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February 11, 2006
Stockholm Furniture Fair: Bliss on a Stick
I went to my first Stockholm Furniture Fair yesterday. I don't know if all designers are nice or only the ones I've met, but I had a swell time and Apartment Therapy fans would cream their jeans over the nifty items on display.
There are too many cool things to mention in a single posting so today I will limit myself to reporting on a cheeky design duo called Save Our Souls. Johannes Carlström and Magdalena Nilsson, the two young designers behind this spanking new company, found inspiration in last year's global disasters, including Hurricane Katrina.
Yes, it is as weird as it sounds. As the company describes it, “Save Our Souls makes harsh, beautiful furniture with bitter-sweet aesthetic. The pleasant combined with the threatening and dark.” That’s an apt description. Later I’ll post a photo of the two designers against a backdrop of their Gunner wallpaper. It’s a subversively traditional, almost old-fashioned looking wallpaper with a repeating pattern in pink against a background of deep maroon. It takes a while to realize that the repeating image is a revolver. A revolver. I nearly burst out laughing when I got it.
The company showed four products: the wallpaper, a gorgeous black glass table (modeled on an oil spill), heavy, hanging black glass lamps (modeled on—you guessed it-oil drops), and a black bookcase I really love called "Fuckin Far From Ok" that has that phrase built into the shelves. If that's not modern life summed up neatly, what is?
To quote from the company’s statement (which I’ve cleaned up a tiny bit), “The greenhouse-effect is getting more severe every day with storms and hurricanes sweeping our world. The glaciers are melting. We produce. Consume. We buy more stuff than ever before and materialism is a way of life. We believe that almost every cultural worker has a dream of, if not saving the world, at least make it better or more beautiful. It's problematic to want to make new products. In fact very little new stuff is needed.
“What to do? Fold one's hands and pray, like sending out a SOS-signal, hoping for someone to rush out and intervene. Save Our Souls became the working name and we made a series of furniture that comments the world around us. This is not a moralizing sermon, we are just like anyone else, in fact we live happy lives in the industrial world. What we want to do is to use that silence between the catastrophes and remind ourselves. Instead of trying to forget, we put the light on the problems and make a visual experience of it."
Save Our Souls presented its new products in the Greenhouse, a special area of the Stockholm Furniture Fair devoted to new and young designers and design programs from colleges as far away as Tokyo. Few of the products displayed at the Greenhouse are in production, and many of them will remain prototypes. That's the nature of the business. But there was tons worth seeing, and I'll add more examples next week.
Posted by Deborah Branscum at February 11, 2006 11:16 AM