NØRDIC NEWS

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen gives us on a regular basis, chosen fresh news from Scandinavia. Sara is a very sensitive person , in love with trends and style, she is also a talented writer and the brain behind "Quote a Gentleman".

A home with a big green tree surrounded by white walls, a mint green “falling” person on a chair, a “closet knitter” and a “womanschair” are all objects made in yarn. The playful knit sculptures and installations relate to everyday objects by exploring the fine line between firm and fluid. By adding an unexpected twist to the work, the artist challenges the preconceptions of what constitutes the purpose of an object, also mirrored in the wordplay of the titles. On the one hand, the art pieces are tangible, because all viewers are familiar to the material wool and the art of knitting, but on the other hand, the objects are an image, a symbol, a comment to our perception of the reality we live in. A new reality focusing on the sense of playing and introducing the new human transition period being a kidult!

The art pieces are made by the Danish artist Isabel Berglund who skillfully knits her objects and installations. What starts off as an ordinary piece of knitting, takes on a new direction and transforms into unexpected forms, balancing between function and abstraction, hard and soft, the familiar and the unexpected. In the “Floating Pearls”, a knitted collage hangs from the ceiling and spreads out on the floor – as a piece of knitted garment, apparently left behind by coincidence. One feels as if the garment was worn by someone with the pearls around her neck. The person has now dissolved and, in color and all, become one with the very objects that fashioned her or his appearance: the pearls and the knit garment. While one still has an idea of the initial function of the object, it soon becomes obvious that a transformation is taking place, and that we are witnessing an object in the state of transition.

The overwhelming knitted proportions, the borderline between playfulness and the ordinary, the exploration of the unknown dimensions of knitted yarn objects all creates a new and contemporary take on the traditional skills of hands. The artist thereby transforms the life we live through a world of wool. With a childlike curiosity Isabel Berglund creates artwork where the visual sense-experience is essential and underneath the surface, more is at play.

Isabel Berglund’s knitted art installations made from one single yarn will spread as a spider web this coming year. The talented artist will display her art pieces at the Nordic House in the Faroe Islands in April 2013, at the “Wool Modern” exhibition at the Seoul Arts Center in Korea in October 2013, followed by an exhibition in Kobe, Japan and latest the exhibition Asia Europe II in the textile museum in Krefeld, Germany and Jean Lurcat & Tapestry Museum in France both in 2014.

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen

www.isabelberglund.dk

www.quoteagentleman.com

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen gives us on a regular basis, chosen fresh news from Scandinavia. Sara is a very sensitive person , in love with trends and style, she is also a talented writer and the brain behind "Quote a Gentleman".

We can’t get enough of our breads in the Nordic countries. Rye bread, whole wheat, multi grain, crisp bread, gluten-free, organic, vegan, yeast-free etc. - a field that continue its growth. Even the traditional sourdough bread has felt the power of a trend from eco-lovers to locavores. There are sourdough blogs, sourdough bakeries and now the first ever sourdough hotel in Stockholm, Sweden. Despite the eco-friendliness and the healthy lifestyle choices there is also an invaluable social aspect of the spread of home-made bread. It gives an opportunity for homemade food lovers to create networks for passing on knowledge, sharing experiences and exchanging ideas.

The sourdough hotel, that’s part of Urban Deli in the hip Sofo district of Stockholm started almost 2 years ago and has been on everyone’s lips ever since. The whole new concept developed in collaboration with the local artist, Josefin Vargö, for her Living Culture project, and the bakery agreed on housing the collection of sourdough samples. The project became sort of an ‘intangible’ and immeasurable resource of sociological knowledge about how people around Sweden use sourdough. The most interesting findings regarding the project was; that there is something more about home-baked bread than people’s willingness for sustainable and healthy lifestyle.

Baking your own bread may be a metaphor for giving the best to those who we care about. In this sense, besides nourishing the body, home-made bread is also a key piece for people bonding with each other. Making, sharing and celebrating it can simply give a feeling of social belonging on every day basis.

What started out as an art project with jars of sourdough, is today part of Urban Deli’s bakery. The sourdough hotel is made for the Stockholmers who goes travelling and need their sourdough to be looked after – a nursery home to keep the sourdough thriving. The local bakers will look after the jars with sourdough and periodically add water and flour depending on the pre-ferment or to increase the volume of the starter. But the sourdough hotel also plays a more important role in the home bread-making culture. Sourdough baking is popular among the socially conscious and eco-worried opposing excessive food import. Other groups that find the concept deeply relevant are the stay-at-home-dads and young parents who are concerned with providing their offspring with commercially produced food. These groups have been a huge driving force in the Swedish sourdough trend.

The success of the sourdough hotel proves that the home production of bread or food in general might be more than a fad expected to pass quickly. It goes hand in hand with the local organic produced food, roof top gardening in the big cities, community gardens, co-operative society gardens, farm shops ect. At the moment the making of sourdough bread is the talk around the Nordic towns, and this momentum will definitely continue for the bread loving people of Scandinavia. Swedes will always be baking their crisp bread, Danes their rye bread, Norwegians their flatbread and so on. The taste, smell, feeling and touch of home-made bread is simply better than other breads and last longer.

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen

www.urbandeli.org

www.quoteagentleman.com

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen gives us on a regular basis, chosen fresh news from Scandinavia. Sara is a very sensitive person , in love with trends and style, she is also a talented writer and the brain behind "Quote a Gentleman".

It is almost like a feeling – a touch of something we are about to destroy. The Somalia born, Stockholm raised and London graduated artist Ayan Farah obtains the physical and tactile records of natural phenomena as a part of her artistic practice. The artist travels to carefully selected locations scattered in the North European countries and bring the imprints of long-lasting nature processes into existence of her site-specific masterpieces.

In fact, the art pieces are influenced by natural phenomenon to such an extent that they become almost an integral part of the place of their conception. The trademark of her practice is to make use of unconventional technology and natural resources while creating sun-bleached canvases, UV-light processed paintings or solar photographs on silk and cotton. An almost sustainable artistic practice where the canvases and objects deliberately put in different locations become “stained” by the time.

As a result, wind, sunlight, rain and snow penetrate the material so immensely that their traces become fully integrated in the work. This reduces the physicality of the object and makes it part of the physical architectural space it occupies, and also connects it to the non-material lucidity of moving image and sound.

Farah execute in whatever medium is relevant for the specific piece varying from placed canvas on a house roof in Nuuk, Greenland to the lining of a sleeping bag dug down by the foot of the Eldfell volcano in Iceland. After several months the physical fabric has undergone a transformation and the result is mostly unpredictable and allow changes to happen. The state of the material shifts as the light changes throughout the day, revealing folds, layers, lucidity and opaqueness. In her own words this is how Farah explain her artistic practice. “It’s about how the work occupies space and co-exits with it, it’s about weight and weightlessness, the making or the unmaking of the work and its nature, it’s cause and creation.”

Characteristic about Farah’s work is the boarder of the deliberate and the provisional. It is form-full and at the same time formless, finished and unfinished, reflective, translucent, static but with an element that echoes time based media. There is a feeling of being inside and outside, on the other side and behind the side first expected. Sometimes humanity forget what is given by nature itself, but hopefully this talented artist will bring back a touch of a natural phenomena.

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen

ayanfarah.com

quoteagentleman

Magda di Siena is an architect, an interior stylist and an art consultant. Her work is focused on projecting and setting exhibitions, fair stands, paper advertisements. She visited the Venice Architecture Biennale and shares with us the Nordic Pavilion.

One of the most interesting pavilions at the 13th Venice Architecture Biennale is undoubtedly the Nordic pavilion (representing Norway, Finland and Sweden), built in a 1962 design by Sverre Fehn, which celebrates its 50th birthday this year. To mark the occasion the curator, Peter MacKeith, has commissioned 32 architects, all born after 1962, to present their concepts of architecture as common ground.

In this pavilion, whose interior includes a number of trees integral to Fehn's design, the concept of an open dialogue with nature is already clearly expressed, and it seems that the new generations have taken the idea to heart.  After meetings, workshops and discussions between the participants, the structure of the exhibition was mapped out clearly and effectively: the decision was to exhibit, in the form of installations (the supports for which were designed by Professor Juhani Pallasma, a colleague and friend of Fehn), conceptual elements that would lead the visitor to an immediate reflection on perceptions of space, materials to be used in construction and attention to the surrounding landscape: considerations which were for too long labelled 'utopian', but are now  seen again as essential elements in any sustainable project of high aesthetic and functional quality.

Light house: on the Nordic common ground is the title chosen for the Scandinavian contribution to the Venetian exhibition. If architecture is once again a space for dialogue, what should it bring with it for this resumed journey? This is the question posed by the Biennale's curator, David Chipperfield.  The Scandinavian reply is the contents of Light house, which in a broad sense can also be taken as just (just?!) a collection of good ideas, good intentions, 'cells' from which new spatial and material conceptions can grow alongside a better constructional awareness.

The visitor's attention is seized at once by Adaptation, a work by the Haugen Zohar Arkitekter: a leveret covering its eyes with its forepaws in front of three pine cones painted white. Halfway between tragic and comic, this installation brings the observer face to face with an important question: is what we produce always pleasing or right for the user?

The territory we live in is, furthermore, shared with other species; they take part instinctively in a dialogue about building and we should pay attention to them before intervening on the territory. Another visually striking installation is the cube created by Marge Arkitekter out of rings cut from plastic bottles. This installation clearly defines the potentialities of materials designated as rubbish, which can and should be thought of as materials to be re-used in new processes with surprising new possibilities and new aesthetic qualities. Similar thoughts arise from the Hollmenn Reuter Sandman team's structure of irregular branches bent into the shape of a cube.

The imperfect has within it the potential to reveal new poetic forms, a tree can be transformed into something else without losing its identity. Likewise cardboard packaging can be transformed (by Verstas Architects) into an interesting model for the study of a living space. The idea of an architecture that refuses to impose itself forcefully, but almost camouflages itself in the territory of its insertion is well expressed by Tham & Videgards through a piece of stylised woodland in which a small house is placed almost as if it were its fruit. Manthey Kula also proposes a reflection on the re-utilisation of materials through a design for a seat created from scrap timber and a vertical element in grey felt, communicating a desire for non-formalisation, while managing to describe atmospheres and sensations even with poor materials.

Closing this short tour, we might look at the installation by TYIN tegnesteu: a tool-box containing a collection of thoughts and maxims for working well and feeling good in the company of others. Among other 'tools' is a dictionary of beautiful mistakes, including this quotation: ‘Don’t worry too much about language difficulties. Use the universal language of the drawing and be aware of your collaborators' body language’. A handy message to carry about in an ever more globalised world, where people of diverse languages and traditions are continually meeting on common ground.

Magda Di Siena

www.labiennale.org

Magda's web site

The Nordic revolution is presented both in classic Scandinavian furniture design, Nordic craftsmanship, the world famous restaurant Noma, the local produced new Nordic Cuisine and also various architecture.  But is there a Nordic identity and does the Nordic way exist?

The Louisiana Museum of Modern Art is currently showcasing the exhibition New Nordic – Architecture & Identity, where some of these questions are in the spotlight. Despite the tendency of globalization where national and cultural differences are erased, it is important to notice if we still understand identity as something that is associated with particular places. If that is the case, how has the Nordic identity developed from the rest of the world?

The New Nordic exhibition explores how the five Nordic countries have experienced the latest development and how it’s taking form by asking what is the new Nordic and what is a rediscovery of the tradition? The Nordic is perhaps mainly evident in the clash between architects cultural roots and professional tradition on one hand, and on the other the fact that the global perspective is an inevitable condition for humanity today.

The exhibition focus on three main themes – reassessing the site-specific, reinteroritating community and reclaiming public space - areas where Nordic architecture has made its trademark in this first decade of the new millennium.Innovative buildings and original urban spaces shows the rebirth and interest of local and regional roots. But also welfare ideals are manifested in present day architecture – a welfare system that is often associated with the Nordic countries.

One of the great new tendencies within the Nordic societies is the Nordic sense of community. New institutions are build these years where many functions that used to be separate is now seen in new constructions. Hospitals become more-home-like atmosphere, library becomes concert halls and culture houses and citizens service centres are suddenly all in one.

The Nordic architecture is closely linked to landscapes and latitudes - from green beech forrest to ice-covered mountain caps, which is all closely associated with the quality sense amd choice of materials, proud building traditions and simplicity at its finest.  When today’s new Nordic wave both attract international attention and have impact on a globalized world, it is definitely in association with the Nordic values and visions.

New Nordic is both a rich narrative and a modern look on how we currently build in the Nordic region and express and organize ourselves and our community.

The exhibition continues until the 21^st of October 2012.

Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen

www.louisiana.dk

Sara’s website

We are happy to introduce you to Sara Ingemann Holm-Nielsen who will give us on a regular base, chosen frech news from Scandinavia. Sara is a very sensitive person , in love with trends and style, she is also a talented writer and the brain behind "Quote a Gentleman".

Scandinavian furniture design is known for its golden era in the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by simplicity, minimalism, functionality and democratic in the sense that everyday objects should be affordable for not only the wealthy, but for all.

The democratic Scandinavian design ideals have survived and a new movement is positioned with the creative Nordic platform Muuto. The name Muuto is inspired by the Finnish word “muutos”, which means change or new perspective. The name itself is a new wave of Scandinavian design success where the best handpicked design talents and leading contemporary designers from Sweden, Norway, Denmark and Finland are given the freedom to express their individual story through everyday objects.

This new movement and chapter to the Scandinavian design tradition begin with the Muuto New Nordic collection consisting of furniture, lightning and accessories. The collection vary from the Wood Lamp by the Stockholm based design studio TAF Architects, that provides a low-tech counterweight desk lamp with a iconic and modern expression to the Raw Side Table by the Swedish designer Jens Fager.

The Raw collection consisting of handmade table, chair and candlestick is based on rough and intuitive interpretations of iconic everyday objects with a modern Nordic colour palette.

The Crushed Bowl by the Copenhagen based JDS Architects manifests big-scale architecture to small-scale objects. The geometric principals are still very strong, but the pure lines of the classics have now been combined with something more fluid. Another everyday object that captures the New Nordic wave is Under the Bell lamp by the Iskos-Berlin. The recyclable plastic, which the lamp is made of, absorbs sound and improves the acoustics in the room. It almost creates a space within the space. Last but not least the Visu chair by the Finnish designer Mika Tolvanen combines the old Scandinavian furniture traditions with a fresh feeling of lightness and modernity.

A hallmark of Scandinavian design is the respect for simple materials such as wood, steel, canvas, glass and cork combined with the Nordic natural light, traditional craftsmanship, classic lines and forms from the Scandinavian furniture masters from the 1950s and 1960s.

Sara' s web site 

www.muuto.com