*Avia Venefica
I turn back. Go back in time. Escape from the city. Home to the village. Into the forest. To the elves, trolls, birds and moose. I think of other times, worlds. Of the things left behind that can never be refound. It disappeared somewhere in the fog. Sank into the mire. But maybe if I look really well under the stones or among all the needles lying all around. Maybe I can find a little thread of all that magic that had once enveloped me completely. Back then it was so obvious. My friends were flying, swimming, and some you did not even see except fleetingly in the corner of your eye.
In my degree project, I bring together the human body with that of the tree in order to unite humanity with the forest and its creatures again. Both visible and invisible.
Design takes place in our lives, naturally and sometimes invisibly, but how can we become alert to its impact on us? How can we as designers elaborate on our role in creating tools for people’s lives?
A handmade metal wire toy I found in my parents’ house made me discover the world of mandalas; a Buddhistic symbol and a tool for spiritual enlightenment. Mandalas speak of the relation between us and the world and balance between body and mind.
In my Master’s project, the act of playing is explored as a tool for altering perspectives on our physical environment. Inspired by the mandala, an alternative approach to functional form is visualized, connecting our bodies and minds in closer relation to a playful and imaginative state of being. By investigating our physical environment and encouraging interaction, new mantras for our everyday lives may be created.
#generalperformance #post-Fordism #labor #economy #transparency
#fashion #art #publicity #self-performance #speculation #value
I primarily work with and through glass, but I also use other materials like textile, metal, ceramic and epoxy. Through my work I got to a point where I started to question the
current ideals that are connected to form within our field, and to be able to
continue with glass; I had to find a texture or expression in glass that was not
shiny, thin and all of the other things that I learned glass should be. This led
to the development of a new technique called Burn-Out. This material
development has now become my method to question a norm of perfect smooth
surfaces and the power structure that supports and maintains that hierarchy of
expressions.
Ambivalence as an everyday occurrence.
With a philosophical approach to the topics, I aim to absorb the dynamics in the meeting between the intangible and the physical.
In the urban contemporary environment that we live in, I see a need for a physical context that contrasts the flow of information and inputs that we are exposed to.
From this point of view, I have created a concept of a space for contemplation, as a reply for both visual as well as mental boundaries that connects both the abstraction of the mind to the corporeal.
The space is the contextual setting from where I have created a resting chair that carries the body. The object is shaped with a tactile approach towards the use of the material; a dynamic, changeable and transformable sheet that interacts and responds to the imprint of the body.
When looking at our civilization today, how should we position ourselves within the structures set by our society? People are supposed to stand in line at stations or they are grouped to sit in circles in meeting rooms.
The spaces that one enters everyday has different orders, people learn to find their own positions within each space. The status of being in order has seemed to become a social standard to understand the surroundings and make everyday life function. Yet, at the end of the day, what does order and disorder mean to people as individual beings?
Every individual has their own routines to make things in order and avoid the troubles of disorder. If one carries their own order to organize an everyday space in their mind, what would the space look like?
The project tells a story of how individuals perceive order and disorder in space within one’s own psychic world.
A Chair Advent Called Chair Variety
During my Master’s project, I have designed one chair with one original shape, but with many different appearances. I was interested in different meetings; meetings in life between people, meetings between materials in a chair, meetings between industrialism and craftsmanship, but also meetings between my chair and the user.
I have investigated various materials and different ways of using them to achieve different appearances and areas of use.
I will show five different chairs, each one using different materials and combinations to show how one chair with the same metal structure and shape can look and behave with different materials on it. I have worked with rattan, leather, paper, string, metal and fabric.
A question, an assertion, a notion, a confirmation!
This project is an exploration of our inner emotional world. A work that will study human body language and how humans behave when in different moods. It forms the basis for furniture that has its origin in various states of human emotion.
The furniture collection comes together under the joint name “Are you”. For me, the expression symbolizes a questioning of a person by the norms of society. A questioning that for me has associations to many strong emotions/emotional mixes. “Are you” is a work based on emotions embodied in physical objects.
During a research process on financial speculation in relation to the home, Carl-Oskar Linné encounters statistics and reports that tell of rising unemployment among realtors. By investigating an alleged flight from the realtor profession and asking questions of prospective, current and former realtors, he attempts to understand the relationship of home sellers to their home, the housing list, the speculation mechanism and security. What are the living conditions and how is the relationship to housing policy?
Our cities and awareness have evolved. They influence our behavior. Has bike-sharing evolved in the same way? Does bike-sharing now fully correspond to our practice in town? Could the sharing experience enhance comfort similarly or even more as riding your own bike? Where are the limits of the system? When is it worth owning and when is it worth sharing?
In this Master’s project, I tried to identify the needs and desires of urban bicyclists in Stockholm by observing how they make use of their bikes in different times, in different contexts of use and in different scenarios. These understandings and their stories shaped a new possibility of sharing bikes in our every day environment.
Together with SL, Storstockholms Lokaltrafik as my fictional collaborator, I envisioned SL CYKEL, a muscle-driven way of individual public transport in Stockholm.
Researching and expressing a memory of place
We are all carriers of place; we all dwell in places of our past in a more or less conscious way.
For my Master’s project, I have been investigating how memory of place works. How it serves as a bodily anchor in time, a phenomena which ensures that we understand ourselves as continuous identities throughout time. But also, how it connects us to certain insights and experiences achieved at a given time and place and thus to values of the present which we associate with specific places.
As an object for these studies, I have been centering my work on the memory of a specific place that I parted from 17 years ago; the house and garden of my grandparents in Denmark. Not a special site in any notable way, but a place of great importance to me as the individual that I once was and now am.
I have carried out this investigation of my memory with an emphasis on materiality, hereby approaching memory of place as both a mental and bodily phenomena.
Artist duo, Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad, have undertaken a cultural pilgrimage in the footsteps of Damo Suzuki. They have explored various methods of art production by collaborating with someone they share ideas and strategies with. From placing a classified advertisement in a Swedish newspaper, Suzuki left Japan in early 1968 ending up in the village of Gräsmark. A booklet was created which documents what happened to Suzuki in Gräsmark and how he kept in contact with his Swedish friends after becoming a member of Can. During the summer of 2012, Lerin and Hystad travelled together with Suzuki to Japan, exploring ideas of improvisation and music as a platform for communication by documenting the Damo Suzuki’s Network Tour. On the 11th of February 2013, the duo performed an improvised concert together with Suzuki at Fylkingen, Stockholm. This album presents Suzuki and the duo’s journey together, as well as a live recording of the performance.
On 180 gram vinyl, comes in a gatefold jacket and includes a 54-page booklet.
Available on Clouds Hill Ltd. in October 2013.
“To hear is to be subject.”*
Can sound penetrate beyond language? Is it a language of its own, a language without barriers or parameters and non-specific or defined by geography? Is it a language that relies purely on resonance? And what is resonance, can it be defined in a way where it does not evoke or suggest?
Redefining the hierarchal structure and elitism found in words, words that can be relevant or irrelevant, one may seek to search for a meaning or let it pass undefined, perhaps let it be filled with uncertain assumption, sound on the other hand, is integral to a bodily function, its visceral reaction is penetrative beyond awareness. It is in fact antilinguistic in its nature. However it is defined by its visceral connotations.
So what does it mean to be involuntarily exposed to sounds, music for sake of this argument, in a public space, to know that we automatically react to sound in a visceral way? What does it mean to experience this in such a way, in such a space? In such a manner? Does this then forth involuntarily connect us, to a set locality? To each other? To we form a composition with one another in the architecture of sound? How are we composers in the spatial experience?
Exploring the corporeal specifics that are unique to the sound heard, as well as the universal aspects of the sound. We almost instinctively recognize a heartbeat; we associate a rate or repetition to what we perceive to be a heartbeat. What we in fact hear is the echo that the sound makes within our ribcage, making each heartbeat not only unique in its self but also relevant to our inwardly space. What does it mean to record such an intimate sound, and play it in a public space? What does it mean to place this intimacy outside, but to also invade the personal space yet again, by playing these sounds back at a specific frequency and in such a manner where one cannot avoid feeling the sound, not just hearing it.
*Paul Hegarty. Noise/ Music: A History. Pg 4.
Artist duo, Simon Torssell Lerin and Bettina Hvidevold Hystad, have undertaken a cultural pilgrimage in the footsteps of Damo Suzuki. They have explored various methods of art production by collaborating with someone they share ideas and strategies with. From placing a classified advertisement in a Swedish newspaper, Suzuki left Japan in early 1968 ending up in the village of Gräsmark. A booklet was created which documents what happened to Suzuki in Gräsmark and how he kept in contact with his Swedish friends after becoming a member of Can. During the summer of 2012, Lerin and Hystad travelled together with Suzuki to Japan, exploring ideas of improvisation and music as a platform for communication by documenting the Damo Suzuki’s Network Tour. On the 11th of February 2013, the duo performed an improvised concert together with Suzuki at Fylkingen, Stockholm. This album presents Suzuki and the duo’s journey together, as well as a live recording of the performance.
On 180 gram vinyl, comes in a gatefold jacket and includes a 54-page booklet.
Available on Clouds Hill Ltd. in October 2013.
“I felt much younger when I was 40 than when I was 20.”
Human life expectancy is continuously increasing and we experience more healthy years in our lives. We feel young, are socially engaged and active at older ages.
But our social norms are slow in adapting to this change. Society still labels individuals as old when they reach the age of sixty-five. Older age groups are marginalized and treated as a problem and economical burden. Can Experience Design change this perception?
This project investigates the social norms and the labels around aging and the aged. It proposes a new set of norms, a system that aims to enable a society that is inclusive towards people of all ages. This ageless system labels people not on the basis of their chronological age, but on their personal qualities and experiences.
The Major Arcana is the first of 22 cards in a tarot deck. This degree project is about interpreting and exploring the symbolism of the cards and the creation of archetypes.
Archetype* (Greek archetypos, which is a compound of ἀρχή archē “beginning, origin” + τύπος tupos, amongst others “pattern, model, type”) is a universally understood symbol, term, statement, or pattern of behavior, a prototype upon which others are copied, patterned, or emulated.* It has been the project’s goal to explore how the tarot system conveys this knowledge and tradition.
How can the process of learning Swedish be better adapted to immigrants’ needs and become more of a step towards inclusion into the society?
In co-creation with SFI-participants and teachers in Tensta and Eskilstuna, I have developed the service concept, Foodtalk that encourages a more motivating and fun way to learn Swedish. The aim is to enable SFI-participants, with no formal education or pre-existing reading or writing skills, to use their own practical skills from their home cultures in the learning.
The service initiates a social and motivating way to learn Swedish while highlighting competence and cultural diversity. It also presents an entertaining and social way for Swedish speakers, companies and other actors to show that they care and want to make a contribution to an inclusive society.
The actions of our lifespan form an invisible textile. The weaving of that textile formed by a person with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder is quite repetitive and therefore overlaps itself, with its repetitive movements, making it tighter and more rigid, eventually becoming all tangled up and stuck in the pattern of their behavior.
The aim of my Master’s project is to make a physical manifestation of this immaterial condition.
“There is nothing more basic than food. Food is the first of the essentials of life, our biggest industry, our most frequently indulged pleasure, the core of our most intimate social relationships, and perhaps the greatest cause of disease and death.”*
* Warren Belasco
Viewing your Home District – On the media presentation of the provinces in reality television and on YouTube.
The purpose of my investigation is to make visible the ways in which a provincial area, in this case the Värmland town of Säffle, is presented and contextualized in the media. I want to examine the role, for example, people from Säffle in television shows Bonde söker fru (TV4) and Lite sällskap (Kanal 5) play for the inhabitants of the town and how the shows mediate the place’s character. What consequences does this exposure have? Despite the “reality/realism” that the media often claim to present, we know it is more complex than that since “the creation of an image through a camera lens always involves some degree of subjective choice through selection, framing, and personalization”. * The aim is to investigate how Säffle’s youth look at the image of their home town exposed by the media. Does the media image match the residents’ view of the town?
Question: How do young people living in Säffle view the media portrayal of their home town?
* Sturken, Marita & Cartwright, Lisa (2009). Practices of Looking: An introduction to visual culture. 2. ed. New York: Oxford University Press, p. 16
Cycling is celebrated mainly for its simplicity, practicality and eco-friendly properties. We often hear the benefits it has on our health and environment, but it’s less common to talk about it from a social perspective. For my Master’s project, I focus on this neglected subject and explore cycling as a tool and method to connect people and initiate dialogues.
The project is a continuous research reaching its peak in an event series inviting participants to a shared bicycle ride and engaging them in conversations on a broad range of subjects. My goal is to create a fun and dynamic way for people to connect, share and discuss. It is a non-conventional graphic design project where my identity as a designer flourishes in the chosen solutions to communicate the vision of the project.
My interest is in relationships between surfaces, and what I can do to express something on a surface. In my visions, the surfaces have various characteristics. They can also be a sort of generalization of a form, movement, or room.
Black surfaces have recently become important. They come into being from a kind of rescue work that is most often about removing what is not working. But also as a contrast in the form of a negative energy or surface.
I also think of the rescue work as a way to tune the painting. A rescue work can also mean something else. For example, to push a painting into a kind of middle ground. To let it remain in an ambivalent state.
Conversation is more than words, it is movement, act and deeds. It demands your attention and your willingness to be alerted to something. The abstraction of the meaning of words in conversation is a subtle action. It is dependent on the sense that we can go separate ways.
The body and the thoughts are two separate objects. If they are allowed to be their own objects, there is a new relationship with our body to discover in relation to the room. For it is in rooms that we are, and it is the rooms that govern our conversations.
I have made a city for you to explore. The city is in the images; computer-generated, captured and made photography. I invite you to attach meaning to them. The city is also in the sound; computer-generated themes and memories. It is not a generic city, nor a random one. It is a city with a soul. It would like to express its soul through image and sound combined and interpreted by you.
Please enjoy.
The story of The Redheaded Man was written by Russian absurdist, Daniil Kharms, in 1937. Illustrating this same story in three different ways demonstrates the impact of illustration on the interpretation of the story by placing an illustrator into a highlighted position as the producer of visual content and ideas.
“There lived a redheaded man who had no eyes or ears. He didn’t have hair either, so he was called a redhead arbitrarily. He couldn’t talk because he had no mouth. He had no nose either. He didn’t even have arms or legs. He had no stomach, he had no back, he had no spine, and he had no innards at all. He didn’t have anything. So we don’t even know who we’re talking about. It’s better that we don’t talk about him any more.”*
* Daniil Kharms, 2009. Today I Wrote Nothing – The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms. Translated from the Russian by Matvei Yankelevich. Ardis Publishers. New York.
“As an embodiment of difference, the stranger represents the doubtful existence and dubious truth of what is not spatially present, of what cannot be verified at first hand. Yet the stranger is nonetheless here, present, and thus throws the doubtful and flickering quality of absence and non-existence back into the faces of those insiders in the local community, throwing into question the sanctity of presence.”*
Whether living or inanimate, elements in my work are more than often where they do not belong. As a result of constant relocation, I started investigating spaces in between the inside and the outside as well as the outcomes of migration. Through my Master’s project A Domestic Matter, I unveil parts of the scattered mind of a migrant while creating a substitute for the feeling of homeliness in accordance with my understanding and experience.
* Rob Shields
With the project Bevara Flatlusen (Save the Crab Louse) I question what nature is considered worth to preserve. I examine the arguments used in conservation of biodiversity and what arguments that are used to define what species to include in the preservation. In my attempt to create an ambulating nature reserve for the plausible threatened Crab Louse, the strive for convenience crashes with rational ideals.
For the Spring Exhibition, I exhibit an extract from the TV show TV4 Nyhetsmorgon and three essays with different entries to the project. The first deals with nature, nature management and wildlife photography. What nature that is represented as nature and considered for preservation? The second treats purity, shame, intimate hair removal and heroic pain. What inconveniences are accepted, and for what reasons? The third and last essay is about the concept of the parasite, the biological definition and the metaphorical use of it as a term of abuse. But, aren’t we all parasites?
For my project, I was inspired by old decorative painting traditions and I chose to put them in a more modern context. I am inspired by the decorative approach of handling the surface and by letting patterns and decorative elements take the limelight. In the project, I investigate the lines and the surface and how they form patterns together.
I want craft to meet function and then to bring these two elements together. My work with the furniture that my project resulted in was based on the body. I want it to be a meeting of the body, the mind and the materiality of the furniture.
The shell holds in the egg’s contents, maintains external pressure and prevents strain.
The shell is the shape of the egg. It gives shape to the egg white and, in turn, the yolk. The egg white is the packing material between the shell and the yolk; it provides stability. The yoke is always surrounded by the egg white. Without the shell and the egg white, the yolk is almost entirely flat.
The egg is the basis of an experimental work with textile materials and techniques. The work is presented in the form of a collection of garments.
In my room, I am carefree. I am Siri Derkert and this is my great big ground-breaking collage. I am the daring Tamara de Lempicka, the Dadaist Sophie Taeuber-Arp. I am an abstract expressionist and want to splatter like Pollock. I am an integral member of the Bloomsbury Group. I am Sonia Delaunay and paint on tablecloth, clothing and furniture. I am Maja Hjälte.
In the Konstfack Degree Exhibition 2013, I will give shape to my artistry using a studio-like room and a painting overall. The materials and techniques I work with are textile, collage and painting.
A rite or a ceremony, a collection, a performance or a show. Masks and bodies in a performative appearance in motion, using a nonsensical language and sound, show us oddity and allow it to take part in a conflict that is perhaps nigh on impossible to resolve. Here we see logic in the absurd and the absurd in logic.
I want to show something contradictory, beautiful and absurd; something that touches upon issues of exclusion and conflict. I want to emphasize something that makes us reflect on that which we hold dear and how we choose to see things. I want to trigger other people’s imagination, as well as my own.
In my work, I focus on sensory experiences that go beyond the “normal” perception of reality. Since having inflammation of the brain in spring 2012, I have become interested in bodily phenomena that traditional science struggles to handle – they are found somewhere in the borderland between psychology and neurology.
Synesthesia is one such phenomenon, where different senses act together. Being able to “see sound” or “hear colors” are examples of synesthetic experiences. As for me, I have always seen words, letters and names with colors, and over the past year I have had strong emotional experiences that were linked with color. Colors can trigger feelings of discomfort or pleasure, and I have therefore chosen to use these reflections in my artistic work. The ambition was to convert my inner images into solid form and transfer my sensory experiences to a design context.
I have chosen to weave two objects whose colors have been chosen based on the shades I am drawn to. The choice of color is based on theories of color therapy and perception. My wish is that my woven objects, both in their materiality and color, have a meditative effect on the observer’s state of mind, in the same way that the colors have had this impact on me.
During the Second World War my neighbours’ grandmother was employed to secretly produce something within the former L.M. Ericsson, now Konstfack building. She never revealed what that was and took her secret to the grave.
After the German invasion and occupation of Denmark and Norway in 1940, Germany demanded and was subsequently provided use of Sweden’s West Coast cable. Wartime arrangements allowed foreign rented lines that passed through their territory to be tapped, without breaking Swedish law. Within a dilapidated apartment at Karlaplan 4, Stockholm, an extremely secretive operation to decipher intercepted Geheimschreiber teleprinter messages was established. Arne Beurling, Professor of Mathematics in Uppsala was recruited and miraculously, after only two weeks, cracked the German cipher machine. Beurling with the engineer Vigo Lindstein constructed special decryption machines at L.M. Ericsson called the Apps.
The breaking of the Geheimschreiber assisted in establishing the Swedish Signals Intelligence, FRA as an independent authority in 1942. Sixty-seven years later the FRA-law took effect that authorises the Swedish state to warrantlessly wiretap all telephone and Internet traffic that crosses its borders.
My degree project is a picture book about the end of the world, set in a hotel in the woods. The book is aimed at children, adults who read to children and adults that enjoy picture books – in that order. The book is part of an old Swedish picture book tradition, though it also holds its own as a contemporary work, with the entire world as the inspiration and audience.
The book is my debut as an author and picture book illustrator. At the same time, it is a development of my work as an illustrator and designer. The book has been published by Sturebygruppen, a recently formed creative platform in the suburb of Stureby, Stockholm.
“Ingrid is 14 and really just wants to be alone with her computer. Under the alias “Nattbarn” [Night Child] she hangs out on different forums, when she’s not busy Googling sexual organs. It is her refuge from a murderously boring teenage existence and a mother who has just got together with the incredibly annoying Bosse.
When Ingrid starts eighth grade, she discovers that the school photographer shares her interest in hard rock, and a secret friendship begins via the internet. One Friday when her mother is with her boyfriend, Ingrid decides to seize the opportunity – she will go over to the photographer’s house…”
“Nattbarn” is a graphic novel about being in an awkward age, seeking identity and longing for independence.
It is the debut book of Hanna Gustavsson, published by Galago in April 2013.
A quest for identity and about being held captive in the notion of one’s own identity.
An attempt to affirm one’s identity via external elements.
An idea about visualizing identity and the quest for identity and putting them into physical form.
I give two theories and visions about the quest for identity.
“To make the classroom a perpetual forum for political and social issues…is wrong; and to see aesthetics as sociology is grossly misleading.”*
This project is an investigation of the subject of typography in the context of pedagogy and education. The aim is to demonstrate tendencies within contemporary teaching of typography in Sweden, in order to bring about a debate on what a school of typography is and what it could be. What teaching would be relevant in relation to history and to technical developments? How are professional stererotypes repeated?
To what extent is typography discussed within a political context? How can education promote subject development rather than subject management?
* Paul Rand. Confusion and Chaos.
“Men det är ju kul att det händer nåt i alla fall!” (But it’s great that
something is happening!) is a phrase you often hear in connection with changes
in places that are not centers of attraction. But what exactly is
happening?
In my degree project I investigate the visual effects of
top-governed urban renewal projects, with my hometown Hökarängen in focus, where
1950s attributes are currently being subsidized. What is the agenda behind
Hökarängen’s new neon signs?
Thank you to all the taxpayers who make this education possible.
“I found a flower in the field, admired its beauty, its perfection in every way, and exclaimed:
‘But all of this, this flower and thousands more, blossoming and then withering, is witnessed by no-one; indeed, often no eye has seen them!’ – But the flower answered; ‘ You fool! do you think I blossom so that I can be seen? I blossom for my own sake, not for others’, and simply because I find pleasure in it. In that I blossom and exist, so I have my joy and my delight.’ ” *
* Arthur Schopenhauer
An examination about right and wrong in drawing and about the role drawing plays in school.
I want children to explore spatiality, both high and low, in both open and closed structures. With Building Pieces, they can create their own space and build their own unique piece. This will give them not only creativity, activity and quality in playing, but also an opportunity to think and learn about creating different spaces and architectural phenomena. They can build on their own, with friends or with adults. Nothing is right or wrong about what they are building; the most important thing is that they have the choice and opportunity to do so.
I have examined identity creation, to find out what opportunities exist within the limitations of graphic design as practice and profession.
I hope to formulate a work manifesto, a design practice and an identity as a graphic designer.
To make the invisible visible
The artist Zanele Muholi, uses portrait photography as a strategy for visual activism to ensure black, queer visibility. With the aim of asking questions of viewing and practices of looking, I’m examining her work using concepts from visual culture studies.
In my media-production, I try to explore the role of looking further.
The opposite of war isn´t peace, it´s creation!
In a world where we rely on “facts”, we still live our day-to-day lives carrying convictions and traditions that remind us of myths and magic. I examine the connection between convictions and jewellery – the mark and perhaps vessel of the power of conviction.
The wedding ring is a symbol with close ties to expectations, hope, preconceived notions and demands, all highly individual and based on the individual’s own frames of reference, which gives each person their own interpretation of this symbol. Despite this I feel that is it viewed as a sort of universal given.
In my work I emphasize and highlight these parts, and examine the symbiotic relationship between those living around me and the objects and jewellery that they wear.
for ten days, every thirty second
a new sunset will be created
each one, on top of the other
erasing the previous one, forever
Textile is what we like to use to clothe nakedness and emptiness. It works as a dampening layer between the often straight and hard walls of the room, and the skin of the body. We are mobile, both in body and spirit, and therefore comfortable inside the ordered structure of the walls.
This is why I want to base my project here. I want to create a space in which the body can exist and converse with the material, where fingers are ruled by their sense of touch and the body by its curiosity.
Small things can be important. The theme of my work is bees. They are tiny creatures who have a great impact on earth’s productive ecosystems, meaning we are reliant on them. Currently, bees are in a lot of trouble due to human activities – the way that we organize our societies and the way in which we use arable land. There are many parallels between humans and bees.
Not least in that we live in complicated societies, requiring a lot of communication between individuals. What does the bees’ situation tell us about the larger events on our planet? What does it tell us about our ability to survive if we continue on our current course?
I examine this small, strong and fascinating creature through sculpture and drawings.
SPACE: a room in between other rooms, a room for what wont be put in place, a distance, the dancers is standing in front of each other, lapses of time, pause.
You write: “In search of the inner experience I end up in a space in between.” I try to understand your words. Perhaps the space you are referring to is an invisible passage between the known and the unknown, between the real and the imaginary, between the actual and the possible. You can hear the wingbeats from future birds and the breathing of others; those who you not yet are.
Jens Soneryd, An attempt to understand (without destroying).
Video: 10 min
Dancers: Marit Fogelgren, Ester Olofsson och Ellen Söderhult.
Music by: Henrik Grimner
Have you ever thought about all the people who held the handrail before you? To touch something that other people have touched before is to share an experience together, something that can not be reached by mere sight. All the objects we surround ourselves with in our everyday lives are shaped slowly by our use and our bodies. I see these objects as connections between people, beyond time and space. To participate in shaping, as we all are, is to be a part of a whole.
In my project I have taken advantage of used everyday objects that no longer had any owner. With my jewelry and hand–items I give parts of the items a new life. The more or less pristine material is an invitation to the wearer to leave traces and bring their story into the objects in a more distinct way. Thus continues not only the older history, but also meets the present into the future.
Boxes, boxes stacked on top of one another. They form a wall, a shelter, a form of protection against the outside world. Thin, short legs protrude from the opening; each foot gnaws on the other, like creatures in their own right.
Alone, alone among others. The shelter houses a resounding silence. Like a monument to memory and time; partly through what it is made up of – the box which stores and preserves; which holds and surrounds – but also through what the shelter itself stands for – a means of protection or a weapon, a place for daydreams and imagination. The memory of the world of our childhood gradually becomes a reflection upon it.
“You’d be surprised how much it costs to look this cheap!”*
* Dolly Parton
– A design in andante and allegro
A practical exploration based on my design methodology in which I relate to furniture design in two different tempos.
Tempo as an appellation in furniture design has not got a natural vocabulary and instead I borrow from the music’s way of relating to the composition of a music piece.
I looked at old Swedish furniture as already written sheets of music. From these I make my own reinterpretation of a new piece.
According to the encyclopaedia a few keywords in the project is explained in this way:
Tempo
“The speed of a piece of music. How fast the beats follow each other.”
Allegro
“Musical tempo indication: hastily.”
– Here I work quickly and intuitively with reinterpretations of old furniture in the waste material.
Andante
“Musical tempo indication: quiet medium pace, neither fast nor slow.”
– Here I put more time and work slowly and carefully with a further development of the fast allegro furniture.
In my work, I investigate what happens when we work with our hands. I switch embroidery with other people, we embroider together, but alone. I’m interested in the knowledge and experiences working with embroidery has to offer and what is communicated in such work.
Tablechair
My Bachelor’s project is about imagination and presents a sculptural narrative in ceramics and glass.
The installation represents a bit of the island Jhax and the creatures Fiix, Kiwix and Surruz.
The island had previously been floating around in a parallel world, until now, when it happened to crash right into ours. Just a little bit of Jhax got through, before the walls between our worlds joined again. The island’s machinery broke and the timer in Tidernasberg exploded so that the rock was split in two parts and a passage was created. The passage was charged by the released energy and the timer’s struggle for power, a magic was created and created a portal. Some creatures got into the passage, through the portal and into the darkness on the other side. Not until it was too late, they noticed that they grew, froze and faded, only the light in their eyes linger.
How are expressions of Sami cultural heritage valued based on cultural experiences? The spoken memories of the shared Sami history are written in the handicraft. In a material investigation, I have challenged the significance of the “genuine” Sloyd material for the identity-building properties of Duodji.
Sofia Ricklund Lidgren, 2013
While questioning the increasingly vague border between private and public, I have chosen to form a spatiality around a female urinal.
In my degree project, I draw comic strips and reflect on images.
In Crossing the Fox River: From Thought to Action, comics artist Lynda Barry describes Ramachandran’s method of alleviating phantom pains in a lost hand by using a trick with mirrors in a box:
“He said to the guy to put his hand in and look. He put it in. And then he saw another hand there… And he told the guy to open his hand; he SAW the other one open… And that was the first relief he felt in years… And that was the beginning of curing this problem. I think that is what images do.”*
…and I do too.
I believe there is a need to tell and take part in stories. That it can alleviate pain. I am almost sure it improves the immune system too.
* Lawrence University, 01/24/2013.
Today there are many platforms in which there is some form of valuation in discussions with and about photographs. In my investigation, I take an in-depth look into how some high school students use Instagram as a means of expression and how they talk about photographs on Instagram and in school.
How do young people value and perceive their photographic images on Instagram and in school? How do attitude or purpose differ in the various contexts and how do the young people relate to different frame factors in school and on Instagram in the creation of photographic images?
“And so I leave the village where I was born,
soon it will fall into eternal slumber,
Gone is its youth, only the elderly remain,
in this region that once flourished.”*
My work is about the Swedish industrial town. A town built around an industry that is now abandoned. A place that has been forgotten.
A community that holds stories and memories of a bygone era in Swedish history.
* Hootenanny Singers, Aldrig mer
Someone turns on the light – part of the cosmos comes to life.
I work with glass. Crushing, splitting, melting and reshaping. The aspiration is abstract forms in which the glass and I have reached a consensus.
In the material investigations, I study a part of the world. It rouses thoughts about life. Sometimes, I am able to get a hold on them, and at other times they escape me.
Through the lens of the overhead projector, seemingly insignificant pieces of glass speak of their inner world, a shadow of its inception and being.
”Two truths are drawn to one another; one comes from within, one from without, and where they meet we have a chance to see ourselves.”*
*T. Tranströmer
The Discourse of Multiculturalism in the Logic of Art: From and About Hyperpoliticized Society.
Case study: The representation of ‘Middle East‛ and ‛Middle Eastern’ in Swedish television since 1976.
The role of the media, in general, has a very strong influence in stereotyping and disseminating biased information in modern communication. In this context, the relation between the media and its audiences, between the actor and spectator, creates a complex that is both impalpable and disturbing.
This relation consists of a wide amplitude of different aspects; from the message broadcasted through media to the institutions involved, from how the message is illustrated to how people observe and make meaning out of such messages, from reality to the politically-made fiction of this reality.
Here, it is very interesting and at the same time, necessary to study how and in which political situation these pictures are produced and broadcasted and how those involved in making and creating these pictures, or in other words, how “artists” perform their role politically within the political realm of the media.
1. Sit down comfortably and close your eyes.
2. Take a deep breath and let the body relax when you exhale.
3. Slowly count backwards from a hundred to one.
4. Daydream about a peaceful place you know well.
5. Tell yourself silently: I will forever remain completely healthy, both body and mind.
Everyone dreams. In dreams, we create a bizarre theatre in which we ourselves are both director, scenographer, actor and spectator. And often we are not aware of these different characters.
We all live in worlds of the night that are strikingly dissimilar to those in which we live by day. In the logic of dreams, it may be possible, even completely ”normal” to fly or to be a cat and a person at the same time. We can find ourselves in different tenses, genders and dimensions.
In dreams we are free, or at least, as close to freedom as we can ever come. Disconnected from our bodies yet intensely bound to them. For a disillusioned romantic in the twenty-first century, this last bastion of freedom and magic, hidden beneath the surface in every one of us, is something to embrace and defend. This is the basis of my work.
Intervening spaces in my environment has been explored. The spatial qualities of these spaces have been defined and transformed in my work.
[Urthred – through telepathy:] When I think to you, the thought, so far as it finds corresponding ideas and suitable words in your mind, is reflected in your mind. My thought clothes itself in words in your mind, which words you seem to hear ‒ and naturally enough in your own language and your own habitual phrases. Very probably the members of your party are hearing what I am saying to you, each with his own individual difference of vocabulary and phrasing.
[Barnstaple:] And that is why […] when you soar into ideas of which we haven’t even a shadow in our minds, we just hear nothing at all.*
*H.G. Wells. Men Like Gods. 1923.
A little boy. He is two and a half years old. Big blue eyes. Light, ruffled hair that seems to have become stuck in an upward motion. Full of energy! Everything is fantastic! Though only twenty seconds at a time, of course. So many different facial expressions. The entire body full of motion; nose, fingers, eyes, mouth, toes, legs, tongue.
He is not disturbed by me taking photos; he probably does not know what I am doing. His aunt and grandfather play with him whilst I continue to take pictures. He is himself; there is no pretense here. He looks content and at ease. The pictures are great, even if it is a little difficult to catch a still moment with his head turned to face me. When I press the shutter release on the camera, all I manage to capture is his behind.
During a trip to South America a few years ago, I came across buildings painted pink, purple and cyan, and people wearing clothes of all the colors of the rainbow. After just a few days I realized how I too had unknowingly ended up with a much more colorful wardrobe. When I returned home to Sweden and began unpacking the new items of clothing, they did not at all fit in with my basic garments.
My degree project revolves around my thoughts on normality from a western perspective. But it is also about standardization and endeavoring to follow conventional dress codes and norms. I want to investigate the concept of taste and neutrality.
Based on the notion of the ever-functional basic wardrobe, as a kind of universal uniform, in combination with how my view of clothing, color and patters changes when I travel, I have chosen to create a collection.
I also wish to illustrate through my work how strongly norms are linked to places and play with our notions of exoticism.
How does the TV function as a sign in picture books? As a metaphor? As a symbol of passivity? Does it compete with the child for the parent’s attention? Is it a sign of our time? Does it construct our every-day lives or is it a window to another reality?
I have selected a few signs and technologies and looked closer at how these are used in certain picture books. The investigation is didactic and artistic as well as theoretical. I write about the form of expression and simultaneously try to create a picture story. In this process, I also try to catch a glimpse of the movements between words and pictures and the interplay between them as they give shape to the story.
Auditory Spatial Design
Based on our fascination for how good we are at understanding our surroundings using our hearing, I investigate how form and materials create good conditions for an auditory experience that promotes the purpose of a space. The visual and the tactile become subordinated, serving to strengthen the auditory qualities of the space.
“Most people would probably say that architecture does not produce sound; it cannot be heard. But neither does it radiate light, yet it can be seen. We see the light it reflects and thereby gain an impression of form and material. In the same way, we hear the sounds it reflects and they, too, give us an impression of form and material.”*
* Steen Eiler Rasmussen. Experiencing Architecture, 1959.
“The wind decided to follow the surface of the ocean. It liked to absorb the smell of salt water. The wind decided to follow the surface of the land. It had a feeling that the soul that lives in its root starting speaking to the root of the land.”
The idea behind my drawings is to share my own stories. To enter into my world, observers must create their own entrance. When someone sees my work, I hope that they will enter into their own world as my drawings create new images for them. I will be presenting a story based on my experiences of being in various kinds of environments.
I am looking for a new form to talk about and relate to in a design process. It is an investigation into what design can be and how design can be.
Using queer-theoretical, performative methods, I aim to investigate textile materials. My body and a camp reference frame form the basis for the project as I put myself in public, semi-public and private spaces, in order to create a shift and highlight the norms that are maintained in our society on a daily basis.
To illustrate my performative investigation as a physical form, I let the textile materials I have investigated take shape in the room and be represented in photographs.
I call them sequences. They are observations, comments and sometimes utopias.
I am working with the dolls. Maybe they embody to be lost, and at the same time, a search for hope and calmness. They are looking in the bend of the arm and the navel. All in sequences, as small fragments of a feeling.
Maybe I draw a map of places inside me I do not understand. I believe it is important to remind that they exist even if they are not measurable.
My work is based on a fascination for the everyday drama; the props needed for its realization and the context in which it is being performed.
On a daily basis we transform living matter in a garlic press. We build houses out of chipboards and keep hamsters in cages. We speak, write, peel and chop. Demonstrates understanding and make misspellings. Communicates and deforms.
THE FRUIT OF THE PAST
A peculiar elderly man openly shares his experiences at the local hot-dog stand, hoping that someone will listen.
During an Easter break, a gang of teenagers makes friends with a significantly older and mysterious man who turns out to possess an unexpected number of talents. Two bored teenagers who have not seen each other since they were children reunite after a party during their last summer in their home town.
A sawmill is in strike and a father struggles to support his family with what little he has. A family takes care of an injured swallow that has crashed outside their house.
My name is Jeff Östberg. I am originally from Kramfors, an industrial town located in Västernorrland which has been associated with the wood industry since the 20th Century, even though considerably fewer sawmills remain today. THE FRUIT OF THE PAST is an attempt to use comics as a basis to create a link between different generations in a town that, in a way, laid the foundation of the modern, Swedish welfare society. It is a story that uses a fragmentary approach and character to create a kind of bridge between different events in time. A journey backwards in order to, in turn, be able to travel forward. It is a story about relationships between children and adults, about exclusion and friendship, about people from times past and about those who live in invisibility, in the margins. This takes place in a town surrounded by large forests, which seems to have stagnated for a long time; the wooden houses are abandoned one by one and there are fewer and fewer jobs but it is a town that, in spite of this, remains and sometimes shows signs of life.
An exploratory design where I investigate what defines a home in a society where we are becoming increasingly mobile. I start off from an interview revolving around home, objects and memories.
It all circulates around a place that has no location, but yet exists. There, one can find an inside, as well as an exterior and in between; a space of a different kind finds its place, a parallel world. Here, body and mind do not split and the path which leads from reality to fiction seems to dissolve.
What it looks like, I do not know, nor does it seem to have a gender. The place I’m referring to seems to be without color and flavor, but it still has the ability to dress itself up in whatever it would like itself to be and have the appearance of.
A number of memories started to take shape like a pattern in my mind. Without knowing how to categorize them or even distinguish the meaning, I felt them as an ambiguous movement of a change. These memories could originate from a moment of only a few minutes looking in the mirror, or several years of relating to a specific place.
As I tried to identify them I wondered, were they only memories from my childhood or were they also something else?
The oak is a magnificent tree with a strong trunk and a large and voluminous
crown. The oak tree can grow very old. It becomes ready for harvest after about
one hundred and fifty years but may well stand a few hundred years more.
There are numerous ways to take advantage of the properties of the oak tree. The bough may be used for planks, the quality of which varies depending on how the tree grows and on how it is cut. One can also cut veneer out of the bough. The thin layers of the tree are often used to cover chipboard or other cheaper woods. The most coveted details of the tree are found in the fork of the bough.
For this project, I have been used only the finest parts that the oak tree can offer.
I have thought a lot about the creative process, about my drawing and about learning to illustrate. What is the creative profession like? How does it differ from other professions? I want to get up at the same time as the plumber, draw to the beat of the window scraper and punch out and go home at the same time as the car fitter.
But what do I want to take from it?
I share these thoughts with many people in my profession. Hence this investigation. I am looking for answers to my questions, partly through texts that have already been written and partly through my own texts. A relationship between text and images. What am I looking for in an image?
My questions are my chapters in this piece.
My tools are the text, the image and the line.
And I am both observer and object.
From Fantasy Books to Interior Architecture – A Working Method
In my role as an interior architect, I want to learn to use all the inspiration I take from books.
My project deals with spaces inspired by the book “The Night Circus”, written by Erin Morgenstern. The spaces may be inspired by a feeling, a thought, an environment or possibly by characters in the book and the meeting between them.
I am looking for space.
I draw, build, photograph, write, make drawings.
I transform.
I find spaces.
I form and represent spaces.
I explore spaces.
We are all made of stardust; all life sprung out of collapsing stars. Even today it rains down small particles of dust containing diamonds and gold whose origins are from the beginning of our time.
There is magic in the air.
Dust is everywhere because everything is its source. Through the dust, we can read the history of our universe. It holds the information of what has happened, what happens right now and what will happen. Every material erodes and transforms into something else. From dust we came and to dust we shall return.
I have captured that magic in my jewellery; it contains the curiosity of the small and forgotten.
With a humble feeling, I now realize that we are all the same, a part of something bigger that started with the dust.
I have found a sense of belonging; even in the darkest corner you can find magic.
The year is 1912. The bookseller Wilfred M. Voynich, who has dedicated his life to the search for rare literature, is in one of the many mansions belonging to the Society of Jesus – Villa Mondragone in western Italy, outside of Rome. Before him in a coffin packed with ancient, dusty volumes is a very strange manuscript which, to this date, has cryptologists scratching their heads. It has been written using an unknown alphabet in what appears to be an unknown language.
The only things that can be properly interpreted in what has come to be known as the Voynich Manuscript are the sloppy, but expressive, illustrations that decorate almost every page. Illustrations of strange plants, cosmological maps of unknown firmaments, marching naked women bathing in green pools, piping systems and what are believed to be some types of alchemist recipes.
In my degree project, I have chosen to provide space for the clues in this mystery and I have placed my interpretation of the illustrations in a three-dimensional environment, in the form of a board game. The elements have become the pieces, the playing board and the strategies: elements that construct a game of achieving eternal life.
My project is based on an exploration of the relationship between semiotics and function using sculpture and design. Its starting point lies in clearly identifiable representations of objects in our surroundings, with a strong connection to either practical functionality or a more symbolic or decorative intention.
Through the working of form, context and material, they reach a state where their practical function has either been moved, twisted or completely removed. What are, and what do these things become without their belonging, without their fixed purpose? How does the manner in which we interpret them change, and what new functions are revealed?
Does ceramics need to be static?
In my project, I have combined my background in flight engineering with ceramic craftsmanship to create movable mechanical constructions: cooperation between different materials and skills, which together shape kinetic ceramics.
My degree project investigates and challenges the self-image of young women in relation to perceived requirements and expectations, as well as to normative notions of how a woman should be.
I want to highlight and embrace that which “is not allowed to exist” and let it constitute what is beautiful: to not please people, not conform to what others think, but to open up to creating your own ideals; to dare to occupy the space you desire; loud or silent, repulsive or attractive; to be beautiful on your own terms and to own your body and sexuality.
Lampshades grown from mushrooms.
This project explores the concept of ‘artifacts’ as being separated from ‘natural things’. We see a future in which we learn more about biology and our environment. We learn how to use new materials and to create more organic products. This future raises questions about how to define ourselves in relation to nature.
The lampshades exhibited are grown from mushrooms which are a living material. They were developed through a mutual cooperation between the designer (the human) and the mushroom. Both parts had influence on the final outcome.
This material is not dead. If you give it more water, it will start to grow again. Thus, we can see the product as possessing a soul.
Approximately 150 students graduate from Konstfack every year. The time at Konstfack is a period of lust, anxiety, joy, despair and a lot of work to finish in time for the degree show. The many possibilities at the school place great demands on its students.
During the spring semester of 2011, Karin Ahlin followed three Master’s students in their last and most important creative process at the school. The documentary Keep on Burning allows us to follow their concerns, thoughts and struggles: from the initial idea to a complete exhibition and reflections on life after school.
The film provides insight into the creation and all that it entails: from the pressure that the student constantly lives under to the highs and lows of the creative process.
It is incredibly difficult to get in to Konstfack, but the film Keep on Burning shows what may sometimes be even more difficult: getting out.
The university’s values rest on solid ground. The equal value of all human beings, the freedom of the individual and equality between women and men are obvious values. Or are they?
What happens when we dig down to the foundations of values, when we test and tackle the “inalienable values”? When art collides with government decrees, does this then lead to prohibition or discussion? What can we find in the national curriculum’s “Christian, western humanism” when we open the lid?
Hopefully we will be able to air the room and create conditions for an open discussion where students are allowed to freely talk about anything and thus become well-equipped to meet the society of tomorrow.