"Experience the Experience" was an exhibition that portrayed a nightclub experience through spatial installations reflecting the various emotions that arise in a club environment. Each piece, accompanied by sound from Studio Barnhus, followed the dramaturgy of a club night. During the opening night, Axel Boman, Kornél Kovács and Pedrodollar performed a five-hour live set, where the sound from different parts of the venue merged into an immersive and physical experience for the visitor.

Here's the map of the venue and the different feelings we portrayed:

This project was really cool, should do it again sometime

Guess we'll never know:)

Another result of our presence at Alcova 2021 was meeting Miguel Leiro, curator of Mayrit Bienal in Madrid. He invited us to do a residency and an exhibition at ACME Estudio in Madrid during Mayrit Benial 2022. ACME Estudio is a metal workshop and exhibition space run by 3 amazing cool awesome Spanish Girls that we are now lucky to call our friends.

The theme of the biennial was Submerged Worlds and we articulated a concept around the topic of waiting.

“Stuck with Swedish Girls” is a multifaceted installation that explores reality and representation through a combination of physical and digital elements. 7 "I <3 Swedish Girls Chairs" are designed with flat pack construction (swedish culture;)) emphasizing the project’s everyday quality and accessibility. By idolizing Swedish Girls we highlight the project’s irony surrounding consumption and status. On a IKEA-side table there's a gossip magazine titled “SWEDISH GIRLS!” that showcases the mythologization and reflects on public image. A video work on a TV displays digital glitches of Swedish Girls interacting in a virtual world, which questions the boundary between reality and simulation, and how we interact with them. Are you interacting from the glitch or watching others do it? What are you waiting for?

The most exciting dimension of this project (in my opinion) was to see visitors interact because it activates the work in a performative way.

This installation has since then been traveling and exhibited in Kunsthal Aarhus 2023, Digitaliseum Malmö 2023, Zentralwäscherei Zürich 2023, Supermarket Art Fair Stockholm 2024 and Röhsska Museet Göteborg 2024.

A big part of the concept of this installation was to invite other voices to interpret the idea of public space with private intentions. This was the first time we ever curated something and we did it together with James Taylor-Foster, curator of ArkDes. It was a really good experience for us to be on the other side of that dynamic.

"Grazing Land" by Moa Marklund

"I Promise You A Rosegarden" by EllenX

So I told u about our FaceTime tour of the exhibition at Alcova in Milan and that the rest is history. So this is history; James Taylor-Foster and the team of ArkDes, the Architecture and Design Museum in Stockholm, invited us to present a proposal for “Utomhusverket 2022”, an annual large-scale public installation outside of ArkDes and the Modern Museum in Stockholm. The brief was to prototype public space and our proposal was successful. We worked on the idea of “public space with private intentions” for 6 months and presented the installations on June 3rd 2022. I thought I could share our speech from the inauguration because it covers a lot;

Mira and I have been talking a lot about our experiences of public space and have also had this conversation with many others. It always has the same outcome: that public space is not a place where we feel safe or represented. We see it as a place of transit and rarely as a destination. If the public space of the city is designed to appeal to a normative public, we believe that this neutrality often works to expand some parts of the public realm while restricting others. For Utomhusverket, we’re prototyping a non-neutral public space, a public space with private intentions.

When we first looked at this site, we got lost in the strange history of Skeppsholmen. It has a history of being torn between private and public interests. In the mid 1500s, this island was called Lustholmen and used as a place of recreation for the Vasa Kings, here there were pleasure gardens and castles. In the mid 1600s, Queen Kristina didn't like the view from the royal castle and moved the naval ships from Blasieholmen to Lustholmen, and it became Skeppsholmen. Where the military is visible, there is often invisible sexual expression, and it is between this play of visibility and invisibility that Skeppsholmen existed in until the 1950s.

So what have we done? We have designed a pleasure garden. It references manicured walks, secluded moments, multiple ways of access. We are inspired by patterns in traditional public gardens and different heights of hedges and trees. Instead of working with a monumental fountain or sculpture as these spaces often hold, we wanted the space to circle around this intimate, still monumental, centerpiece. It’s been really important for us to create a space where you feel secluded yet welcomed. We want to make room for visibility and invisibility, trysts, community and play.

What you see here is a development of the first piece of furniture that we designed as a team. It’s called Seats, and we have worked with the same social, aesthetic, and sustainable values in this project. Focusing on interaction, having no back or front and instead inspiring the flow of a space. It’s the first time that we work in this scale, turning an object into a spatial installation.

We have worked closely with the production studio Hamilton & Serrander and every part of the process has been handled in Sweden. The metal threads are machine made, based on our drawings, as are the bottom elements that hold them together in this frozen form. There has been a great deal of craftsmanship in achieving this sort of precision; the steel instantly reacts with tension. The finish of the installation is powder coated: a zink base with a glitter clear coating. The material is all sourced in Scandinavia and is largely recycled, but the raw material is Swedish. The bouncy rubber that covers the ground is recycled car tires.

Working with these questions of who’s represented and safe in public space calls for a diverse representation of voices. Throughout the summer this space will be activated with performances where different artists will interpret the idea of non-neutral public space. This is a very important part of Utomhusverket 2022, and you’ll soon get a taste of what this could be - literally.

It’s been an emotional process since the project became so private with the concept we chose to work with but when we sat up here the other day and were done with the whole installation we had a peak emotional moment. There were tears and Mira put it so beautifully, in between sobbing, that for so long it's been only ours. Now it’s everyones. As scary as that feeling is, it also functions as a proof that we have designed a public space with private intentions.

Summing up we want to thank you James, Kieran, Stefan, Alva and the whole ArkDes team for all these months of hard work and for being bold by having us. This experience will forever be so special to us, it’s really been a pleasure! Thank you<3
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