Material Connection
Ebba Lindgren’s 3D-printed mirror from her Alter Ego exhibition (image: SSDD).
Located in the heart of Nordiska Galleriet, Malmö’s high end furniture and lighting store, is a surreal space that I can only describe as looking like the office of a Greek goddess.
A mirror with a frame shaped like a draped toga floats over a stool and table. At first glance, the piece seems like a vanity, but on closer inspection much of the accompanying furniture in the space is made out of bent steel, a finish which feels more reminiscent of a sleek workplace. Everything is beige, however, including the folds of the translucent curtain that separates the space from the rest of the store, and the sand which surprises me by sinking under my feet.
Designer Ebba Lindgren used AI as a design assistant for her exhibition Alter Ego, uploading photos with aesthetic details that she liked and subsequently generating hundreds of images that she used as inspiration. It makes sense: the metal and sand together looks like a misinterpreted AI prompt, or an Instagram explore page glitching between photos of a white sand beach and aspirational interiors. It is a radical departure for Lindgren, who two years ago invited visitors to the Southern Sweden Design Days festival into her apartment, which she filled with furniture she made by hand in her living room, including electric blue cupboards and neon lights sheathed in pink fabric.
The concept for this previous exhibition, Scenes From a Home, was about as warm and human as possible: one morning, Lindgren even cooked breakfast for all visitors to the space. But for this year’s festival, Swedish furniture company Källemo gave her an open brief and access to new materials and manufacturing techniques, while Lindgren herself wanted to try her hand at something different. “People have seen work from me that is more fun, playful, and cute,” she says. “That’s why I created an alter ego, to allow myself to work with a different aesthetic.”
Lindgren’s alter ego has an aesthetic that feels refined and borderline sacred. “[Källemo] is like the Holy Grail in Sweden,” Lindgren says, referring to her collaborator’s reputation within the nation’s design scene. “I wanted to create a Holy Grail feeling, and I wanted to feel like I belong in that realm.” The surreal, artificial quality of Lindgren’s exhibition reflects the imitation of self confidence implied by aphorisms such as “Fake it till you make it”. For Lindgren, the approach worked: creating an alter ego helped her to embody the confidence and decisiveness required to work with a renowned company and give life to her ideas on a larger scale.
Lindgren’s alter ego is one intriguing interpretation of “care”, the theme for this year’s Southern Sweden Design Days. The armour of an alter ego, it suggests, can be a form of self-care in the world of design. “I actually have two email addresses for male employees that don’t exist,” another designer reveals to me at their show. “I use them to write emails which I, as a female, would have a hard time writing,” she says, giving a glimpse into the methods she uses to chase people to pay invoices. Lindgren, however, chose to design a mirror to reflect how the conviction she imitates already lies within her. “The alter ego is, of course, also me,” she says. “I have that resoluteness in me, I just need to remind myself sometimes to bring it out.”
Toying with the idea of infusing care into a space, spatial designer My Comét and product designer Stina Henriksson created their group exhibition, The Waiting Room, to encourage visitors to interact with the designs and spend time with them. Here, visitors can sit on wooden chairs with playful squiggly edges by Henrik Ødegaard, sip water from hand-blown glasses by Blank Studio, and send their children to play a ring toss game made by designer Carl Fredrik Emrik, all while designer Minna Palmqvist’s pink clock emphasises the feeling of waiting by marking only the passing seconds.
Stina Henriksson’s lamp made out of upcycled candle stubs from Malmö’s restaurants, sitting on top of a side table by designer Kajsa Willners (image by Matilda Warme).
Unlike the harsh lighting of conventional waiting rooms, the exhibition is softly lit by two of Henriksson’s lamps, which are made out of recycled candle stubs from Malmö’s restaurants. “Candles are very special, because they’re a sort of a luxury product, but they’re also consumable at the same time,” Henriksson says. “I wanted to give the material a bigger value because wax actually never really gets old – if you don’t light candles, they can last forever.“ Thick wax curves around the bulb of one of Henriksson’s lamps like hands circling a crystal ball, a shape achieved by repeatedly dipping a thin wire and net frame into a vat of wax. Since the majority of restaurant candles are white, except for seasonal red ones at Christmas, all of Henriksson’s products have a pinkish hue, as if someone accidentally left one red sock in a white wash. “When I asked the restaurants, I got more wax than I could have ever imagined,” Henriksson says, shaking her head as she remembers how much waste candles can produce.
Taking advantage of local waste streams is increasingly popular in Malmö, in part thanks to the work of Malmö Upcycling Service, a design studio which makes products and installations out of upcycled waste materials. “More and more, I’m becoming a material broker,” co-founder Anna Gudmundsdottir says, explaining how designers ask her to put them in touch with manufacturers or to help source particular waste materials. Gudmundsdottir also works for Spok, a platform that lists manufacturers online so that designers can collaborate with them. Through visiting manufacturers for Spok, Gudmundsdottir discovered how offcuts of marble tabletops and metal pipes are tossed away, and vowed to find designers who could take care of all the waste she saw. “When I go visit a manufacturer I’m always like, ‘Can I see your bins?’” she laughs.
A Studio Soriano bag made out of upcycled airbags provided by Malmö Upcycling Service (image by Anders Ahlgren).
For Southern Sweden Design Days, Malmö Upcycling Service supplied five fashion designers with 200 airbags that would otherwise go to landfill. “I got a tip from somebody who works at a big car company in Sweden,” Gudmundsdottir laughs cheekily, explaining that airbags are single-use products that can’t be recycled because of their flame retardant fabric. “You can sew them with a regular house household sewing machine, and the material is very durable – it’s waterproof, windproof and fireproof,” she says. Fashion brand Studio Soriano made the airbags into sturdy bags with thick blue straps like seatbelts, while Pampas created a jacket with layers of tight frills scrunched together like popcorn pieces, taking advantage of the material’s stiffness to hold its voluminous shape.
The city of Malmö also embraces upcycling as a means of preserving its history. Converted warehouses, such as architecture studio Wingårdhs’s office, are made using repurposed materials from Malmö’s former industrial docks. With its layers of peeling yellow, white and mint green paint, Wingårdhs proves the perfect backdrop for an exhibition of designer Finn Ahlgren’s furniture made from discarded tabletops. “We have a really nice orange staircase from one of the old shipping wharves, but there’s a lot of stairs we didn’t take, we took the nicest we could find,” Joakim Lyth, an architect from Wingårdhs, says. “[Ahlgren], he takes the scrappiest scraps he can find. [His work] is a way of testing ourselves.” While most designers take pains to make upcycled materials look more polished, Ahlgren celebrates their cracks and scratches as a way of accepting the aesthetic limitations of materials. His cupboards have rough wooden edges, their sides are punctured by nails and carry the shadow of old tape marks. “We need to enjoy ugliness a bit more in our lives,” Ahlgren grins. “The idea that everything has to be perfect is really stressful.”
Emilie Palle Holm’s woven forms are held up using origami techniques (image: SSDD).
The festival’s main location, Lokstallarna, is a gigantic former train shed with 24 massive holes in the floor. These holes were once used to repair trains, and are now cordoned off away from the main space, which is large enough to comfortably house two eclectic group exhibitions. Lisa Darland, a designer selected as part of Form/Design Centre’s business development program “Going Pro”, presents lamps woven with flexible optic fibre that can be moved around to form jellyfish-like shapes, while Emilie Palle Holm, one of the winners of Ung Svensk Form, an annual exhibition for young designers, uses origami techniques to create entirely woven forms using jacquard fabric. One of Holm’s pieces looks like a woven pineapple with scales in shapes reminiscent of a paper fortune teller game – it is both charming and impressively sturdy.
Southern Sweden Design Days showcases work that mixes resourcefulness with a large dose of playfulness. Upycling materials helps Malmö stay connected: it keeps the city in touch with its industrial past and keeps its designers linked up with local businesses and manufacturers. Caring for materials, it seems, easily translates into caring for each other. “Everybody collaborates in Malmö,” Gudmundsdottir says. “We share resources, share tips, and share momentum with each other that just makes the region stronger.”
Words Helen Gonzalez Brown