Boom! Everyone Joins In
Feminine 3D printed elements from Ebba Lindgren’s live/make apartment (image: SSDD).
A new generation of Swedish designers are ready to make their mark. Just don’t mention IKEA. Or Scandinavian minimal modernism. They’re cooking up something much more eclectic, colourful, and frankly joyful in Malmö, and it was on full display at the first in-person Southern Sweden Design Days (SSDD).
I’d assumed my maximalist wardrobe of primary colours would stick out like a sore thumb amongst the stereotypical Swedish palette of tasteful neutrals, as befitting of the country that gave us COS. I certainly hadn’t thought I would fit in – quite literally – with the colour scheme. But standing in the foyer of Ebba Lindgren’s apartment my neon co-ord has me blending in like a lemony chameleon with her wall-to-ceiling yellow foyer. When she moved in she was enchanted by the paste flowers someone had lovingly handcrafted into the wood chip walls, so decided to make a feature of it.
Lindgren’s home is not just an expression of her personal aesthetic, but her workshop. It’s a live/make space where she built, sewed or 3D-printed all of the furniture and furnishings herself. Everything was put up for sale for SSDD; once all her furniture was gone afterwards, she plans to start over and build more. Her approach to 3D printing feels fresh it its unabashed femininity. A reel of rhubard-and-custard two-tone filament stands by, ready to make more amorphous lightshades reminiscent of the inside of a 90s lava lamp. A clothing rail is held together by iridescent green printed joints frilled like a ruffled fold, each door knob or drawer handle has been encased in an extra jewelled layer. In the bathroom, the toilet tank has been turned into a candle-stick thanks to a custom holder.
The apartment is more than experiment in an extreme DIY lifestyle, she wants it to be a commentary on what she sees as the fast fashion effect creeping into design. “People are using interiors like fashion to tell stories about themselves,” she says. “So I became my own factory.” Her open house was one of 60 locations around the city that opened their doors as part of SSDD. Entry was entirely free, and the public was furnished with colourful maps to find the balloons marking the pop-up design exhibitions that sprang up in garages, shops, and even a studio built in an adaptive reuse project underway at an abandoned cigarette factory.
Along with designer Maria O’Brian, Lindgren is also one half of creative duo Candytuft. The pair took over room 104 at MJ’s, a hip hotel where the reception desk doubles as a bar. In keeping with the suggestive location, the one-night-only installation was called One Night Stand, with O’Brian and Lindgren inviting their favourite hookups – other local female creatives – to take over the space. The room had a sexy Cronenburgian vibe; a red-lit bathroom was filled with waggling tubular fronds made of tulle and Lisa Reiser’s bulbous hand-blown glass sculptures, like the lovechild of a Jeff Koons and a Louise Bourgeois, bursting out of cupboards and suitcases. Over champagne the creatives and visitors swapped war stories of trying to make it in Sweden’s conservative design industry. “If you’re designer you have to call yourself an artist to get paid,” confided one guest. “If you don’t make blonde wood furniture, they don’t understand what’s happening.”
Around the corner, upmarket concept store Olsson & Gerthel let young studio Lab La Bla loose on some of their stalwart suppliers. Founders Axel Landström & Victor Isaksson Pirtti have been friends since they were nine months old. Their previous work has included finding new uses for Swedish industrial waste, braising cheap spruce wood with dust from copper mines for their BBQ series. So it was brave of Olsson & Gerthel to invite the duo to give some Swedish design classics an irreverent makeover.
In collaboration with furniture makers Swedese, Lab La Bla have reinterpreted a trio of iconic Yngve Ekström-designed Lamino Chairs with wildly luxe materials and bittersweet backstories. “People have a lot of memories of this chair,” said Landström. “They either love it or they hate it. They talk about it like it’s a person.” One version has been modified to represent a bad dad, with an arm extended to form a tray for a whisky glass. The woodstain is named after snus, the tobacco product of choice for emotionally distant Swedish fathers, and the seat upholstered with a rare and expensive leather tanned using pine bark slurry made to a 150-year old recipe. The other Lamino redux feature aquatic blue curly hair, pearls, and plush fleece with a pattern of bald patches shaved in, inventively, using dog clippers.
Lab La Bla also got their hands on Swedese’s Flower table, pleasingly clover-shaped nesting pieces designed by Christine Schwarzer in 2004. Inspired by the larger, more abstract moulds used to make the dainty tables they created monolithic pieces in birch ash veneer painted pearlescent white. When the carpenter used tape to hold temporarily glued pieces together, they liked the raw, unfinished look so much they taped up every edge. “It was about using a throwaway material and locking it into the product,” says Pirtti. “We try to spotlight materials that don’t seem luxurious.”
This sense of mischief combined with thoughtful provocations and a focus on materiality continued at the main exhibition. SSDD temporarily took over Lokstallarna, a monumental former train shed. Being locomotive-sized risked the 25 exhibitions getting lost in such a cavernous space, but once the enthusiastic visitors arrived in throngs (mainly by bicycle, the modish mode of transport in this cycling-obsessed city) it was clear that all that room was needed. Unapologetically colourful lighting by Swedish Ninja hung out next to bright fringed clothing-hammock hybrids by design research studio Objective, although the latter proved a little too temptingly interactive for one overenthusiastic punter.
Wood and minimalism was not totally absent at SSDD, but when it appeared it was with an eclectic environmentalist twist. At Lokstallarna, designer Louise Hederström showed furniture built from materials rescued from the construction site of Hyllie Terrass, a new housing development from developer Skansa and architects Cobe. In a collaboration Swedese, Hederström pilfered latches and wooden offcuts, which she combined with leftover leather to make tables and chairs for the building’s reception areas. The Future is Local, an exhibition at Form/Design Centre, highlighted the work of Swedish furniture maker Verk, whose approach to sustainability has been to try and source Swedish materials for their pieces.
Local is one of those words that has an uphill battle against it’s folksy, granola-eating connotations, but sometimes it’s a serious challenge in today’s globalised economy for designers to get hold of the materials that are technically in closest proximity. Most of Sweden’s timber and steel is destined for export, making it tricky for Verk to actually get hold of Swedish materials for its Made in Sweden collection. Sometimes, it’s simply about matchmaking industries to collaborate with. Take Verk’s SOFA V.MC.0, by Mia Cullen, a pleasingly plump sofa stuffed with wool from Texel sheep; until recently, Sweden simply threw away over 70 per cent of its fleeces for lack of buyers, prompting campaigners to encourage the textile industry to tap into this fluffy resource on their doorsteps.
If collaboration is not sounding like a word anymore after reading this piece, you’re not alone, but the collective spirit was strong in Malmö. SSDD is organised in collaboration (sorry) with Form/Design Centre, a non-profit funded by various local and national government initiatives that’s based out of a historic grain hall. It functions as a mutually supportive network of institutions, with SSDD as a new outgrowth of this bottom-up approach to the local creative industry. Project managers Terese Alstin and Ann Isler are designers themselves, and are determined that the programming reflect what participants – not brands or advertisers – want from an event like this. The inaugural edition was due to launch in 2020 and ended up getting pushed back – for obvious reasons.
In 2021, they just couldn’t wait and launched as a digital event, streaming panels, interviews and workshops. By 2022 they were cooking on gas and ready to bring everyone together, for real. The sharp-elbowed competitive edge of some more established design weeks was refreshingly absent. Camaraderie was palpable, with designers and organisers dropping by to support each other’s exhibitions and events. It’s an attitude, says Alstin, that’s endemic to the local area. “It was the most amazing process [organising SSDD],” she said. “That’s very typical for southern Sweden. You say you’re doing something fun, then boom! Everyone joins in.”
Words India Block
Photographs courtesy of SSDD