Experiences of glass production

During my childhood in the 1970s, I spent my summers in Småland, a region in southern Sweden that was and still is called the Kingdom of Crystal as part of an effort to promote tourism in the area (Fig. 1). The town where my father grew up in the 1930s, Nybro, was characterised by the glassworks, Engshyttan and Pukeberg. My grandfather, who was born in 1880, was employed as a glassblower at various times at these glassworks. The family also lived close to Pukeberg glassworks.

In my childhood, I sometimes accompanied my father in the summers when he met his cousins in different parts of Småland. Several of them worked at the glassworks in Orrefors and Älghult and at other glassworks that no longer exist. During my childhood and adolescence and throughout my adult life, whenever I returned to my father’s birthplace, I experienced the tangible transformation and closure of the glass industry and the emergence of today's glassworks specialising in art glass.

My experiences have made me think about why glass is still so important to the identity of Småland, even though the industrial production of glass has almost completely ceased. The explanation lies largely in history and its interaction with the present. The forest that was so necessary in the past provided the glassworks with wood for the glass furnaces. Forests were available in abundance. The sand used was also initially sourced locally. Glassmaking, albeit in different forms, continues to attract visitors to this day, many years after tableware and lamp glass have been replaced by art glass. Manufacturing has gone from artisanal to industrial and back again. The products of the glass industry have been replaced by glass as a work of art and artistic expression, and today it evokes much interest from visitors to the region.

Glass between the Mediterranean and Scandinavia in ancient times

I have encountered glassmaking in more ways than through my relatives. As an archaeologist I am well aware that objects of glass are sometimes found in excavations of prehistoric and historic sites. The most beautiful and well-preserved objects end up in museum displays. In archaeological finds from the Scandinavian and Swedish regions more conspicuous glass objects are linked to rich environments from the so-called Roman Iron Age around 0–400 AD. During this period, all glass drinking vessels were imported from the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean since there was no local glass production in Scandinavia at the time. These ancient glass objects have mainly been found in exclusive burial contexts such as Iron Age chamber tombs and mounds as precious grave gifts to rich and powerful individuals.¹

There have also been archaeological finds of flat glass that has been used as window glass, especially in connection with Viking Age hall buildings and early medieval churches from the period c. 800–1200 AD. These flat glass objects were initially interpreted as contaminations from later historic times but have since been reinterpreted as contemporary with the excavated Viking Age and Medieval sites.²

Glass beads are another type of object that is abundant in the Scandinavian archaeological record, sometimes found in ordinary cultural deposits, but sometimes discovered in whole sets in the form of necklaces, placed around the necks of the dead as grave goods. The earliest glass beads in the Scandinavian archaeological material are blue in colour and have come to Scandinavia all the way from Egypt.

The origins of glassmaking in Mesopotamia and Egypt several thousands of years ago point to an interesting and long-distance connection between Scandinavia and the early glassmaking in other regions of the world. Sweden has only recently emerged from an era of initially artisanal and then industrial glass production that has existed in the country no longer than for the past 500 years. The establishment of glassmaking in Sweden took place quite late in history with a beginning in the sixteenth century. In the light of this rather late development of glassmaking in Scandinavia, it is interesting to consider the much earlier archaeological findings of glass objects in Sweden that have come here mainly from the Mediterranean area in Roman times.³ People from Scandinavia had regular contacts with those in the Mediterranean back then, and traditions like serving and drinking wine from precious glass vessels were practised in Scandinavia, too, to imitate the traditions and manners learnt from these contacts far away.

The archaeological traces of glass on Öland

A few years ago, in 2016, archaeologists found a possible bead-manufacturing site on Öland, an island located southeast of the Småland coast in the Baltic Sea.⁴ The island is known among archaeologists to have had long-distance contacts with Mediterranean cultures, particularly during the Roman Iron Age c. 400 AD. Öland enjoyed considerable prosperity during this part of the Iron Age in Scandinavia because the locals participated as mercenaries in the armies of the Roman Empire. They were paid in gold coins, and this gold has in turn been discovered on the island in rich treasure finds, either in the form of coins, or in the form of bracteates and jewellery made from the melted-down gold coins from Rome.

The possible traces of glass-bead production on Öland are relatively early in a Swedish context. The glass that was used as the raw material was imported or came here with travelling craftspeople. This early form of glass-related craftsmanship in Scandinavia is about 1600 years old, a short time compared to the duration of the glassmaking tradition in regions like Mesopotamia. And it would be another thousand years before more advanced glassmaking developed in the neighbouring province of Småland.

Long-distance contacts and moving objects

Archaeologists appreciate finds that tell of long-distance contacts and exchanges of ideas. One such example has a direct link to glass as a material. Based on the discovery of a horn-shaped glass beaker in a Swedish Iron Age grave from around 400 AD, archaeologists have concluded that glass production in the Roman area was adapted to a design that could have appealed to the inhabitants of the area that is now Sweden. At this time, cow horns were used as drinking cups in the Scandinavian region. The glass from the grave find is apparently an imitation of such a drinking horn but made entirely of glass and decorated with a vine.⁵ This discovery was recovered from a rich tomb in the province of Östergötland just north of Småland in 1890 (Fig. 2).

In another burial site, this time associated with an urban settlement, the Viking town of Birka near Stockholm in Sweden, a glass game piece was unearthed by archaeologists in 1879. The piece depicts the king-like figure of a board game and is a human creation that makes it easy for us to connect with both the game and the people who played it a little over a thousand years ago. ‘Pleasure and vices’ is the museum’s categorisation of this small piece, which is barely four centimetres high (Fig. 3).

Glass, time and artistic expression

Artists have the ability and opportunity to create a direct link between the present and the past through their practice. The connection over time can be made based on archaeological findings, historical practice and contemporary artistic practice. Artists can overlook the time that has passed, and, through their expressions, link the past and the present without the filters that the temporal distance has placed between us and those who lived and worked back then.⁶

The Swedish glass artist Åsa Jungnelius consciously connects the now with the then through her work, bridging the distance in time. By immersing herself in and practising the glassmaking tradition while at the same time applying it with her very own unique expressions and formats, she gives the glass a new form both within and beyond the traditional.

Glass is a tangible, solid and hard, but also very fragile material. It has a distinct body. But at the same time, glass is created using something invisible to the naked eye, namely breath, which causes the material to expand while it is still in a heated and therefore malleable state. As an archaeologist, I find it fascinating to see all the materials that have been shaped by humans both in the past and in our own time. The very act of shaping a material for different purposes also connects us in an interesting way across centuries and millennia.

Figure captions

Figure 1. Map showing the location of the region of Småland, Sweden, where the glassworks and Nybro are located.

Figure 2. Glass drinking horn made in Roman territory, found by archaeologists in 1890 in a grave from the Roman Iron Age (c. 400 AD) in the Swedish province of Östergötland. Credit: Christer Åhlin, The Swedish History Museum/SHM (CC BY 4.0).

Figure 3. A king-like game piece of green glass and blue decoration for a board game, found by archaeologists in 1879 in a chamber tomb from the Viking Age (c. 800–1100 AD) in the Viking town of Birka on the island of Björkö in Lake Mälaren in Sweden. Credit: Jens Mohr, The Swedish History Museum/SHM (CC BY 4.0).

Figure 4. Photograph from Orrefors glassworks in Småland around 1900. Photographer unknown. Credit: Photo from the Swedish National Museum of Science and Technology.

¹ Kent Andersson, Glas – från romare till vikingar (Uppsala: Balderson Förlag, 2010).

² Linda Qviström, Rum utan utsikt: fönster och ljus i medeltida byggnader. Phd. Dissertation (Stockholm: Stockholm University, 2019); Torben Sode, Bernhard Grautze and Mads Dengsø Jessen, ‘Viking Age Windows: A reassessment of windowpane fragments based on chemical analysis (LA-ICP-MS) and their find contexts’, Danish Journal of Archaeology 2023, Vol. 12, 1–26, 2020, https://doi.org/10.7146/dja.v12i1.131493.

³ Ulf Näsman, Glas och handel i senromersk tid och folkvandringstid: en studie kring glas från Eketorp-II, Öland, Sverige. Phd Dissertation (Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1984).

⁴ Maria Karlsson, Sveriges första glasverkstad? En undersökning av glasfynd från Sandby borg och andra tidiga glashantverksplatser I Skandinavien, unpublished candidate thesis (Kalmar: Linnaeus University, 2017); Ludvig Papmehl-Dufay, and Helena Victor, Sandby borg IX. Undersökningar 2016. Rapport. Sandby borgs skrifter 9 (Kalmar: Kalmar County Museum, 2020).

⁵ Andersson 2010, 44–46.

⁶ Bodil Petersson, and Danny Burke et al ‘Experimental Heritage as Practice: Approaching the Past through the Present at the Intersection of Art and Archaeology’, Internet Archaeology 55,2020. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.55.5

Bodil Petersson, Professor of Archaeology and Cultural Heritage at Linnaeus University, Sweden

I met Åsa Jungnelius in early March last year. She was in İstanbul at the invitation of the Swedish Consulate. Mike Bode, who was the last Cultural Counsellor, made possible research trips for artists throughout his tenure. Each trip was a seed that might flourish into collaborations. Åsa was one of the last artists to be invited after it was declared that the department was closing down.

Hearing about her visit, I volunteered to take her around the Historical Peninsula, since I always enjoyed observing others’ perceptive relationships with these unique spaces. It was a transitional period in my life. After nearly twenty years, I had stepped outside the institutional work system, which had given me the rare chance to wander the city at a time when I would usually be working. So, on my first free day, without being aware of it, I embarked on a new journey that would reveal itself as we crossed the country through four seasons.

Earth: Red Imperial Porphyry from Egypt

Every day, thousands of people walk on İstiklal Avenue. Sometimes, you just let yourself flow with the crowd until you reach Tünel Square. But if you are there early in the morning, you can enjoy its quietness, and all of a sudden, the mesmerising buildings from the nineteenth century become visible to your eyes.

Beyoğlu used to be a centre for the Western community living in Constantinople, and it has long been the heart of cultural life in the city. It is home to most of the European consulates. The Swedish Palace, where Åsa was waiting for me, is located at the end of this pedestrian avenue, close to Tünel Square. The building was completed in 1870, after the first one – built in the early eighteenth century – was burned down.¹ It is located just a few minutes away from the oldest Mevlevi lodge, which was constructed in the fifteenth century.

My heart became entwined with İstanbul as a child, thanks to my pen friend's letters sent from one of the Princes’ Islands. During my teenage years in Eskişehir, every excuse was a good one to take a train to the city, where I would spend hours wandering around Beyoğlu – looking at the old buildings, touching stone façades, sitting quietly under a tree, and imagining all the souls who had passed along the same roads. It took me years to comprehend that the history of this place was supporting my present existence.

Åsa looked exactly like the pictures I had seen online before our meeting. After a brief greeting, we started to walk down to Karaköy to take the tram that would bring us to the old Roman city, established in the fourth century. I knew that this leading glass artist and award-winning designer had been to İstanbul before. Her groundbreaking works from the early 2000s were included in Aurora – Contemporary Nordic Glass Art, a group show hosted by Pera Museum in 2014. The exhibition was curated by Mats Jansson and included works by twenty-five artists from the Nordic countries.

Åsa had a pavilion within the exhibition, which was separated from the rest of the space with a semi-transparent mirror and pinkish curtains reminiscent of skin. The glass sculptures, displayed on black shiny plinths of various sizes, carried connotations of gender narratives deeply embedded in society. Fluorescent lights placed on the floor next to the plinths enhanced their glossy appearance, but also added a sense of dangerous electrical energy. Åsa had created an atmosphere in which visitors were captivated by a colourful world of symbols, while being held by an invisible tension.

On the occasion of Aurora, she had a public discussion with Ahu Antmen, where they talked about her practice and she introduced her feminist perspective in relation to her works. I learned that March morning that during her last visit to İstanbul she had left a baby at home. I guessed our children must be about the same age. His name, I later discovered, was Sten, meaning stone in Swedish.

Åsa’s practice is process-based and collaborative. She starts with a feeling, an idea, and then follows the intersecting paths without rushing. Sometimes she pauses to immerse herself in the environment, listening to what the land or the materials with which she works have to say. She’s not afraid to step into the unknown – mentally or physically. The more she moves, the more she gets lost. Unlike most, she embraces uncertainty and obscurity. But she does so with the wise instinct of an adventurer, knowing that the way is never truly found unless it is first lost. Her collaborative approach – bringing others into her journey – opens space for sharing. One meaningful example is The Inner World Exhibition (2023), a project developed over three years in dialogue with Norrköping’s identity, character and history.² For this work, she produced twenty unique pavilions in collaboration with individuals and local associations. Each time, she created environments that triggered sensual experiences on a collective scale — like the joy of witnessing a hot-air balloon rising inside an old factory, or a beautifully set table in soft colours where people could eat and chat together.

The tram from Karaköy was not too crowded, so we sat and looked out of the window. While we were in Eminönü, I showed her the New Mosque, which was opened in 1665. I find it remarkable that a seventeenth-century monument is considered ‘new’ in the context of this city.

Except for a few tourist groups following their guides, Sultanahmet Square was relatively empty. We decided to visit Hagia Sophia first – one of the oldest monuments in the city and an architectural masterpiece. I hadn’t been there since it was reopened as a mosque in 2020. Whenever I visit an old building, I take off my shoes and stand barefoot in silence. It is an irresistible act. The energy loaded in the material attracts me like a magnet. I had done this multiple times in Hagia Sophia, feeling its sixth-century stone floor with the soles of my feet. However, this was no longer possible, since the floor was covered with carpet due to the building’s new function.

We entered the main space from downstairs, which is open to locals. As soon as we stepped in, the majesty of the dome left us breathless. We walked around, following each other for a while, and then began to explore the space separately. It is too beautiful to take in at once – one feels confused about where to focus. The intensity of one’s emotions, even amongst the crowd filling the room, seems related to all the memories that the materials hold within them. After a short while, we met again in front of a wall composed of a variety of colored marbles. Åsa pointed to one with a dark, reddish-purple hue. She asked if I knew what it was. I shook my head.

Red imperial porphyry was one of the rarest stones, quarried in Egypt. It was widely used by the Romans for sculpture, decoration and flooring, and it remained a prized material during the Byzantine Empire. It is said that the Palace in Constantinople had a square-shaped chamber covered in porphyry, designated for the birthing of imperial children.³ It was described by Anna Komnene in her book The Alexiad from the twelfth century, where she begins: ‘I, Anna, daughter of the Emperor Alexius and the Empress Irene, born and bred in the porphyra.’⁴ A few days before International Women’s Day, we reflected on purple’s associations with royalty and dignity, and its embracement by the Suffragist movement in the early twentieth century.

It took us some time to leave Hagia Sophia, since we were both captivated by the atmosphere. The rest of our day drifted like a dream. We visited the Basilica Cistern, where we admired the Medusa heads used as pillar bases, then strolled around Eminönü and stopped by the Rüstem Paşa Mosque, known for its exceptional sixteenth-century İznik tiles. For lunch, we chose a small esnaf lokantası – a humble restaurant where local shopkeepers typically dine. We ate rice and beans while the cries of seagulls mixed with the hum of traffic. Our final stop was the Pera Museum. I could sense how heartwarming it was for Åsa to return after a decade and reconnect with Begüm Akkoyunlu, Temporary Exhibitions Manager, over coffee. Before parting ways, we stopped at the flower vendor on the corner of Odakule, bought a large bouquet of mimosa blossoms, and wished each other a happy Women’s Day.

Fire: The Glass Furnace in Denizli

Åsa returned after a few months, in June, exploring the possibility of a solo exhibition in İstanbul featuring a new body of work to be produced specifically for the occasion. Following her visit in spring, she connected with The Glass Furnace in İstanbul, which in turn introduced her to Şişecam – a leading glass company founded in 1935 as a Republican project. Åsa was already familiar with their work, since their handmade glass factory in Denizli is one of the main producers for international design companies.

I met her at the airport, where she was arriving from Copenhagen. Our next stop – after exploring İstanbul’s historic sites – was Denizli. From family photo albums, I know I had been to the Pamukkale travertines when I was a child, probably in 1986 or 1987, but I have no memory of the city itself. This time, with Åsa, we would stay over night. While waiting for our plane, we began chatting, and I got to know more about her story – how she first encountered glass, and how it gradually shaped her life.

Åsa was born in 1975 and grew up in the suburbs of Stockholm, which were built the same year she was born. She says everything was new and there was no history. From an early age, she was aware of her heightened sensitivity to materials. This connection created a desire to interact with them, to alter or rearrange how things looked and felt. Helping her grandmother in the kitchen gave her access to tools like knives; assisting her father in repairing old boats introduced her to sanding and polishing. Through these family moments, she began to modify objects – reshaping and transforming the world around her with her hands. Her grandmother also gave her the task of setting the dinner table, where she could play with materials and create an atmosphere through small choices. In a world lacking character and where women had little voice, Åsa found her own ways to make it better.

The defining moment came when she was seventeen:

‘I met a girl in a parking lot’, she told me. ‘She was wearing a necklace with a big lump of glass. I was captivated by its beauty. I asked her where she had bought it, and she said she made it herself – at a school in the south of Sweden where you could learn to blow glass. I looked it up in a phone book, bought a train ticket, and visited Småland for the first time. That’s where I live today.’

The school was part of a craft tradition rooted in the long history of glass production in the region, known as The Kingdom of Crystal. She stayed for one year, receiving strict, traditional training at Orrefors. Afterwards, she attended another glass school in Brierley Hill (UK), where the approach was more experimental. She stayed there another year. After these two formative experiences, she began looking for work as a glassblower.

Åsa describes herself as having a restless temperament, needing physical activity and routine to stay grounded. The moment she entered a glass workshop, she felt an immediate sense of belonging. The physical intensity, constant movement, and the need for harmonious cooperation with others – reminiscent of choreography – were perfectly in tune with her nature. With fire as a central element, the work demanded total focus and precision.

But more importantly, working with glass opened a gateway, and it soon became clear to her that materials act as mediators between her inner world and the external one. Her thinking is triggered through the act of making.

One person who had a significant influence on her was Anders Wingård, a key figure in the Swedish Studio Glass movement that emerged in the late 1960s.⁵ The movement itself began earlier, in the United States, when artist and educator Harvey K. Littleton challenged the long-standing idea that glass belonged solely to the industrial realm. Inspired by independent European glassmakers and the experimental ethos of studio ceramics, Littleton organised landmark workshops at the Toledo Museum of Art in 1962. Together with glass research scientist Dominick Labino, he developed a small-scale furnace and low-melting-point glass formula, making it possible for artists to blow glass outside of factories.⁶ These innovations helped liberate glass from its functional roots, opening it up to expressive, sculptural forms. The movement soon spread across Europe. While Åsa was working for Wingård as a glassblower, he encouraged her to apply to Konstfack, the College of Arts, Crafts and Design in Stockholm, where she studied between 1998 and 2004.

Listening to her made the trip seem short, and we were in Denizli before I knew it. As we stepped out of the airport, a warm breeze welcomed us. In the dark, we stared out of the car window at the mountains that accompanied us along the road. Our hotel was located on the outskirts, close to Şişecam’s factory. It was almost 22:00 when we arrived at our temporary home – the place to which we would return repeatedly in the coming months.

The next day started early. With the Şişecam team, we walked around the factory, visited the production, testing and packing areas, had lunch with them, and looked through their design archive, which includes a copy of each item produced at that facility. Åsa recognised some of her early works.

The factory’s history is tied to Turkish workers who had emigrated in the 1970s. In an effort to create jobs for future generations, 215 people collectively invested in establishing this factory, initially named Şirintaş A.Ş.⁷ It was an act of hope – for their children to find work in their hometown rather than having to migrate themselves. Production began in 1981, and the name was later changed to Denizli Cam. In 1994, Şişecam acquired a 51% share in the company.⁸ Today, the factory is known for its high-quality handmade glass production. Surrounded by pine trees, it operates in three shifts and, despite its constant activity, maintains a striking sense of tranquility.

Åsa, who has spent her adult life working with glass, looked comfortable and happy. We were both mesmerised by how flexible glass could be, and how such a thin, fragile material could become so resilient thanks to the technologies developed here. Until that day, I had only seen a few tourist demonstrations of handmade glass production – this was truly a mind-altering experience for me. While they talked, I watched the glassblowers shaping carafes, wine glasses, vases and tea glasses around the round-shaped furnace, which resembled a small hill. Each workstation in the furnace had a mouth of a different size, allowing glassblowers to gather the precise amount of molten glass they needed. Every time a new object was about to be made, someone would open the furnace’s mouth and extract a lump of fire on a metal rod – bright orange, hot like the earth’s core. This molten material would soon become a functional object under the hands of a glass master. Åsa told me she decided some years ago that she would always make functional objects. She believed they dissolved hierarchies in our approach to history, remarking that people’s needs never change and that a vessel is always required. In this context, she decided to include a selection of historical glass objects in the exhibition and juxtapose them with objects she had produced.

After the factory visit, we drove for an hour and a half to Aphrodisias. Climbing through the mountains, we passed several marble quarries. Åsa said cheerfully, ‘Everything I need is here in Denizli – maybe I should consider moving here.’

Under a strong sun, we began exploring Aphrodisias, a city named after Aphrodite, the goddess of beauty, love, nature and abundance. According to the historian Stephanos, it was founded by the Lelegians and was originally known as Lelgonopolis. The name Aphrodisias began to be used in the Hellenistic period after 300 BCE. It was a prominent city known for its fertile land, cotton and textile industries, and advanced commercial, political and cultural institutions. It also boasted a renowned school of sculpture and philosophy. The city’s decline began in the seventh century, due to Arab invasions, religious and political turmoil, disease outbreaks, and was ultimately deepened by a devastating earthquake. Many buildings were damaged and never repaired.⁹ In 1892, Osman Hamdi Bey – a painter and the founder of the İstanbul Archaeology Museums and the İstanbul Academy of Fine Arts – attempted to initiate excavations, but was unsuccessful. In 1961, with the efforts of Kenan Erim, New York University began archaeological work, which continued after his death.

At the entrance of the archeological site, a wall of theatre masks offered a glimpse of the vivid artistic life the ruins once held. As we walked around, insects sang, and a snake moved between the stones. The pomegranate trees created a pleasant view with their red blossoms. Åsa and I moved at different paces, and despite the heat, we took our time to examine every corner that had once been a theater, pool, temple or stadium.

The museum was temporarily closed, but before leaving, we saw a small exhibition about Kenan Erim and a selection of Ara Güler’s photographs from 1958. While visiting Aydın, he had got lost and found himself in this village, where Roman ruins were still part of daily life. Locals were incorporating Roman columns and architectural fragments into their homes. His photographs helped draw international attention to the site.¹⁰

On the way back to the airport, watching the landscape and marble quarries in silence, I felt the day’s warmth sealed in my skin. As scenes from the experience replayed in my mind, one image stayed with me: blazing fire, reminiscent of lava, inside the furnace – bright enough to burn your eyes if you stared too long, hot enough to sear your skin if you touched it. I was captivated by its force. I felt as if fire was the only real thing, and everything else we know is an illusion. With my mind full of disharmonious thoughts, I realised that we were already above the clouds.

In Åsa’s remaining days, we crossed the city to the Asian side to visit Şişecam’s headquarters in Tuzla, then took a boat along the Bosphorus to the Sadberk Hanım Museum, explored the glass department of Mimar Sinan Fine Arts University, and met the team at Pera Museum. After a brief but intense trip, it felt as if there were still more roads for us to travel together.

Water: Obsidian Journey

In early October, I picked up Åsa and the photographer Peo Olsson from Tünel Square before sunrise. We were heading to the airport to take a flight to Muş in Eastern Anatolia for a road trip to follow traces of obsidian sources (rapidly cooled lava in its natural form) from Muş to Kars. During our ‘obsidian journey’, as we called it, Peo’s lens would capture an important step toward Åsa’s İstanbul exhibition: a search for natural glass born from the Earth. Ferzan Bey, whom I met ten years ago thanks to the journalist Sarkis Seropyan, would be our guide on this journey. We would drive approximately 900 kilometres in four days, along the Iranian and Armenian borders.

On the plane, after a nap, we watched the mountains below as we landed in Muş. Outside the airport, Ferzan Bey greeted us and explained our first stop: an obsidian field behind Lake Nemrut. Midway, we stopped at a gas station to change vehicles. Our new car was suited to the rough terrain, and the driver had experience guiding geologists in the area. We drove for about an hour and a half through fields that didn’t resemble a road. In the surrounding green hills we occasionally spotted traces left by recently departed nomads. As we neared our destination, large, shining rocks began to appear in the distance. Ferzan Bey said, ‘See? These are the obsidians.’

At a certain point, we left the car. The air was cold – it had dropped to below 5°C in the shade. The obsidian could be seen in the field in the form of large, matte black lines. We began to climb the hill alongside these formations. Åsa quickly disappeared from view, while Peo paused, attracted by a particular rock, to document it in detail. At over 2,200 metres, the altitude made it hard to breathe, so I stopped at the top and looked out at the mountain in front of me. A beam of light pierced the clouds, which had never felt so close. As I enjoyed the poetic vastness, Ferzan Bey repeated his warnings about wild bears in the area. But Åsa, who has long lived in the forest, moved with ease, comfortably in solitude. These lands seemed to be enchanted, and none of us wanted to leave. But sunset was approaching. Before departing, we stepped into circular outlines made from stones – traces left by nomads. Åsa found a piece of bone and kept it. On our way back, we caught a glimpse of the crater lake before dusk – the mouth of the volcano.

We had a long road ahead to Van, where we would spend the night after stopping for dinner near Lake Van, the largest inland sea in Turkey.

The next morning, our first port of call was the Van City Museum, where we learned more about the region’s rich history. Van was once the capital of the Urartian civilisation and played an important role due to its location on the Silk Road. At the entrance, a selection of obsidian tools from Erciş were displayed, believed to be 350–400,000 years old. These were from the excavations led by the archaeologist İsmail Baykara a decade ago.¹¹ I had spoken with him a few times, and he had explained the importance of that area. However, the site had been inactive since his appointment to Gaziantep University.

We arrived in Erciş around midday, but there were no signs marking the archaeological site. We kept on driving until the land and mountains began to sparkle with obsidian. We stopped the car and started exploring, mesmerised. After a while, we got back in the car and drove on until the road began to resemble an animal path. There was so much sharp obsidian that Ferzan Bey feared a tyre puncture. With no phone signal, we couldn't risk getting stuck here.

On our way back, I called the archaeologist İsmail Bey, who directed us to the exact location of the excavation site, which we had actually passed by. Here, the rocks were shinier and more transparent. Once again, Åsa started climbing the hills while Peo captured our surroundings with his big lenses. I wandered, admiring dry thistles and examining obsidian fragments. Being immersed in the wilderness started to bend my perception of reality. I recalled Tim Ingold’s words, ‘to walk is to journey in the mind as much as on the land: it is a deeply meditative practice’.¹² I began to feel the ground beneath my feet connecting me with the nomadic groups who had come here to supply volcanic glass for hunting spears thousands of years ago. Then, we all heard Ferzan Bey calling us. Gathering in a valley, we came across an impressive tall obsidian wall, partially extracted. He remembered that a company used to collect stones from here and sent the rocks to Italy to process the material. This was a long-forgotten craft technique in Turkey.

We left the site for Van before it got fully dark. After a long day, we ate and discussed our plans for tomorrow. Returning to Erciş was one option; heading to Sarıkamış was another. However, our desire to cross the border areas and see Mount Ararat won.

The weather was warmer on our third day. Our car was stopped almost every fifteen minutes for security checks. Ferzan Bey pointed out the hills, saying that Iran lay just behind them and that people occasionally tried to cross the border. After some hours, we arrived at Mount Ararat. It stood before us in all its glory, rising up over 5,000 metres. Its peak, often surrounded by clouds, was clearly visible that day.

We parked the car. Ferzan Bey poured tea from his thermos, and Peo took out a small, round obsidian mirror from his bag. He explained that in the past, these black mirrors, known as Claude glasses, were used by artists as a sort of pre-photographic lens for landscape painting because the reflection they gave endowed the scenery with a painterly quality. We all held the hand-sized stone, which looked like a deep wheel. I remembered the obsidian mirrors that were found in Çatalhöyük in the 2010s. It was believed that obsidian had the power to connect with other worlds – guiding people on journeys after death, or used for scrying.

Before departing, we all used the small obsidian mirror to view Ararat’s reflection. The sharpness of the image was remarkable. Staring at the snow-capped mountain through this volcanic glass, I wondered if this was indeed where Noah’s Ark landed, as it is claimed, after the big flood

Following Ararat, a silence settled in the car until we reached Sarıkamış. Unlike the other sites, here the obsidian rocks were by the highway. When they cut the road, the rock was exposed, creating a shiny, transparent wall that extended over a small area. Ferzan Bey found a safe place to park, and we started walking alongside the road, captivated by the rich textures of obsidian. We called out to each other whenever we spotted something interesting. Some parts looked like flesh, with muscles and veins. Others resembled crystal gems.

Without hesitation, Åsa began climbing the sharp rocks. While watching her from a distance, I thought about how she seemed to experience the world through her whole body, as philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty described in his phenomenological theories, as if ‘sensation was a communion, or coexistence, between body and thing.’¹³

We collected pieces here and there. Puzzled by the different visual qualities of the stone, I read more about their formation. The minerals in the land, the temperature during cooling either with immediate interaction with water or air, all affect how they appear.

After sunset, we moved towards Kars. But first, we stopped by a small shop where a teacher from the local crafts school is working on techniques for shaping this extremely hard material. His shop, full of obsidian and other natural stones, felt like a small sanctuary for mineral lovers.

Kars – a city to which I’ve returned repeatedly since my first visit in 2004 – felt unspoilt, despite the new cafés and hotels. In the past decade, it has become a destination for winter tourism, with ski resorts and scenic train rides. After dinner, Åsa and I took a walk. The silent, dark streets of the centre were our background while we talked about families, friends and the life that had brought us here.

On our last morning in Eastern Anatolia, we visited the archaeological site of Ani, the medieval capital of an Armenian kingdom. With limited time, we followed Ferzan Bey – except for Peo, who disappeared with his camera. As we explored, the voices of children in school groups echoed through the site. Ferzan Bey pointed across the stream, showing Åsa the old quarries and noting that the Arpaçay River marks the border between Türkiye and Armenia.

After passing a building held by scaffolding, Åsa shared her fascination with these metal structures. Slim and raw, they hold up history – our present lending its shoulder to the past, helping the remnants of our ancestors stand and radiate their energy.

At the airport, we said goodbye to Ferzan Bey, thanking him for his openness to follow every road we wished to take. During the flight, we each drifted into our own thoughts. Mine, in particular, kept returning to the lakes and rivers we had seen, making me reflect on water's profound role: as the source of life, a transitional medium in mythologies, and as the catalyst for obsidian's formation when it met lava. This very element, I realised, was the subtle leitmotif of our autumn trip.

Air: Collecting the Breaths

Our next trip was in February, to Denizli. In the meantime, Pera Museum confirmed the exhibition dates, and Şişecam agreed to open its factory for a collaborative new body of work aimed at collecting the breath of glassblowers.

Like the first time, we met at the airport. We were excited to return, this time to develop a work together with the talented craftspeople trained in the pursuit of perfection. Åsa had been collecting her own breath in the form of glass bubbles for some time. Recently, she had created a 12-metre-long sculpture made of mirrored bubbles as a permanent installation for the Gävle Konstcentrum. But for Şişecam, she had something different in mind: she wanted to intervene in the production flow and ask the glassblowers to blow freely after taking the hot glass from the mould.

During our flight, as we discussed the relationship between craft and art, she shared some memories from her school years. ‘In art school’, she said:

I experimented with many different materials and met one of my best friends, Sara Isaksson From, who is now the head of the Department of Crafts at Konstfack. Together, we were eager to find new ways of using craft in a contemporary context. We were lucky to have a strong heritage around this theme – Konstfack itself was established in 1844, and the Arts and Crafts movement, which originated in Britain in the early twentieth century, had also made its way to Sweden. Later, pioneers like Charlotte Johannesson brought new meanings to textile craft in artistic ways. At the same time, we were deeply involved in discussions about socially engaged art practices – particularly in the wake of the refugee waves – as well as international debates on feminism and identity, which were central to our thinking. Within this rich context, we spent a lot of time reflecting, investigating, writing and organising talks. Our work at Tensta Konsthall was particularly important, as it was a leading institution for socially oriented programming and created space to blend artistic experimentation with craft. This collective effort led us to begin exhibiting in Norway, the United States, and the UK. During my time at Konstfack, I also worked as a glassblower on weekends to support myself.

Later, she added that her first child was born while she was still a student. She paused, and then she said that she had been working non-stop for thirty years, and maybe it was normal to feel the urge to slow down. I could see that her peace of mind now comes from her daily routine: waking up early, working in her studio or garden, baking bread, being present for her younger son, and taking long walks in the nearby forest with her artist and villager neighbour Markus Vallien. During these walks, they weave rope from Typha latifolia. Markus learned this knotting technique from a member of the First Nations from British Columbia, who spent summers in Sweden. Now, he has passed this knowledge to Åsa – a history carried through hands. On the way to our hotel, she mentioned that she was weaving a rope to hang a plummet she is carving from red imperial porphyry – an instrument used since at least ancient Egypt to ensure precise alignment.¹⁴

Upon arriving at the hotel, we wished each other goodnight. In the silence of the room, I read a passage in Tim Ingold’s Making: Anthropology, Archaeology, Art and Architecture (2013), where he quoted Peter Zumthor – one that echoed Åsa’s process:

Material is endless. Take a stone: you can saw it, grind it, drill into it, split it, or polish it – it will become a different thing each time. Then take tiny amounts of the same stone, or huge amounts, and it will turn into something else again. There are a thousand different possibilities in one material alone.¹⁵

I fell asleep while meditating on that last sentence: ‘There are a thousand different possibilities in one material alone.’

The next morning, we began by planning the production and visiting the workstations where various objects were being made. Åsa, who decided to focus on wine and tea glasses as well as carafes, explained her ideas to the makers. Even though there was a language barrier, she communicated easily through gestures, drawings and steady eye contact. The experimentations began. It was a challenge for these master glassblowers – trained for precision – to let go and embrace the tension between their mastery and the unknown. Molten glass, gathered on a metal rod, shaped on a steel table, kept at optimum heat with flames and air, was then dropped into a mould. But this time, instead of continuing the usual process, the mould was opened early, and the maker was invited to blow freely – the result was an uncommon object, for instance, a tall, thin form only loosely resembling a tea glass.

After lunch, Åsa asked to repeat the procedure using the largest mould they had – a bottle approximately 130 cm tall. A special workstation with a wider mouth was set up. This time, our collaboration involved different glassblowers, and once again, she communicated with ease. I quickly realised that they share a universal language. The first attempts mirrored the morning session: experienced masters were hesitant to let go. Åsa encouraged them, showing her recent glass sculptures that explored the limits of material. After a short break, the mood shifted. The masters began contributing ideas, and Åsa responded with small instructions. They worked in harmony throughout the afternoon.

The day after, we placed all the objects made in the annealing oven in a room. Åsa took her notebook and pencil, sketching, taking notes, and inspecting each piece, eager to spend time with the material. We contemplated the glass containers' associations. They still held something of their intended function, familiar in one sense, yet unfamiliar in another. Ribbons, metal chains and rescue ropes would later bring them together, forming an invisible body that holds the breath of the makers, who have dedicated their lives to their craft. The work drew its power from a collective effort, and in this process, embracing the unknown became an act of embracing imperfection, an inevitable quality of human existence.

Upon our return, snow had fallen in İstanbul. As the city stopped, we continued working at my flat – cooking, talking, thinking together. We looked through her recent sculptures, which would soon be shown at the Pera Museum. She said that since 2017, stone had held an ongoing presence in her practice. Its contrast with glass had enriched her expression. The marble and bronze pieces marked different stages of a self-reflective journey, which she described as regaining her balance after a turbulent moment. Once that inner process came to an end, she turned her focus to the glass. With the help of her long-time collaborators at Kosta Boda, she let the material move freely – even when it was dangerously heavy molten glass. In the end, gravity and physical force shaped the final form. For Åsa, this body of work in green and transparent glass is a manifestation of her trust in the material—one that allows her to act intuitively. After a slow cooling, she determined the final form, which would be supported by marble and steel. We agreed that these works reflecting the transformation of her practice from figures to abstraction would be shared with the visitors in İstanbul.

Then, we filled pages of sketches with exhibition space, thinking how to put the works from Şişecam in dialogue with others. These sculptures, derived from an intervention in the making of functional objects, all held something impossible to hold: air. A mixture of gases, invisible to the naked eye. When we breathe, air enters through the mouth or nose, travels through the body, and leaves again. It is also said the soul enters the body with the first breath and leaves with the last. A physical act, inseparable from a metaphysical essence.

A Verse Written with the Elements

Åsa’s exhibition can be read as a verse composed in collaboration with the elements, Earth, Air, Fire and Water, through a journey that unfolded over a year. Positioning the artist and her engagement with diverse materials at its centre, the show brings together her recent glass and marble sculptures, as well as a new series of glass works created specifically for this occasion in Denizli (TR). In a shelter built with scaffolding, a constellation of historical glass objects that reflect functional responses to human needs is presented with a series of ready-made, obsidian pieces, a bone replica and photographs depicting obsidian fields in Bitlis, Van and Kars (TR). A hand-woven cord, which comes to life through an ancient nomadic tradition, is used to hold a plummet carved from porphyry. The space, envisioned as a landscape, invites the visitors to follow a path, knowing that here, understanding does not arise through explanation, but through presence.

¹ Levantine Heritage Foundation, ‘The Swedish Palace in Istanbul’, accessed 1 June 2025, https://levantineheritage.com/book37.htm.

² NOBA.ac, ‘The Inner World Exhibition by Åsa Jungnelius’, accessed 5 June 2025, https://noba.ac/en/exhibition/the-inner-world-exhibition-by-asa-jungnelius/.

³ Anna Komnene, The Alexiad (London: Oxford University Press, 1929), 120: ‘This purple room was a certain building in the palace shaped as a complete square from its base to the spring of the roof, which ended in a pyramid; it looked out upon the sea and the harbour where the stone oxen and lions stand. The floor of this room was paved with marbles and the walls were panelled with it but not with ordinary sorts nor even with the more expensive sorts which are fairly easy to procure, but with the marble which the earlier Emperors had carried away from Rome. And this marble is, roughly speaking, purple all over except for spots like white sand sprinkled over it. It is from this marble, I imagine, that our ancestors called the room “purple”.'

⁴ Ibid., 2.

⁵ Kulturparken Småland, ‘The Studio Glass Revolution’, accessed 1 June 2025, https://www.kulturparkensmaland.se/en/the-studio-glass-revolution/.

⁶ Corning Museum of Glass, ‘The American Studio Glass Movement’, accessed 1 June 2025, https://wayback.archive-it.org/11570/20191121194542/https://www.cmog.org/article/american-studio-glass-movement.

⁷ Mehtap Sarıkaya and Ayşe İrmiş, ‘Geçiş Sürecinde Halk Sektörü Girişimciliği’ [Public Sector Entrepreneurship in the Transition Process], PIBYD 2, no. 2 (2015): 27–36, https://dergipark.org.tr/tr/download/article-file/424152.

⁸ "Denizli Cam Vakfı Mahkeme Kararıyla Dağıldı" (Denizli Glass Foundation Dissolved by Court Decision), d20haber.com, 11 July 2024, https://d20haber.com/gundem/denizli-cam-vakfi-mahkeme-karariyla-dagildi/.

⁹ Aphrodisias.org, ‘About Aphrodisias’, accessed 5 June 2025, https://www.aphrodisias.org/en/about-aphrodisias.

¹⁰ Erman Ertuğrul, ‘Ara Güler'in Gözünden Tüm Ayrıntılarıyla Aphrodisias 1958’ (Aphrodisias in All Its Details Through Ara Güler's Eyes 1958), Arkeofili, 16 March 2015, https://arkeofili.com/ara-gulerin-gozunden-tum-ayrintilariyla-aphrodisias-1958/.

¹¹ İsmail Baykara, Berkay Dinçer and Serkan Şahin, ‘Gürgürbaba Tepesi (Erciş, Van) Paleolitik Çağ Araştırmaları’ (Paleolithic Age Research at Gürgürbaba Hill (Erciş, Van)), Colloquium Anatolicum 17 (2018): 160–61, https://dergipark.org.tr/en/download/article-file/1715202.

¹² Tim Ingold, ‘Ways of Mind-Walking: Reading, Writing, Painting’, Visual Studies 25, no. 1 (2010): 18, doi:10.1080/14725861003606712.

¹³ Christopher Tilley, The Materiality of Stone: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology (New York: Routledge, 2004), 10.

¹⁴ Denys A. Stocks, Experiments in Egyptian Archaeology: Stoneworking Technology in Ancient Egypt (New York: Routledge, 2003), 180.

¹⁵ Peter Zumthor, Atmospheres (Basel: Birkhäuser Verlag AG, 2006), 24.

The old man and the pear tree

I have two images on my mind. In one, a wizened old man holds aloft his infant grandson. In the other, the boughs of an ancient pear tree are laden with fruit. Both seem to be saying something rather profound, about the interplay of gravity and grace in the concurrent processes of ageing and rejuvenation. Let me begin with the old man and the infant.

The man has suffered in his long life through years of toil, working the fields and husbanding his flocks and herds to provide for himself and his family. His wiry frame, all bone and sinew, muscles twisted and taut as rope, is by now a little bent, his hands are gnarled and rough, and his gaunt face creased and wrinkled from exposure to the elements. Yet he is still strong. As he takes his little grandson in his arms, far from being burdened by a creature not yet able to bear its own weight, he feels himself uplifted by the sheer joyousness of the occasion. It is a moment of exaltation. This child, begotten of his own offspring, is his gift to a world that has itself offered him life, and holds within its being the promise of life to come. There is grace not only in the posture of uplift but also in the cycle of giving and receiving, thanks to which this new-born life can rise and shine in the world. But the figure of the baby could not be more different from that of the old man. Bulbous and rotund, with a skin as smooth and soft to the touch as silk, the infant cannot stand. His natural posture is not erect but recumbent, weighed down by the force of gravity, cradled in a sling on his mother’s back or in the arms of another. Yet even grandfather was a baby once, as one day his little grandson will age to be like him. How can such a chubby, cherubic creature transform itself into the wiry figure of old age?

Now let’s turn to the pear tree. It too is old, and has seen many human generations come and go. In its habit of growth, the tree embodies the passage of generations within itself, as the carpenters of ancient Rome knew when they christened the wood they worked with material, from the Latin mater, meaning ‘mother’. As the baby issues from the mother’s womb, so the growing shoot issues from the interiority of the trunk or branch. Yet at the heart of the tree there remains the sapling from which it once grew, overlain by successive increments of annual growth. With every passing year, the tree expands in girth, around its trunk and branches, while sending out further shoots, at whose tips budding leaves search for a place in the sun. But every spring, too, it blossoms with flowers that – come autumn and thanks to the visitations of pollinating insects – will swell into fruit. The tree’s branches, strong yet supple, trained by wind and weather, bend under the weight of ripened fruit. We harvest the gift of fruit, received in gratitude for the world’s gift of life to the tree, by way of its elemental constituents of sunlight, earth, air and rainfall. The pear, enveloped in its silky skin, is of characteristically bulbous form, elongated above but rounded below. It can hang from the stem, but placed on level ground is liable to topple. How can something so gnarled and encrusted as the old tree, with its twisted trunk and crooked branches, spiky with twigs and festooned with foliage, give birth to something so perfectly smooth, soft and rounded as a ripe pear?

Rocks of ocean and of fire

The earth, too, was young once. For the most part, we see only its ancient and decayed encrustations, folded and eroded by tectonic and atmospheric forces. Yet we know from the greater part of the earth’s surface hidden beneath the oceans, as well as from periodic volcanic eruptions, that it is still very much alive and active. Two lithic materials, in particular, attest to the rejuvenation of an aging earth. These are marble and obsidian. Let us compare the two.

The ocean teems with myriad forms of microscopic life, the faecal and skeletal remains of which continuously rain down upon the seabed. Over countless millennia, this predominantly calcareous material has accumulated into an ever-thickening layer of sediment, fusing into solid limestone. But as the movement of the earth’s tectonic plates forces the seabed downwards, beneath the advancing continental crust, this sedimentary rock comes under immense pressure from above, at the same time as being heated by magma intrusions from below, causing the originally solid material to bend, buckle and swirl, and its minerals to recrystallise into interlocking grains. This, according to geological science, is how the rock we know as marble is born, and it is the grains that lend it its characteristically flowing and iridescent appearance. Indeed, the rock takes its name from its shininess. The Ancient Greeks called it marmaros, ‘shining stone’, from marmairein, ‘to shine’ or ‘shimmer’, comparing its surface appearance to that of the ocean, which likewise shines and shimmers as it catches the sunlight in its waves and ripples. There is moreover a sonic aspect to this comparison, since the Greek mormýrein, whence comes the English ‘to murmur’, referred to the roar and seething of ocean waves. An entire vocabulary of maritime terms has its origins in the same source, all ultimately derived from the Sanskrit root mar, for a wavelike movement, and mar-mar for its repetition.¹ It is as if, in the birth of marble, the ocean’s wind-whipped turbulence had been frozen for posterity in an instant of petrification. Could it then be that for the ancients, marble was no less than sea-swell turned to stone?

Where marble begins with sedimentation, obsidian starts with eruption. Here, the magma whose intense heat ‘cooks’ the limestone beneath the crust, turning it to marble, instead rises to the surface, bursting through volcanic fissures in streams of molten lava. Obsidian is formed when the sudden cooling of lava, due for example to contact with water, aborts the process of crystallisation, instantly locking its atomic constituents into place in the essentially random conformation of the liquid state. Yet for just this reason, the material is exceptionally hard and brittle. In obsidian, liquidity and brittleness are two sides of the same coin. You can see this if you break a piece off with a hammer blow. The force of the blow ripples through the material, from the point of percussion, to produce a fracture that preserves in its newly exposed faces the radial and undulating form of the resulting shock waves. And it leaves a razor-sharp edge. For this very reason, obsidian has been valued since ancient times as a source material for making implements, from knives to arrowheads, for which sharpness is critical to their function. Evidently, while obsidian shares with marble the quality of liquid stone, it interprets this quality in a fundamentally different way. The liquidity of marble is smooth – as smooth as the mellifluous and rhythmic murmur of the calm sea lapping the hull of a boat at anchor. It is why marble has long been the favoured material of sculptors, the most accomplished of whom could render its surfaces as soft as a velvet drape or a baby’s skin. But the liquidity of obsidian is edgy, riven like the break-up of choppy waters.

Shattering glass

This brings us, at length, to glass. Between black obsidian and white marble, glass comes in many colours, or none at all. And while it shares affinities with its earth-borne cousins, glass is nevertheless critically dependent for its production on human pyrotechnic intervention, which gives it a distinctive character of its own.

In his Historia Naturalis, dating from around 77 CE, the Roman writer Pliny the Elder tells an apocryphal tale of the accidental discovery of glass, when a party of seagoing merchants, whose vessel contained a cargo of nitre, alighted on a sandy shore to prepare their dinner. Lacking stones on which to balance their cauldrons, they used instead some lumps of nitre taken from the ship. As the heat from their cooking fires, ablaze under the cauldrons, grew ever more intense, they were surprised to see a transparent liquid oozing out from below.² It is doubtful whether even Pliny believed this unlikely story. In any case, the earliest glass dates back at least another two millennia, to coastal Syria, Mesopotamia and Egypt. The story does nevertheless capture the essentials of what is needed to make glass: sand (or sandstone) as the basic raw material, sodium salts to lower the melting point, and fire to heat the mixture up. Though sandstone can incorporate a substantial amount of skeletal material from marine organisms, it is principally composed of fine grains of quartz and feldspar, produced through the erosion of ancient, igneous rocks, washed down by rivers to the sea, and deposited in accumulating layers of sediment. Yet in the fierce heat of the furnace this material, mixed with soda, is subjected to conditions that replicate those of the magma chamber from which, aeons ago, it once issued. Molten glass is close to volcanic lava in its consistency, and behaves like obsidian when rapidly cooled, retaining in the solid state the liquid disorder of its atomic elements. For this reason, it is exceptionally brittle, prone to smash into lethally sharp-edged shards.

In the history of the Earth, processes of erosion and sedimentation follow on from the original inferno out if which its igneous crust was formed. But the production of glass puts this order in reverse. Starting with the accumulated deposit of eroded particles, it ends with the furnace, from which the material emerges reborn. Glassmaking thus enacts, in microcosm, the rebirth of the world. There is indeed something neotenous about the form of a glass vessel, all smooth and shiny, in its birthday suit.³ It is the form of flow, congealed in a moment of suspended animation, held like a bated breath until it breaks into myriad fragments. Between the radiant brilliance of absolute newness and the shattered chaos of total disintegration there is no continuum. It is either one or the other. The brilliance of new-born glass is reflected in its many names, ranging from the Ancient Greek hualos, which references its liquidity, through the Latin vitrum and its derivatives, with their common connotation of shining and sparkling, to the word glass itself, which goes all the way back to the proto-Indo-European root *ghel, ‘to shine’.⁴ Yet marble, as we’ve seen, also had a reputation for shininess. How, then, does the sheen of glass differ from that of marble? Born of the heat of the inferno rather than the cold depths of the ocean, glass shares with obsidian a certain edginess, and this, too, affects the way it shines. Where marble is durable and monumental, the brilliance of glass speaks to its brittleness and fragility. It is flighty, evanescent. Its shininess sparkles and crackles, like the flame of the fire, rather than shimmering and murmuring like ocean waves.

Aging and rebirth

Let me return, finally, to the images with which I began, of the infant in the arms of his grandfather, and the pear hanging from an ancient tree. What connects these with glass? What common theme runs through the immaculacy of the child, the freshness of the pear and the resplendence of the vessel? It is of course, the theme of rebirth.

As the old man lifts his grandson in his arms, he is not merely introducing a new being into the world, as if to celebrate the continuity of the lineage. For what he carries is a world in itself. The newness of this world is not relative, compared with precedent, as when we speak of innovation or novelty. To the contrary, it is absolute and irreducible. And the grandfather’s gesture, in presenting this world, is of truly cosmic import. In that moment of exaltation, man and child have become gods. But the moment doesn’t last. Even as life continues, the immaculate inevitably gives way to the mundane. For the little boy to grow, he must re-enter a world in which he is nourished, loved and cared for. He will develop in strength, stature and endurance until, worn and wiry as his grandfather today, he in turn will raise a new world on his shoulders. In short, the child embarks upon a process of aging. But what of the glass vessel? Emerging from the heat of creation with a form as immaculate and rotund as the new-born babe, its body – like the baby’s – is naturally recumbent, and requires a frame of support to stand. But unlike the child, the vessel does not age. In it, the moment of birth stretches potentially to eternity. Yet such is its fragility that it is bound eventually to smash, as it collides with the choppy reality of a cracked and riven world. Only then, in shards resembling flakes of obsidian, does glass finally begin to age. Gradually, in the wear and tear of its edges, its sharp crackle softens to a marble-like murmur.

What, then, of the pear tree? As the tree is mother to her branches, perhaps the pears, each containing seeds of the future, are her numerous granddaughters. And each one, as it forms, takes the shape of a bubble, or perhaps a teardrop. The resemblance is not accidental, for it results from the same dynamic of formation whereby a downward force of expansion, issuing from a source, presses radially against the tensile resistance of an enveloping skin. It is no wonder, then, that the first vessels of blown glass, following the invention of the technique in Syria in the first century BCE, were typically pear-shaped. A vessel shaped by the bated breath of its maker, being round at the base but elongated towards the top, will not readily stand, but it can hang, like the pear from its stem. It is by grace of the tree that its fruits shine like hanging lanterns from its boughs. But while the tree can bend and flex in answer to the winds, its bough-tossed fruits, unless picked, can only fall. Is not falling fruit the very epitome of gravity? So it is, too, with pears of glass. Like the wind, the breath of the glassmaker exists only in the blowing. You can no more hold this breath in the vessel thus formed than store the wind in a jar. All you are left with is a volume of air. Likewise, to suffocate the fruits of nature is to leave them still-born. While the making of glass may bring the earth back to life from its crucible of fire, the glass must fall and break for this life to carry on.

¹ Barbara Baert, The Weeping Rock: Revisiting Niobe though Paragone, Pathosformel and Petrification (Studies in Iconology 17), Leuven: Peeters, 2020, pages 41-42

² Pliny the Elder, The Natural History, translated by John Bostock, Book 36, Chapter 65: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0137%3Abook%3D36%3Achapter%3D65, accessed 25th May 2025.

³ Tim Ingold, ‘Writing, making, lighting: three reflections on glass’, in Lines, Threads and Traces: Exhibition Catalogue 2024, curated by Ayako Tani, edited by Janine Christley, 20-24. Stourbridge: International Festival of Glass, 2024, page 23.

⁴ Mario Affatigato, ‘What’s in a word? Glass by any other name’, American Ceramic Society Bulletin 101 (8): 40-41, 2022.

Åsa Jungnelius in conversation with Lise Coirier

Lise Coirier (LC): What do the three words Desire/Utensil/Container stand for and how do they relate to each other?
Åsa Jungnelius (AJ): An abstraction - to be able to carry what we receive from life, but especially how we can give to each other. With the tools we have in our personalities, which are always sharpened and re-sharpened throughout life, so that we can reach each other and our own earth. I see desire as both a window and a way out, but also as a force for progress.
LC: Is there perhaps a sense of materiality and immateriality?
AJ: All conflicts materialise in our common society. How can we accommodate this with our physical and emotional memories and experiences?
LC: And a “secret recipe” you would like to share with us about how you approach materials such as glass or stone, in their individuality or as mixed media.
AJ: Personally, the lava-like power of glass in its creation gives me an inner peace. Also, the repetitive movement and physical labour involved in the process. When I work with a
larger team like the Kosta Boda glassworks, I have access to the power and experience of the great glassworkers. To create with the hand is to think, and when we are in a team, we think together like a six-headed monster, or rather, like a cat!
The artistic action and the work with stone, mostly the more malleable Carrara marble, is converted from the glass process. With the stone I slowly chew my way into the material; the slowness allows the sculpture to find its way further into my stomach and become my own soil. The fact that the material is so clearly linked to a place and the eternity of the universe, clarifies its use throughout art history and magnifies human smallness.
LC: Do you see a dichotomy between glass and stone that you would like to explore?

AJ: I am not particularly interested in the dichotomy of materials, as it is an approach that sees the world in opposition, which in turn can lead to exploitation, domination or conflict between different parties. I am more interested in the movement, energy and exchange that is possible with an open approach.
LC: How much does Småland's Kingdom of Crystal influence both your daily life and your artistic practice?
AJ: Småland has taught me so much, living and working in a glass village that has a long tradition of production, but also a plight in the collective memory. When the population left this place in the 1850s for America, when it was not possible to live on what the Earth gave, it created a mood of caution and despair. I am proud to be part of this tradition
of craftsmanship, of travelling, of inheritance and of the constant transfer of knowledge around the material glass. But perhaps what Småland has given me most of all is an immersion in circular thinking, a system in which we are all involved. It has also made other actions possible, such as blowing up a hole with dynamite, and thus giving birth to a new artistic chapter based on site-specific work.
LC: The landscape or industrial history of the region you come from has a lot to do with your work, can you tell us more about that? This seems to be both an "in-between space" for you and an exploration of our origins.
AJ: I think about how we have moved and lived through the landscape throughout history, and how in many places a pervasive chastening and impoverishing approach materialises

the prevailing political structures, power relations and ideological perspectives of the time. We humans undeniably leave traces, some of which are completely irreversible. I try to understand what mechanisms drive us; is it desire that haunts us?
LC: The combination of glass and marble/ stone is very special. What is the common thread between them? Is it perhaps the choreography of the gesture, the direct physicality or the idea of collage and assemblage that is important to you?
AJ: Physically I am drawn to these materialities. I always listen to my intuition and think that it will lead the way. I don't really know what the materials do with each other yet, but I know that there is a longing, something physical in me.
LC: I feel the search for minerality and the return to nature in your work, both in stone and in glass. How interested are you in wilderness, archaeology and human roots?
AJ: I am very interested in basic human needs, the question of what do we really need in a human life? For example, I have been working closely with the artist Markus Vallien and his knowledge of how to live with the materials available in your area and the basics such as fire, water, shelter, food, hunting, fishing,
edible plants, healing herbs. It is a method of looking back into the past, on how things used to be - a practice also developed with students at Konstfack in Stockholm. It is through these experiences, investigating how we lived before industrialism, that we can understand how to move forward together from the situation we are in now.
LC: Can you give us some references, travels or sources of inspiration that have guided you in recent years?
AJ: There are many journeys that in different ways have influenced the braid that formed my artistic practice. During the years that I was doing the project Residence - In - Nature locally in Småland and in the northern part of Sweden, Norrbotten, I was interested in understanding both the industrialised landscape that the forest industry represented, but also the spiritual in the concept of nature. I approached a shaman to take me down an abandoned well, a dizzying journey and an important passage to a deeper understanding of how all life and collective experience are connected.
LC: Talking about the philosophy you have developed in relation to artefacts, do you follow a precise process when making glass or stone objects? Or do you follow your intuition and direct gestures?
AJ: It is always intuition, an impulse that makes me do something. The uncertainty of the result is central, as it requires maximum attention throughout the process.
LC: What is the intrinsic value of desire in your work? Do beauty and aesthetics play an important role? Femininity and intimacy?
AJ: Desire is present in some of my work, perhaps mainly to describe vulnerability and imperfection. Beauty for me is something you can rest your eyes on and find comfort in, but I often wonder why people think beauty is good? I start with myself as a human being and the experiences I carry within me, I am obviously a feminist, although the whole concept has been popularised. The power of giving birth to a child has also preoccupied me, but femininity is more of an image or an ongoing social spectacle. Sometimes I participate and sometimes I am horrified.
LC: You are reinventing tools and mixing techniques, searching for new paths and a new palette like a painter. Is this research an individual quest or a team effort with studios like Kosta Boda - Orrefors?
AJ: It is both, materialisation, aesthetics and colours come from the artistic drive, like looking for a new combination of flavours like a chef.
LC: Documenting and photographing your process and living environment seems to be as important as the final result. Could you tell us more about your collaboration with the photographer Märta Thisner? There are different layers, from the anecdotal to the iconic representation of the object, as well as portraits of you in a very immersive context, which can range from everyday life to the most intimate 'moments' of your art practice.
AJ: Märta's observational skills and unique voice add another layer. She photographed a piece I made with assistants at Åfors 2018, The Portal, in the large barn in the village that served as a temporary studio. When we looked at Märta's photographs, it was as if we were discovering the world together. It became a collaboration, and Märta has been following me ever since. Märta has an innate ability to capture the relationship between people and materiality. In her ability to observe, she exposes human vulnerability and sees the environment as it is. Märta's images reveal a clarity when reality is wrapped in darkness.
LC: With this first solo exhibition at Spazio Nobile, what message do you want to convey to a new audience of art lovers and collectors?
AJ: I am always humbled by new situations like this. Of course, I want the artworks included in the exhibition to start a process, a thought or a mood in the social space of an exhibition or a person's home.

Porphyry
Fragment of an Imperial Egyptian Porphyry, found in Mons Porphyrites area north of Jabal Dokhan in the Eastern Desert of Egypt, dating from the beginning of the first until the middle of the fifth century AD. Thanks to Erik Mostert
The term Porphyry comes from the Ancient Greek language, meaning “purple”. In Ancient Roman times, Porphyry stone was considered a symbol of great prestige and royalty. It was often used for columns, statues, floors, official buildings, and other imperial and royal objects. Porphyria is believed to have the power to protect against enchantments, contempt, evil forces, and beings. If the stones are properly placed in the space, they can harmonise and enhance the energy. The Egyptians called porphyria a symbol of longevity and a stone with vital energy.

A text about Åsa´s practice by Masha Taavoniku
Year after year she has stood in front of the furnace in her workshop, each time performing the unwritten choreography that both facilitates and, ultimately, refines the task itself. Thirty years have passed and no day is like the last one, no movement identical with the next one. Nothing is simple but, nowadays, everything is a species of controlled repetition with a difference. In spite of the noise of the workshop, there is a quietness about her and, without even thinking the thought, she never has to worry about what to do next. Like a vessel, she carries in her body all the years that have passed.
 
For as long as she can remember, she has felt a dissatisfaction with the state of things. In her workshop, she found her chance to manipulate the world. The plasticity of the molten glass challenged her sense of security at the same time that she challenged the supposed limitations of the material. Domestic wares opened the doors to people’s homes, thereby giving her the opportunity to influence the movements and interactions that take place within the four walls of a home. Without blinking, she took every opportunity to create some sense of meaning. Right from her earliest work in the workshop she has made glass using moulds or free-blowing, she has worked as a product designer and created sculptures and site-specific public art. For her, glass dissolved all the previous limits of what was possible.
 
Taking deep breaths, she now blows vases using clay moulds that she has excavated by hand. Enclosed within the cavity, each vase assumes its singular shape; rough upside-down mountain tops, as though carved from dramatic mountains or rocks that often serve as a border between land and sea. Domestic wares and sculptures are united in the silence. The transformation in the workshop is from rock-hard grains of sand into an object which can be crushed into a thousand fragments at any moment. For anyone who is not an initiate, this can be difficult to grasp but she can be calmed by the reminder of everything’s transience.
 
Her artistic work unites her with times long before she herself existed. In Pliny the Elder’s (23/24 – 79 CE) book Naturalis Historia an event is described that, in earlier times, was claimed to describe the origins of glass.  The written narrative deals with the manner in which an unknown number of natron merchants sailed from what is now Egypt to the coast of Palestine. Towards evening, as they began to feel hungry, the merchants lit a fire on the beach, making use of a lump of natron from their cargo to support their pan. The heat from the fire caused the natron – which is rich in soda – together with the sand to become the transparent viscous substance which, the following morning, had solidified into glass. Åsa Jungnelius is entertained by the story, but she knows exactly the temperature necessary for sand and soda to fuse and become glass. She knows that a modest campfire on the beach would not create the necessary heat.  In all probability, the discovery of glass was a serendipitous event related to ceramics or to the production of metals; a process that later came to be imitated. But the fact remains that no one knows exactly how or when the first glass was produced.
 
Outside the workshop spring is in the air, trees are in bud and her body aches from the arduous work. One by one she carefully dips the hot, heavy vases into the icy water, whereupon the surfaces crackelate. The shiny vases’ seductive characteristics and the cracks that break the light testify to beauty and to the closely related fragility. From her stomach the colours are produced that have become characteristic of her art: billowing; sharp and pale nuances of green, blue, yellow, orange, violet, pink and white.
 
In the hot workshop, she wanders slowly over miles of beaches while the waves erase her footsteps in the sand. On her journey, she blows shells filled with pearls, lava-like candlesticks in bright colours, silver-coloured objects and sculptures. She knows that not everyone can see this but the glass carries with it everything she is and does; and therewith hundreds of years of time past. At any moment, the vessel can be broken. “Precisely for that reason,” she thinks as she takes another deep breath and blows into the glassmaker’s pipe.

Published on occasion of Artifacts: the Origin of Things, Vandalorum

Åsa Jungnelius (b 1975) is an artist and designer. Gunilla Palmstierna-Weiss (b 1928) is a scenographer, costume designer and ceramicist. The two meet prior to Jungnelius’s exhibition at Vandalorum, Artifacts: the origin of things, for an intergenerational conversation about their common experiences – both are flexible in their choice of artistic medium and began their careers in the repetitive discipline of crafts. Moreover, they share a key driver: to position themselves in history. The result is an artistic practice based on a fundamental respect for the greater context in which the work generates meaning, whether it be the material, industry, politics or friendship.

The conversation took place in Stockholm on 25 April, 2019.    

The beginning and the craft

Åsa: We both come from a typical crafts background, and you are my role model in that you work across several genres, in the borderland between utility goods, stage design, ceramics, architecture and art. That’s why I wanted to have this conversation with you. It struck me that I’ve been a bit blind to history, but I also find that very little has been written about these practices, and the women who have had this approach. A cup is comparable to a monumental stage design, and one is not worth more than the other, they are simply different aspects of your artistic practice. That’s how it always was for me – the activity itself has been the important thing, and seeing the possibilities in different kinds of creative processes.

Gunilla: Yes, that is something that many find hard to accept, that you express yourself in different ways in different materials. It’s so weird, just keeping to one category. But then, I guess you could see it as a privilege, being able to stay so flexible. For me, my skills and background in ceramics actually entailed an artistically uncompromising approach to my profession as a scenographer. I took battles head-on, because I knew all the time that I had another professional skill to fall back on. This has given me wide latitude. Then, of course, it comes down to personality. I know some prominent painters who have stuck to their medium all their lives and still remained experimental in their practice. But I’m not like that. There are obviously different kinds of curiosity.

Åsa: I was originally drawn to glass and utility goods due to my discontent with the way things were, I wanted to learn how to influence them. When I got hold of a material, which was glass, it gave me the opportunity to manipulate a shape at several stages, from its design to the social space where it would eventually be used. I realised that if I had access to a craft, I could influence the social interaction between people, with the utility object as a point of departure. We relate to a glass with our bodies, and it is part of a social act that we invent in real time. I’ve never wanted to work with materials to create commodities. I’ve wanted to work with materials to create meaning.

Konstfack and companionship

Gunilla: I went to the Konstfack University College of Arts, Crafts and Design at Hötorget (in Stockholm), where I met Torun Bülow Hübe, who was studying metalwork. We had similar life situations. She had a new baby, and I was expecting. That was frowned upon at the College, we weren’t allowed to bring our kids. We both had a similar approach to our studies, we liked moving around between departments. It was against the rules, but I attended courses in decoration painting, textiles, sculpture and ceramics before finishing in 1952 (with a break for studies in Amsterdam and Paris). At the graduation ceremony, the director summoned Torun and me. They told us we would not be given any graduation diplomas, as the college believed we would come to nothing since we had “hopped around” and not stuck to our field. But I’ve never needed a diploma anyway, and my student years were the beginning of a lifelong friendship for Torun and me.

Åsa: When I was at Konstfack in the late 1990s, crafts were in a transitional period, when materiality was being discovered as a field that could potentially straddle several genres – something made of glass could be both conceptual and political. You could say that this approach was invented in real time, but the staff at Konstfack didn’t get what we were doing. I also had a classmate, Sara Isaksson, who shared my interdisciplinary interest, and we didn’t get any grants or prizes either. What we were doing was still a blind spot in the context of applied arts, that story hadn’t been written yet. But we found our context around us, in other fields where the same kind of issues were being explored, that’s where we found our nourishment. Now, as a lecturer at Konstfack, I would say that interdisciplinary practices are the norm among my students.

Skansen and the public

Åsa: Nowadays, manual industry and traditional crafts have become so rare that they are being regarded as performative acts. The glassworks where I am active in Småland are a convenient example; an enormous tourist industry is being developed around them, and people visit the workshops to watch the glassblowers in action. For me, it’s as though the glassworkers are the objects, their working bodies are exoticised. Because what they are doing is so unusual, physical labour from a distant past when all industrial production was manual. When I was studying at Konstfack, I had a summer job at the glassworks at the Skansen outdoor museum. This was an important and useful experience in many ways, but we were like caged monkeys. There I sat, making little mooses according to a model, we were just there to entertain. But it was experience nevertheless, it made me very proficient. You’ve experienced that too, Gunilla?

Gunilla: Yes, after Konstfack I was out of work, and so were my two friends, Greta Berge and Eva Lindbeck. I had heard that Skansen was closing its pottery. We managed to persuade them to let us use the workshop, on the condition that visitors could watch us turning pots. That meant every day of the year, except Good Friday and Christmas Eve. So, there we sat, and it made us better at our craft, of course, but a side effect was that we became a bit misanthropist. That was rather a high price to pay for having access to the workshop. The kilns were fired at night, so one of us always had to sleep there to watch over them. We took turns, every third night. From the workshop we could hear the Skansen animals gibbering. There were no showers or toilets, so we had to go down to the monkey house to wash. I eventually started making wall reliefs and small sculptures.

Clay and glass

Gunilla: I’ve worked a lot with pressing tools into my ceramic creations, going around scrapyards collecting material from our everyday reality, and then incorporating them in artistic designs. When I was making my large ceramic works, I borrowed workshops at the IFÖ factory and Gustavsberg. There I was, working among men who were flush-testing rows of toilets; it was quite fun working in a variety of environments. At Gustavsberg I built a gigantic sand bed inspired by mediaeval methods, and then I drew my patterns in it and moulded the viscous clay. That’s where I made a public work for ten high-rise buildings in Upplands Väsby, for instance. I used different colours and materials for each entrance. I made each work as a guide for kids, so they could find their way home, so they could say, “The house with the hammer and the white clay is where I live.” Glass certainly has its own language. I can imagine that I would have been inspired to make something different if I had worked in glass instead of clay, which is more tactile.

Åsa: Yes, because you interact with the material in very many different ways, and that obviously influences the aesthetic approach and possibilities. Glass is liquid and is in the fire first, and then you have to make it calm down and cool. With clay it’s the other way around, it comes from the elements of earth and water, and then it has to dry in the air and then go into the fire. My designs and my art have an organic heritage. But I’m also interested in what the shiny, “glossy”, attractive surface does. I like working with seductive beauty, and the notion that beauty is good. It’s my way of drawing the viewer into the work. But there’s also the organic quality, the cavities and phallic shapes that play against one another. I’ve always devoted myself to spatial designs, where other materials are in dialogue with the nature of the glass, like mirrors, podiums with sharp edges, metal and artefacts. Like fleshy enactments.

Solitude and collectiveness

Gunilla: When I’m engaged in my own design, my drawings or models, I basically work alone. But when I’m working on larger pieces, such as my monumental public reliefs, collaboration is crucial, for instance with the builders, because they have expertise I don’t have. At the theatre, I could never work with anyone who wanted to control me, like the directors who come along with finished sketches of how they want the stage to look, as if they could just order it. Then I just say, Good bye! Do it yourself! But in collaborations with Ingmar Bergman, for example, we deferred to each other’s respective expertise. Now they’re making him out to be a god who knew everything, but he was no theatre image person. His skill was on a different level, he was incredibly musical, he understood text, psychology, and movement. Then the collaboration is not a compromise, instead I call it a synthesis, when you meet and cooperate on equal terms as professionals. Discussions arose, of course, and could at times be quite heated. It is drama, after all.

Åsa: When I saw your exhibition Vivid Scenes 1964 – 1984 at Moderna Museet, with the models and sketches, it was like I could sense your concentration in the studio when you made them. It actually sent shivers down my spine. I began thinking about creative integrity, and this voluntary solitude that is so precious. Starting from your private artistic motivation, you can hook up with the larger systems. In my case, with public art, such as the underground station I’m currently working on, or the collective exploration project Residence in Nature. You initiate processes on a larger scale, but then you need to return to your own nest to be alone and concentrate. You upsize and downsize.

Gunilla: Yes, the absolutely best time in my life was when I could combine the two, working collectively, and just being on my own, concentrating in the loneliness of my studio. I wonder if I can still turn a pot the way I remember doing in my dreams.

Emily Fahlén is an art historian and curator based in Stockholm.

Publicerad i Residence-In-Nature: Mammas hus i Lainio 2019

Att som kritiker vara med i ett konstnärligt projekt låter en givetvis komma närmare konsten. Jag hade samma upplevelse som Lisa Rosendahl, som hade min roll i det här projektet för två år sedan. Hon jämförde konsten med potatisen. När potatisen introducerades i Sverige trodde man att det var blasten och blommorna som var grejen. Först ett tag senare upptäckte man att knölen var ätbar. På samma sätt finns det risk att kritikern bara ser blasten. Jag skulle vilja gå åt två håll från här. Dels försöka se blasten från knölens perspektiv – det är inte blast som knölen tänker på! Den har gratäng, pommes frites, brännvin för ögonen! Det är vad jag tyckte mig se hända när konstnärerna i projektet plötsligt så att säga skulle ”avsluta” det de höll på med, för att ställa ut det. Offentligheten provocerade fram tankar om vad man kunde göra med potatisen nu när den inte skulle växa längre. Det där ger mig ett tillfälle att ställa frågor om konst och icke-konst, och om konstens natur. Så arbetstiteln för min text är ”Konstens natur som icke-konst”.

En annan fördel med att vara med i ett konstprojekt i en liten by, Lainio i Tornedalen, är tvärtom att man börjar se konsten, eller det man nu håller på med i projektet, utifrån. Man förhåller sig ju till de bofasta, även om man sällan ser dem, och föreställer sig vad de skulle tycka om ens göranden i byn. Det är ett betraktelsesätt som åtminstone för mig blev ett slags icke-konstbetraktande, jag kastade en amusisk blick på mig själv och min grupp, på mina förväntningar, på våra diskussioner och det vi tog på allvar, på grejerna som folk höll på med, och tänkte – svammel, trams, löjligt.

Bland annat gick vi, i november, i Tornedalen, i en situation där vi hade hyrt ett flertal hus att bo i, gick vi ut ett stycke från byn och tältade i naturen. Hur gravt insnöad i konstvärlden måste man vara för att inte se hur löjligt det är! Det finns inga om och men här, det är fånigt. Att gräva där man står, att ta tag i just det där intrycket av larvighet blev min första impuls. Jag gillade den här betraktelsen från utsidan när jag äntligen var på insidan, och jag gillade också att identifiera mig och omfamna löjligheten. (”Omfamna” är nog inte rätt ord, det är mer som den spända förtjusning man känner när man ska sätta tungspetsen mot en lätt omogen citron.) Jag gillade tanken på att vi gör oss löjliga eftersom den kändes sann.

Vad säger det om konstpotatisen, utöver att det löjliga kanske är en del av dess natur? Jag vet inte än, jag påbörjade tänkandet i förrgår. Men jag har i alla fall hittat lite material om det, som jag kan dela med mig av: ett avsnitt i Adornos Estetisk teori som heter ”Det mimetiska och det löjliga” (jag citerar från Sven-Olov Wallensteins ännu opublicerade översättning). Så det här är vad jag kommer att försöka skriva om, så småningom.
”Det löjliga i konsten uppfattar de amusiska bättre än de som är naivt hemmastadda i konsten. (LEHL: Icke-konstblicken beskrivs alltså positivt, som något som ser eller förstår mer än konstblicken, nämligen det löjliga.) … Det löjliga är det mimetiska residuet i konsten, priset den måste betala för att den stänger sig inne i sig själv. Filistern har skamligt nog alltid lite rätt [mot det löjliga i konsten].”

De som påpekar det löjliga i konsten, har mer rätt än de som förnekar det; de konstnärer och kritiker som motarbetar det löjliga i ett verk, kommer därigenom att göra det till kitsch – det måste alltså vårdas. För om man tar avstånd från det löjliga tar man avstånd från de impulser, de kanske djupaste impulserna i konstprocessen, som det löjliga korrelerar mot. Vad är dessa impulser? Helt enkelt de som får en att ta sig an ett material och göra någonting med det, göra konst av det. Att göra en oanvändbar form av ett material som bjuder motstånd – klart att det är lite tramsigt. Men det är just där, säger Adorno, som anden (intellektet) tänds, i friktionen mot materialet:

”Konsten har sitt räddande moment i den akt med vilken anden i den den slänger bort sig själv.” Det där är ju en ganska komisk beskrivning av hur intellektet uppfattar sig abdikera när den grundlöst börjar bearbeta ett material, göra en form av en bit trä. Den verkar inte helt inse att den därigenom uttrycker sig – och hur ska den, i en given situation kunna veta eller ens tro det? Hemligheten, eller det gåtfulla i konsten, är också det som gör den löjlig, nämligen att intellektet slaviskt eller troget måste följa impulsen och dess väg genom materialet, utan att veta varför. Den här spänningen mellan att försöka göra något bestämt, en form som motsvarar något krav – om än bara en känsla -, och att tvingas göra det i blindo, trevande, ”har sitt korrelat i det löjliga…som de mest betydande verken fortfarande bär inom sig, verk vilkas betydelse till viss del ligger i att inte ha sminkat över det.”

Det löjliga är alltså en väsentlig del av konsten, kanske rent av det som gör den levande. Hur kul är inte det, att det som ger konsten ande och gör den intellektuellt stimulerande, är just det larviga! Och att vi försöker skyla över det för att istället presentera konsten som… någonting jävligt märkvärdigt. Fast det är just denna allians mellan pajaseri och intellekt som är det märkliga i den.

Utifrån det jag hittar hos Adorno – som är en riktig löjlighetsgruva – kommer jag kunna lyfta fram den samhällskritiska relevansen av allt det som var fånigt i vår mötesform i Lainio (som är precis lika larvigt i vanliga mötessammanhang, fast då fungerar löjligheten inte kritiskt, utan konformt). Och jag har gått hopp om att genom den kategorin till slut också kunna koppla konstprojektet till naturen – för det heter ju trots allt Residence in Nature – eftersom det löjliga i vissa former kan få ”människans likhet med apan” att blixtra fram. ”Konstellationen djur-narr-clown är ett av konstens grundskikt”. Det är i det skiktet potatisen växer, jordmån: fånighet.

Published in Åsa Jungnelius: Artefakter/Artifacts

Herculaneum, the roman town buried in mud and ash, was discovered when a peasant digging a well by the Gulf of Naples came across marble sculptures and a marble floor –the stage of an antique theatre – in the year 1709. When I encounter the work of Åsa Jungnelius, I begin to reflect on the towns that were destroyed (and preserved for posterity) by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79. I think of the art treasures of the villas, the luxury objects and indoor gardens. But I also think of the innumerable quotidian, religious or erotic objects that were found. Everything seen from the moral optic of later powers and talk of decay, as well as, naturally, coloured by my own experience of these places via visits, texts and images. Memory turns to fleeting encounters between past times and value systems; accidentally created still lives—a garbage bag leaning against a marble pillar. The place, the gaze and the temperament move between shine and muteness, between home and nature, between the personal and the political.

8–– –– ––[-)

Åsa Jungnelius talks about the society we live in by assembling different quotidian and reworked materials into fetishes of sorts; hand-made objects with inner souls and stories. In these composite objects times and places, and not least different social tensions, meet: city, industry, forest, equality, pleasure, struggle. We encounter wooden sticks, cloth, animal skins, hooks and chains of metal. But the recurring and main material is glass. A material as much hard to define for those who desire a satisfactory theoretical and aesthetical description of it, as for those who wander around the city’s many shop windows or amble through compact dwellings. Glass is eroded material that is heated up to a mass. A blank mute surface that continues to narrate with geological stubbornness. This transparent surface surrounds us in vast expanses, enormous quantities, and it everywhere offers a transition from sight to reverie. The passage is important in the art of Åsa Jungnelius; she makes use of it both in the figuration of a place and in the very coming into being of a work. The work with transparency, with its colour and form, with the addition of and attachment to other materials is a work that creates limits against the visible. To make visible is to be visible.

8–– –– ––[-)

In Werner Herzog’s film from 1976, Heart of Glass, a glasswork town falls into a depression when the glass master dies and with him the secret of how the red ruby glass that sustains the town is produced. The one who becomes craziest of all is the owner of the glasswork, an aristocratic man who believes that the glass gives eternal life and that the secret behind its red colour is using one’s own blood. In a new version of the film Herzog says that for every scene, he let all the actors be hypnotised, except for the one playing Hias, the protagonist; a prophet and mountain shepherd who wanders around the villages telling stories of the apocalypse.

Published in Åsa Jungnelius: Artefakter/Artifacts

The first work by Åsa Jungnelius that I ever saw was a chandelier in pink strung-glass. It was at once alluringly beautiful and slightly vulgar, and it woke in me some desire to possess it. But at the same time it reminded me of the decorative objects at my Italian grandmother’s home: how I walked around and fiddled with them, investigating what they wanted of me. Like the little dog in green crystal. Åsa’s art took me back to that space.

A bowl, a candlestick or a pair of shoes are seen in general as being there for us. They are normally to have a certain function and incite our sense of beauty. The green dog is just supposed to be sweet and pretty. We cast out or neglect the ugly objects; perhaps we laugh at them.

Åsa’s art triggers an entirely different process in us; in it, objects undermine authorities and establish new relationships. The question of function still arises but it is quickly subordinated to the demands that the objects place on us. Many of these objects seem to have come into being with a clear purpose: a bowl for dipping crisps in or a candlestick for lighting up the room. But they are also at the same time simply themselves, artworks in their own right.

An encounter with Åsa’s work can therefore be a little confusing at first. The pieces unhinge us from our habitual representations and we are forced to become agents. The objects gaze back at us, as if they wanted to make us think about who we are, how we relate to ourselves and to the world surrounding us. It is as if her artefacts knew that we are to see them. They speak a language other than our own, but they lift us from our routines, as if it were them who are the actors and we the objects of study.

The works included in the exhibition were crafted in Småland’s Kingdom of Crystal. Glassworks are traditionally seen as masculine environments and Åsa comments with her art on the area’s industrial history. And the history of glass is a multifaceted one. At the same time as there is a whole culture around the production of glass objects, the raw materials can also be found in nature. (A lightning can produce glass by vitrifying sand.) Glass is a material at once heavy and volatile, sharp and soft, solid and fragile; and still Åsa knows how to extend the possible uses of glass by also placing it in relation to other materials.

At Fullersta Gård we encounter a number of assemblages stemming from an elevated, spiritual state of the senses: A well that perhaps contains a truth about our past, our future or ourselves, a symbolic portal, the entry into another reality.

The set table presented on the second floor is to be considered as a social act. I myself imagine that Esther, or as those who work here call her, ‘the house ghost’, is specially invited to this party. Esther was a maid at Fullersta Gård more than a hundred years ago and has been seen around in the house. A table is set for us, but when the exhibition closes for the evening the objects stay in place and wait for the nocturnal guest of honour.

Written on the occasion of Åsa Jungnelius’ exhibition Artefacts at Fullersta Gård, Stockholm.

Publicerad i OEI 75/76: Naturbegreppet ([EK]OEI)

Sådant trodde jag inte på, var jag övertygad om, men ändå trängde jag in i andevärlden med hjälp av en schaman. Vägen dit gick genom en övergiven brunn, ett hål, en passage, en öppning i den orörda mossan med spegelblank avgrund. Med hjälp av schamanen krälade jag in och ut. Brunnens ejakulation kom i rosa och förde mig genom sin explosion av slem in i den andra världen, brunnens universum – är detta livets källa? Berättelser om mänskliga artefakter och existentiella behov beskrevs för mig i extatiska vågor. I brunnens universum hade jag förmågan att träda in i andras kroppar och vara; jag kunde återuppleva födelsen av mina barn, födda och ofödda. Schamanen säger – ”Naturen är levande, den består av gudar och andar, och alla delar av kosmos upplevs som förbundna med varandra. Universum består av ett verkligt nätverk av energier, former och vibrationer.”

Brunnen fann jag nära Moshultagöl i Ljuders socken, vid en för länge sedan övergiven boplats där marken idag främst används till industriellt skogsbruk. Det är en plats jag återkommit till under flera års tid. Här brukas naturen; den ägs, köps och säljs för att generera kapital. Rumsligt innebär det ett snårigt landskap där det är svårt att ta sig fram mellan grustagets, torvmossens, granodlingarnas och åtelns produktivitet. Obarmhärtigt lämnas urgröpningar och sår. I skiftet mellan bondesamhället och industrisamhället övergav smålänningarna av nöd denna plats för att finna bördigare mark på andra sidan Atlanten. Industrialiseringen av landskapet sågs sedan kanske som en lösning.

Min undersökning rör förståelsen av det vi vanligen kallar natur. Naturen som är en del av vårt gemensamma offentliga rum på ett lika självklart sätt som det urbana, en plats där produktion och romantik möts. Men vad är natur? I vilket tillstånd möter vi naturen? Och finns ens naturen i någon annan form än som en bild av sig själv, ett slags ”naturteater” som vi efter ett besök sedan lämnar? Kanske är komposten, det cirkulära systemet, det närmste natur vi kommer, ett system vi alla ingår i. Död, förruttnelse, jord, återfödelse, död, förruttnelse, jord och återfödelse.

Jag tänker på impressionisternas landskapsmåleri. De lämnade sina ateljéer för att vistas och måla i landskapet som en motståndshandling mot den rådande normen för verklighetsåtergivning. Land art-rörelsen omformade naturlandskapet i monumentalformat, och också detta var en motståndshandling mot konstens kommersiella system. Som en parafras/kommentar till båda dessa rörelser och ett personligt möte med bruksorten, en plats som tidigare var främmande för mig, ville jag pröva att arbeta direkt i landskapet i skala 1:1 och samtidigt titta på det som bild och rum för att undersöka om det går att röra sig genom bilden av natur. Det kan ses som en reaktion på en närvaro påxs och samverkan med en viss plats, där denna plats och det kontextspecifika formar varandra. De lokala förutsättningarna möter de globala frågeställningarna och ett kunskapsutbyte uppstår.

Published on occasion of Residence-in-Nature 2016

We are driving between Lessebo and Skruv. Dense forests line the road. It is still winter. Åsa meets my gaze in the rear view mirror and says that the idea behind Residence-in-Nature is to engage with its context on the scale of 1:1. She has mentioned this before, but it is just now, here, that the concept sinks in. What does this really mean? What could it mean?

At first I come to think of Lewis Carroll and Jorge Borges’ fictions about earlier civilizations’ attempts to map reality with such precision that the maps eventually became as large and detailed as the territories they attempted to describe. In both cases the representation and what was to be represented were conflated, effectively negating the difference between territory and map. By equating representation with reality the map’s logic and function was lost. But Residence-in-Nature does not have the map as its premise. It is the wrong tool and the wrong method for what the project seeks to accomplish. It is not about creating an exact representation of the place. Rather, Residence-in-Nature uses the concept scale 1:1 in order to denote a relationship.

The relationship constitutes a meeting where the context is as important as the artistic practice that encounters it. 1:1 describes a reciprocal exchange. Those materials, techniques, spaces, stories, images and people who are at and of the place create the conditions for how the artists utilize their knowledge. The surroundings shape the art as much as the art takes the surroundings as its material. The concept also describes a mirroring between two parties: the art takes place at the site just as the site takes place in the art. And as art relates to site, it also creates new sites.

The difference between navigating a place with the aid of a map or not is like the difference between measuring something with a measuring tape or through a direct comparison to my own body. The measuring tape establishes a universal value for the whereas in comparison to my own body I experience the distance subjectively. To know that we are standing four steps or 387 centimeters from each other is not the same thing.

We have a meeting at Lessebo paper mill among stacks of handmade paper. Of the hand, for the hand. Is this scale 1:1? Industrial paper production is located in the adjacent building. Industrialization altered the scale of reality; everything became more, larger, faster. The world was divided into abstract components. Direct contact with the context — the link between human, tool, and result, the conditions to independently shape and decide over one’s existence — vanished. At the same time, wage work created new possibilities, a different kind of mobility, new rights, prosperity. Factories were started, produced, closed down. Societies were constructed around them; filled and emptied at the same pace as the factories. Meanwhile images of reality were rendered with increased clarity. We zoomed out and zoomed in. A bird’s eye view became a satellite view. Molecular view became atomic view. Paper maps became Google Maps. Finally it became impossible to navigate the world step by step by being in it — everything had become image and we no longer needed to look up from the screen in order to move on, to the next image.

The difference between navigation aided by a traditional map or with the help of Google Maps is that Google Maps all the while operates in relation to your actual position and redefines which aspect of the map you see from that vantage point. Instead of seeing an image of the whole you only see that delimited area where you are right now. There is no longer any need to look up and assure yourself that reality corresponds to the map, since that relationship has been fragmented into so many small components that it has become nearly incomprehensible and irrelevant. It is also not possible to reach an end, to venture beyond the map: Google Maps blankets the earth’s surface without any noticeable seams.

To relate on a scale of 1:1 can be an attempt to establish direct contact. Not by pretending that there is a path back to a way of being before the images and the projections, before the yard sticks, the fragmentation, globalization, digitization, but by making visible and comparing all these layers of reality with ourselves, with our bodies, thoughts, and experiences. To say that there actually is a here and now anchored in time and space, and that it affects us in the same way that we can have an effect on it.

Perhaps it is similar to what the feminist theorist Donna Haraway speaks of when she describes situated knowledge. According to Haraway, who wrote about situated knowledge in relation to science, the only accurate objectivity is that which reveals how each conclusion has been affected by its context. According to this logic there are no facts that are not a result of who, how, where, and when; the historical context, its geographic, social and economic power relations and materiality.

Haraway critiques how the rational scientific community has favored seeing above all other senses and has created a scientific gaze portrayed as "a view from nowhere," as if abstracted from physical reality, and thus claims the right to represent the world while it escapes representation; a mode that Haraway terms "the God trick." Situated knowledge, on the other hand, makes visible, according to Haraway, the person examining, what is being examined, and the environment they are located in, and in such a way presumes that a gaze always comes from "somewhere."

Even if the role of the artist and art during modernity, unlike science, has been ascribed the function of communicating the subjective perspective and upholding authenticity, it has also been surrounded by a succession of neutralizing and regulatory spaces and procedures. When modernity divided the world into different areas of specialization — e.g. medicine, physics, psychology, geography, etc. — also art was made into its own, separate, sphere. Here all the creative potential, liberated through modernity’s break with tradition, could be set free, while this force under no circumstances was allowed to permeate any other sphere of society. Art was autonomous, in exchange for being entirely its own and in that way not having any actual effect on the world as a whole.

Different voids were created — such as the studio and the white cube — which effectively staged and gave form to this liberated outsiderness: separate spheres for production and consumption where these two modes could maintain their own fantasies. That the relationship between the artist and the consumer was abstracted constituted the foundation of art’s autonomy. In these autonomous spaces anything could be said; here was a critical distance which through its remove enabled another type of honesty than what the other areas of knowledge produced. But here was also a social contract that meant that all artistic activity was considered without real effect beyond art’s limits. Art represented and commented, but did not alter. To instead situate both the artistic process and the completed work at the center of daily life — an approach artists have used in various ways during different times and which we now also see in Residence-in-Nature — should be understood as resistance to this development, and as a way to de-neutralize art and the role of the artist.

From the situated perspective it is not possible to be an objective viewer who stands outside and observes the world from a distance. The philosopher Gilles Deleuze and the psychoanalyst Felix Guattari in their book A Thousand Plateaus differentiate between this "optic" way of orienting oneself in the world — exemplified by maps and satellite images — and what they term "haptic" sensation. The haptic viewpoint acts at close range and explores the world step by step: it does not utilize background and foreground, there is no horizon or unmoving universal perspective in relation to which everything appears. One is "in" the landscape instead of "in front of" it. As an example they use different nomadic peoples’ journeys through what they call landscapes of pure connectivity — deserts, oceans, icescapes — which are all under constant transformation and do not offer any fixed points but must be navigated through absolute presence. Deleuze and Guattari see this mode of relating in nomadic peoples’ art, such as in Inuit representations of hunting scenes where there is no central perspective; where animals’ body parts simultaneously point in different directions and where the landscape lacks distinctions between heaven and earth.

Did Deleuze and Guattari ever experience the landscapes they drew on for their theory? Although they describe a relationship that transcends seeing, their actual referent is an image: art. What they do not mention is the materiality of the image; that the Inuits’ hunting scenes often are carved from walrus tusks and that the material most likely has determined how the image has taken shape.

The relationship between image and material should be regarded as reciprocal. The absence of perspective is probably as much the result of the walrus tusks’ rounded shapes as it is an expression of a world view. That the image lacks distinctions between heaven and earth maybe instead illustrates the nature of violence in the hunting situation — of the moment when the limit between life and death and animal and human is suspended through intense close contact — rather than the relationship to a landscape.

In our media-saturated world, everything is seen from afar and close contact does not take place. The same distancing that destroyed the ancient alliance between human and nature enabled different forms of objectification, colonization, and control which still determine our daily lives. Can art offer another possibility? Can it be the opposite of the map by describing the world from within? The difference between Google Maps and the haptic approach, both characterized by a nearsighted absence of perspective, is presence and materiality: to orient oneself haptically is to always relate to the specific, while Google’s world view remains generically simplified no matter where you are.

On the airport shuttle to Kalmar Airport a screen displays ads for the "Giraffe" shopping mall. We slow to a stop at a traffic light, and through the window I see that the bus has stopped in front of the actual Giraffe Mall. For a few seconds the gazes of the large plastic giraffes on the store signage meet the gazes of the giraffes on-screen in the bus. This is also a form of direct contact. Then more ads: a veterinarian offering a discount on spaying and neutering; frozen chicken is on sale at the grocery store. Humans’ relationship to nature has rarely felt so alienated.

I wonder if Residence-in-Nature is an attempt to "rewild." Not in the sense of returning to a utopian concept of the natural, but as a means of turning wild our relation to reality by releasing it from the overwhelming systems of borders and control which dominate our contemporary life. The organization Rewilding Europe has as its ambition to return two million hectares of land to "wilderness" before 2022. Their work consists of reintroducing animal and plant species that have been threatened by civilization, and to then let nature take care of itself, which includes not intervening in forest fires and floods. The possibility to even think along these lines is an effect of the rural depopulation that has occurred as industrialized society has given way to a postindustrial urban economy. It is a historic moment: there are fewer people in the European countryside today than there were one-hundred years ago.

A place that humanity definitely retreated from exactly thirty years ago is the so-called "dead zone" around the nuclear power plant in Tjernobyl. In the areas in Belarus and the Ukraine that were emptied of people after the 1986 catastrophe, animal life now flourishes. Some species — above all large animals such as wolf, bear, and moose — have increased seven-fold since the disappearance of humans. However, toxic radiation makes itself known nonetheless: among some species the survival rate is as low as 28% and most of the animals show traces of mutations such as spots in the patterning of feathers and fur, or growths on toes or wings. Nonetheless, the effects of humanity’s retreat on the return of animals is striking. Nature is a self-organizing force in constant mutation.

It is March in Kronoberg. I dig in my coat pocket for my cell phone. Instead I find a pine cone I picked up at Gökaskratts Campground that morning. Then the pine cone was half frozen and as tightly closed as a brass knob. After a day in the warmth of my pocket it has bloomed; the scales are opened
like a fan and the pine cone has completely changed shape. Nature or nurture?

Now it is the end of May. Residence-inNature has taken its public form. I wonder if the relation 1:1 is applicable also to the relationship between process and result, and between art and the public. Even if the artists have related to the place 1:1 that does not mean the rest of us have the ability to relate that way to their art, or to the spaces it occupies. How can the work communicate the relationship between the artist and the place? How can it communicate the meaning of the relationship 1:1? In a moment of doubt I think that it is perhaps impossible to relate to anything on a scale of 1:1. That, perhaps, this is why art was necessary, to embody the gap between the human and the world?

I visit the Emigrants’ House at Culture Park Småland and read of the famine in the 1800s. Perhaps it is with art as it once was with potatoes. When the potato plant was first introduced to Sweden it was considered decorative. It was grown for its flowers, but failed to generate a great deal of excitement. In time it was understood that the attraction was not in the flowers but in the gnarled roots, an insight which resulted in the potato saving the population from starvation. Can we think of art in the same way? Has the potential of art on the whole been misunderstood because it has all-too often been regarded incorrectly? Have we stared ourselves blind at the flowers and not had enough insight to learn from the gnarled roots? When will we realize that it is through those roots that art can save all of us?

Maybe we already know this, artists most certainly do, but we need to find ways to apply this knowledge in ways that extend beyond the artist’s role and into life. The gnarled roots of art are what struggle beneath the surface, creating themselves bit by bit and following their own path, shaped by their encounter with the soil. One cannot see them grow. If you pull the roots up into the light the process ends and something else takes hold, a kind of harvest which is certainly satisfying but completely different from growth. In growth, creation takes place; it is what shapes us and our surroundings. Growth is a tactile practice. It cannot take place in a vacuum, but is intimately connected to an environment, a place, a material. It is situated, in us and in the world. Growth co-exists or does not exist at all. This is what gives us agency — the possibility to act.

In her book The Practice of Place the artist Emma Smith writes that artists cannot claim the exclusive right to practice art. The ability to practice belongs to us all. Art and the artist’s role is instead to make us aware of that possibility:

…artists cannot make any exclusive claim on art. Practice belongs to everyone. Artists merely choose to dedicate themselves to it. […] Practice is a process in which we are all involved. Art, in its production and experience, draws our attention to these practices. This is the role of the artist. […] By replacing the bench-
marks of capitalism, measurement and sequencing, with relationship as a primary mode of orientation, art does not offer dis-order (order disarranged) but the absolute impossibility of order. This approach is not only a means to autonomy and alterity but is potentially a more congruous practice of place; a practice of being.[1]

1. Emma Smith, The Practice of Place, pp. 81–82, Bedford Press, London, 2015

In Kronoberg county there are now artworks by ten practitioners from different artistic disciplines who have participated in this year’s edition of Residence-in-Nature. One way to understand their presence is that they want to redirect our attention to exactly this, to our ability to have an active relationship to reality and our surroundings, and to practice our lives here and now, on a scale of 1:1.

Inuti is the Swedish word for "inside", "on the inside", or "within". Inuit is a term utilized by certain Arctic ethnic groups; it means "people" or "humans" in Inukitut.

Published on occasion of Residence-in-Nature 2014

If you venture into the forest, you are likely to reemerge transformed in one way or another. Every storyteller, outdoors person and paper mill baron knows this. The forest supplies us with raw materials, personal insights and encounters with nature. It is a well-worn metaphor for that thorny journey called life, and a very real necessity for an abundance of organisms, from microscopic spores to multinational corporations. The adventurous journey through the forest is perhaps also the archetype for linear storytelling, the narrative form which long dominated our western culture: one begins at its outer edges, disappears in among the trees to be surrounded by one’s fate, only to a few camp fires, chapters or novels later see the trees grow sparse and have the story reach its conclusion. The forest is – like the street, the beach and the white cube – a generic idea and a fictive image as much as it is a specific place and reality.

The forest plays a central role in a Swedish context. It was, and is, one of the cornerstones of Swedish industry and therefore also of the modernization of the nation. The forest literally built the society while it at the same time paradoxically acquired the role as a place of retreat when society was becoming too intrusive. Today the forest as cultural reflection and national myth is still significant, even if the landscape has been cultivated beyond recognition. The aesthetic of the million program can be found in the homogenized trees standing in rectilinear rows across the entire country. Today, Swedish wilderness is simply an image we carry within us. And perhaps it was just then, when nature became an image, that modernity was born: the very idea of nature as wild and essentially different from the civilized human was a necessity in order for modern society to be able to develop at the pace that it did; if the idea of untamed nature had not been articulated the need for paved streets and rectangular blocks would have been less urgent. All signs now point to the fact that we have satisfied the production ideals of modernity and devastated any remaining evidence that there ever was anything but an eternally expanding society: according to the national atlas of Sweden there is no longer any forest in this country, only forestry.

Right now we are in the forest by the Ronneby River between Korrö and Bast Lake, where six cultural workers from different disciplines have been in residence for two weeks and have produced new work within the parameters of the project Residence-in-Nature. The area has been populated since the Stone Age and the river was an important route for ancient peoples. Here are also a plentitude of traces from what happened since: fields and land for grazing, small villages and modern communities, wind mills and saw mills, ore mining and charcoal production, furniture making and paper production, glassworks and tourism. It is a landscape rich with a cultural heritage, but in what way does contemporary art fit in?

The art works along Ronneby River have grown out of a relatively brief on-site production phase during which the artists have been in close dialogue with the environment, both physically and intellectually, and have drawn on it as material. The project is dissimilar from other instances where art meets nature, for example the sculpture park Wanås in Skåne, with large production budgets and permanent works, or the large-scale Land Art manifestations created in the U.S. in the 1960s and 70s. This exhibition, which is best experienced from a canoe, is temporary and relatively low-key. The production process is as important a component as the result. Instead of moving high-octane art into nature to create unexpected contrasts, my impression is that the participants instead have let the surroundings move into them and their way of working. The artists have adapted to the place in a variety of ways that highlight their respective approaches. Together they make the area visible as a public space, a term one doesn’t perhaps normally think of in relation to this picturesque, privately owned place.

The term public space in part connotes that a place should be accessible to all; we have a right to be there regardless of who owns the land and without in advance having to define what we will do there. The forest, through the legally defined “right to roam,” is of course such a place. Here we can even pause for a moment, sit down or spend the night – and in which of our city’s streets or squares is one granted that privilege? But public space as a concept also connotes something else, often associated with the densely populated city: the prerequisite for a common experience shared by many and therefore the idea of the political. It is in public space that the distribution of power takes place within a democracy, and it is here that power is expressed: through urban planning, normative messages and behavior, or social attributes and choreographies. But it is also a space for discussion and critiques of power, a place for making public and shedding light on various issues and occurrences. Contemporary art grows out of this tradition. In the best case, to encounter art in the forest thereby encourages and challenges us to think critically and reflect on a place and our relationship to it. By being present here, art creates opportunities for conversations and new perspectives.

If you begin your canoe trip through the exhibition from the informational kiosk in Bro, the first work you will encounter is Lisa Torell’s Craft, Application and Protection. Torell has worked at the juncture where the public road ends and the forest begins, and has created a series of interventions along the slope down to the water. Legible as passage rather than as place, the area attests to the fact that no one normally pauses her for longer than necessary. Here, the experience of nature is not immersive: the road back to civilization is constantly making itself known, and traces on the ground and plant life attest to the fact that many do not feel that they need to be as careful here as they do further into the natural environment. Using asphalt, Torell has covered those patches worn most by visitors’ eagerness to enter the forest. Around the tree trunk that has born the brunt of the canoes she has installed protective galvanized metal tubes. Torell’s piece raises the question of where society ends and nature begins, but also ideas about what kind of aesthetic we find acceptable in different contexts.

The piece reinforces the transition between nature and culture, in part by literally arming the ground and tree with asphalt and steel, but also by directing our gazes to the idea that such a transition even exists. Visually, Torell’s intervention is contradictory, to say the least. On the one hand the matte steel tubes cue us to state-determined standards and legally regulated safety measures that are difficult to recognize as art when outside the gallery space. On the other hand, they remind us of an urban environment that is not compatible with the expectations of the nature we are entering. This makes the work feel quotidian and strange at the same time. There is a parallel here between our expectations of nature and of art. As one in nature often looks for wild beauty, the unplanned and the informal, art has since modernism been expected to fill a similar function as a contrast to mundane society, and has been seen as representative of the authentic in an increasingly artificial existence. The modernist mindset in this way generated a series of binaries that obscured more than they revealed: the idea of nature as untamed was cemented while at the same time humankind intensified its exploitation of the environment to the point that any untouched nature can no longer be said to exist. Similarly, art and the artist were assigned the roles of bearers of authenticity even though a work of art, like every attempt at representation, builds on the very possibility of artificiality. In this contradictory way we can in part understand art as the equivalent of nature, but also as its opposite.

The title of Torell’s piece opens the possibility for additional reinterpretations of established terms and binaries. Here I am thinking primarily of the word handicraft which has a strange ring in relation to the industrial materials and labor processes the work consists of. But in light of the fact that we are said to live in the Anthropocene, the geological era when humankind’s interventions in nature have had such an extensive impact that they can be equated with natural forces, it is perhaps not so strange after all. From that perspective the difference between traditional crafts, asphalt paving and environmental destruction is not so great: the source is still humanity. In addition, the relationship between craft and industry is causal: the crafts environment around Korrö with a wind mill, saw mill and tannery from the 1700s is of course an early version of today’s heavy industry. It will not be long before today’s industry has become tomorrow’s artisanship.

Johanna Gustavsson Fürst’s The Delighted Spectators Quietly Viewed the Remarkable Spectacle also engages with our expectations of the encounter with nature. The piece can be found in two sites. One site is indicated by two wood benches placed on either side of the stream. At first glance the benches appear idyllically situated by the leafy edge of the stream; perfect spots for a much-needed break from paddling, with an opportunity to pause and take in the beautiful surroundings. But upon closer examination one realizes that the benches’ placement is even more strategic. Instead of directing our attention to the picturesque surroundings, the resting spots direct our attention to what lies just beyond the verdant river’s edge, which are the warehouses and mill of Lars Carlsson’s Wood Products, Inc. The company clears, processes and sells timber from nearby forests, and has also produced and donated the material for Gustavsson Fürst’s benches. By treating the buildings as a part of the environment rather than as something we’d rather ignore in our pursuit of a satisfying experience of nature, Gustavsson Fürst reminds us that we are in the middle of an industrial landscape where timber and tourism are hard cash. We are also reminded that one depends on the other: the very nature that most people today consider attractive and hikable is not virgin forest, but instead consists of forests that have been thinned and cultivated over the years creating a passable and variegated scenery. Similarly, mass tourism emerged as a phenomenon alongside industrialization, when leisure time became a popular concept and the working population had means that extended beyond everyday needs.

A few hundred meters away by the opening to Bast Lake is another component of the same piece. We are encouraged to dock and wander into the forest. The tier of fully grown trees, however, turns out to only be a few meters deep. Beyond awaits a large-scale nursery. We follow Gustavsson Fürst’s wooden walk-way to a specially constructed viewing platform. Again the conceptual and actual components of the piece are one and the same: the platform is constructed out of the locally harvested pine it aims to highlight. The company Southern Forest Plants delivers more than 15 million forest plantings annually from their nursery in Flåboda. Infinite numbers of plantings of the exact same height stand in straight rows waiting to grow to the desired size and be planted by landowners around the country, to be cleared a few decades later. The sea of standardized plantings brings to mind the premise in Peter Tillberg’s painting Will You Be Profitable Little Friend? (1971-72) where equal parts listless and expectant schoolchildren look back at us from behind their rows of school desks. Gustavsson Fürst’s piece stages an abrupt contrast to the prospect of natural nature and becomes yet another reminder of how our gazes are often directed. Like the bulk of the trees we encounter in Swedish forests are planted, the paddling tourist’s sense of freedom follows a well-defined course. Gustavsson Fürst’s piece constitutes an elegantly interlocked unit where circuits of production and consumption are made visible, as are we in our roles as both fellow actors and spectators.

Discourse around the forest is usually about nature as livelihood or as landscape. It is rare that one speaks of it as culture. Caroline Ringskog Ferrada-Nolis’ sound piece Nature prompts us to question the idea of the natural and primordial by connecting it to its self-selected opposite, culture. “Why are you here in Sweden, in this forest?” asks a young female voice. “Where are you actually from? You’re not totally Swedish, right? I was thinking mostly that you’re pretty dark. Not black, but pretty dark. Are your parents from here?” The monologue highlights a situation which, despite the woman’s startling naiveté, perhaps can only be described as evil. The young woman delivers a series of statements about “immigrants” as such a matter of course that one sees that she considers it her given right to make declarations about the state of things. The position that she is the norm, the given, the natural, for the place she is in is so obvious that she is incapable of reflecting upon it no matter how much she reasons with herself. It is a completely uninhibited and normalized racism, unpleasantly amplified by her gentle tone and friendly attitude.

When one travels through Sweden the road is most likely bordered by a natural landscape that emerged during the same period as Folkhemmet, when economic growth created an indomitable faith that everything would become better while the natural landscape was sacrificed for industry. The result is a landscape that can best be described as homogeneous and anonymous. Evenly green trees of the same variety and age stand in rows along the highways. If there is a community in the distance it is undetectable, and can only be suspected in advertisements for fast food restaurants that appear at the edge of the road at regular intervals. There are people here, somewhere, but one never lays eyes on them.

It is good to be reminded that this nature is in no way natural, but a cultural product that follows a specific aesthetic. It is surprisingly rare that this aesthetic is called into question. It is functional, instrumental, automatic. Connections between the homogenous landscape and the idea of nature as primordial are unpleasant, to say the least. Folkhemmet was not accessible to everyone; rather, it depended on a significant degree of exclusion. The Swedish landscape as a reflection of the soul of the people warrants critical self-reflection. As reality is presented today there is little space for biological diversity. The national parks boast of their authenticity, but how they are selected is highly questionable. According to the Swedish National Park Service, the national parks are “representative landscape types that are maintained in their natural condition, but they should also be beautiful or unique environments that can produce powerful encounters with nature.” Created with the purpose of conserving and representing the nation’s different archetypes it is presented as a given that only those environments that are beautiful are to be protected. Nature as concept is still deployed in different contexts to exclude or criminalize people: for their sexual orientation, gender or way of being. To invoke the “natural” as if it existed separate from culturally defined values is as preposterous as ignoring that it was humankind that invented the word nature.

An ambivalence concerning the natural can once again be found in the title of Åsa Jungnelius’ piece, Landscape Painting, which should be understood as having dual meanings. The piece is a representation of a real image, at the same time that it is an actual landscape painting – Jungnelius has literally painted and modified the landscape. The installation extends along both sides of the river and a bit into the woods, and creates a field where the movement of the canoe and the form of the piece become one. An arch standing in the water forms a circular passage for the canoe as it does for one’s consciousness: half concrete metal, half reflection in the water. Space and image, reality and representation, romance and concretism, are linked together in a shared journey that at times makes the landscape appear magical and at other times makes it unattractive. Spider webs sprayed blue hang seductively like soft veils between tree trunks and point to a fairy tale landscape where anything can be possible. However, that very same blue color returns a bit further away in the form of rough plastic bags wrapped around cut-down trees. The color is typically used to mark trees ready to be cleared, the plastic bags are ubiquitous within the timber industry, the space we are transported through is a production unit while also a landscape, a tourist trade and place for romance and spirituality.

Jungnelius highlights what is already there, utilizes everyday materials in a divergent way, or adds the extraordinary as if it is a given. The piece creates a dramaturgy where the movement itself, the river’s flow and the direction of the gaze, is made evident and one suddenly detects the geometry in a pair of leaning trees or the river’s reflection in the water in a new way. We are moving through a painting. Green play dough frames the already verdant plant life, bright pink tree roots crawl at the water’s edge like fluorescent vegetation dripping with phosphorous. The different components create a force field where everything – what the artist has contributed as well as what was already there – becomes aestheticized and appears to be part of one and the same system. Along the river can be seen finger prints in the mud that has been dug up and smeared across the ground. Humankind has been here. Her presence beautifies and destroys, creates and re-creates. We humans are nature, at the same time that we insist on the possibility for us not to be, to stand to the side and regard, comment and control.

Being present at the site was central to the Residence-in-Nature project. Depending on how one sees it, the exhibition is a result of that stay, or a reason for the stay to even take place. According to his own statement, Fredrik Paulsen was troubled by his encounter with the forest: this was not an environment where he felt at home. Symptomatically, his piece is the one that relates most clearly to the artists’ encampment and living conditions, and the only one that now indicates the site where they camped. Rest Area is a projection screen in corrugated plastic installed between two tree trunks across the river facing the artists’ camp site, at a suitable screening distance. Here the artists screened films with the aid of a portable generator and video projector. Films included the documentary Kon-Tiki (1950) and Happy People: A Year in the Taiga (2010) as well as the feature film Stand by Me (1986), which in different ways address adventures in the wild by linking them to insights about humankind and its historical development.

Aside from being a functional projection screen, Rest Area in my eyes also represents humanity’s tendency to project its own conceptions and images onto the existing reality. This becomes even more apparent when the screen is left in place long after the screenings have ceased. The audience encounters an object and an empty surface, a framework within which all images are possible. The reference to film is also reminiscent of the different perspectival shifts that occur when one moves from one setting to another. In contrast to the city’s passability and sight lines it is difficult for the unaccustomed visitor to have an overview and orient themselves in the forest. Nature encroaches and can appear impossible to survey from even just a few meters away. Film, however, functions in the opposite fashion: the most foreign places can seem familiar when they are presented through a knowable dramaturgy. The film screen is a space in the space that can provide perspective on the site itself. Perhaps it operated in this way during the two-week long stay.

Well at Bast Lake the tree crowns open up and you can see the horizon once again. At the mouth of the river stands an upright cluster of spruce branches. At first glance they appear to have been struck into the bottom of the lake in a topsy-turvy fashion, but after the canoe has moved forward an additional few meters a remarkable geometry becomes apparent. Rectilinear perspectives and sight lines cut across the blank surface of the water. The installation extends a good way across the lake and creates a soft undulating form in the water. The thin wood poles look like they are nearly the exact same thickness while they at the same time are relatively roughly cut and far from uniform. The same appears to be true for the geometry: the exactitude is an illusion, placement has been measured by eye and not with a yardstick. Markus Vallien’s installation When Humanly Repeated Forms Meet the for Us Incomprehensible, Apparently Random Order We Call Nature represents what the title promises. The piece becomes an effective visual metaphor for humanity’s doubled relationship to nature, which appears to us to be random and disorganized but at the same time reveals itself to consist of strict systems. From one angle everything seems to be accidental, but then a pattern emerges.

I can’t help but think of the minimalist Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977) in the desert of New Mexico, which is also a geometric field placed in the middle of nature and considered one of the Land Art movement’s most iconic pieces. In contrast to Vallien’s relatively modest installation of locally harvested spruce and water, The Lightning Field is composed of 400 specially produced poles in polished stainless steel. If the early Land Art movement (1966-1974) showed a strong preference for natural materials and interventions directly into the landscape, de Maria’s choices of materials reflect their production at the conclusion of the period of high industry. Like the American Land Art movement emerged as a response to that continent’s tremendous landscape and monumental industries, Vallien’s piece is in harmony with its surroundings; both its scale and materials are distinctly local.

It was also in conjunction with the Land Art movement’s emergence that the term site-specific art was coined to describe pieces produced for a specific site and to be exhibited only there. It is telling that this also takes place at the end of the 1960s, just when globalization has become a fact and both people and goods have achieved a never before imagined mobility. Today we stand in the middle of the next transformation, from industrial society to the so-called post-industrial condition. What does this mean for our relationship to site and to nature? Along the Ronneby River one sees strong linkages between the water-bound environments and the development from agrarian society to early industry. The modern paper mills and timber industry were also dependent on the site’s specific conditions in order to develop. The post-industrial knowledge- and service-based society, however, is not as tightly bound to what nature can offer. The connection between a product and the site that produces it becomes more and more remote. Perhaps this is why it is once again interesting for artists to be confronted with a particular site and produce works that do not simply draw on the local but also add new meaning to it?

While Europe’s cities are gentrified beyond recognition and become increasingly streamlined there is talk of a new green wave. More and more, artists and writers reside outside the urban environment, both in their works and in their lives. Not only because one strives for a higher quality of life and growing one’s own vegetables, like in the 1970s, but because the rural landscape as a site offers something other than the flattened cities, something - specific. The art works along the Ronneby River create a dialogue with an environment that carries the sediment of many thousands of years of information through which they touch upon the most pressing issues of our time. They link the specific site to a global production of knowledge, while they at the same time are here and nowhere else. In a time when modernity’s abstracted world of ideas and effects – exemplified by the emergence of rationality and industrialization – is called into question, different forms of situated knowledge become increasingly interesting. Not as a way to return to the idea of the local and the primordial, but to formulate new ways of constructing the relationship between human being and environment, and between place, body, and thought.

Publicerad i Handle With Care, red. Lisa Partby

I Åsa Jungnelius konst kräver fittan sin självklara plats, och om du inte passar dig så kommer den och tar dig. Kärt barn har som bekant många namn, och fittan/snippan/hålet uppträder i en rad olika former och konstellationer i hennes konstnärskap. I en serie vardagsobjekt har den domesticerats. Den kan som i Snäckan (2014) förekomma som en behändig skimrande snäcka, fylld med lördagsgodis på någons soffbord. Eller så kan du placera värmeljuset i en svart Snippa (2004) i stället för i den sedvanliga snöbollen. I den rokokoinspirerade Sconce (2011) uppträder den som förförisk lampett, där ljuskällan och den lilla pälskanten ger tydliga referenser till penetration.

Jungnelius arbetar med stereotyper, och hon använder dem som ett redskap för att göra betraktaren medveten om ingrodda föreställningar och vanemönster. Hon vill punktera rådande konventionella tankesätt. Det kvinnliga könsorganet blir en självklar del i en klassisk dialektisk maktkamp, där kuken/snoppen/pålen utgör den återkommande sparringpartnern. Medan samhället är överöst med falliska symboler, har det kvinnliga könets former helst skyfflats undan. fittans kraft har närmast setts på som något gåtfullt och oövervinnerligt. Enligt myterna ruvar den på en farlig okontrollerbar kraft, som det är säkrast att packa in, stuva bort eller vid tider bränna på bål. Historier om kvinnor som lurat till sig älskare för att sedan kastrera dem med sin ”betandade fitta” har cirkulerat världen över i litteratur, hörsägen och film. Sigmund Freud kunde babbla oavbrutet om manlig kastrationsångest, medan han inte reflekterade över om det kanske kunde finnas en kvinnlig variant. Hos kvinnor förklarades alla sexuella problem med frigiditet. Den ogenomträngliga musslan.

I Jungnelius konst har fittan rest sig med pondus och kraft. Den ber inte om ursäkt. Men precis som i verkligheten så uppträder den i olika former och skepnader. Medan den monumentala Snippa är en självbespeglande anatomiskt korrekt glasskulptur, består installationen Akta annars kommer jag och tar dig (2008) av en stor monsterfitta som hänger från taket. Glasobjekten som utgör mobilen svävar hotande över betraktaren som får underkasta sig verkets rumsliga dominans. Kedjor och krokar griper in i könen och skapar ett fetischistiskt förbund mellan kropp och objekt. fittan lever inte längre i skuggan, utan tar kontroll över den. Det monstruösa organets form refererar till filmer där de skräckinjagande bestarna har vaginaliknande drag.

Jungnelius undersöker relationen mellan treklövern kön, makt och identitet. Hennes konstnärskap sållar sig till en stolt tradition av feministiska konstnärer som också de gett vaginan sin rättmätiga plats i tid och rum. Några tidiga historiska exempel är den amerikanska konstnären Georgia O’Keeffes (1887–1986) intima närbilder av blommor, som har tydliga sexuella anspelningar. Medan surrealisterna generellt hade en väldigt traditionell och chauvinistisk syn på kvinnlig sexualitet tillhörde Meret Oppenheim (1913–1985) ett av undantagen. I skulpturen My Nursemaid (1936) har hon snört samman ett par vita högklackade skor, som serveras upp och ned med dekorationer i klackarna, som en grillad kyckling på ett silverfat. Blandningen mellan vardagsföremål och sexuella referenser återkommer i Oppenheims Object (1936), där hon klätt en tekopp, fat och sked med päls. Men det var framförallt 1960- och 70-talets feministiska konstnärers idoga undersökande av kroppen och deras övertygelse om att det privata är politiskt, som fittan fick en ny och central roll i den politiskt laddade konsten. I Niki de Saint Phalles (1930–2002) Hon – En katedral (1966) fick besökarna traska in i en enorm kvinna. Genom samma hål de en gång förlösts fick de nu snällt återvända. Ett av de mest centrala verken från denna tid är Judy Chicagos (f. 1939) The Dinner Party (1974–79). Den massiva installationen består av ett stort trekantigt bord som är förberett för en formell bankett. Runt bordet är det dukat för 39 viktiga historiska kvinnor. Varje tallrik är individuellt utformad och har vaginala referenser, som vulvor och fjärilar. På golvet finns 999 andra kvinnors namn nedtecknade.

Men Jungnelius ägnar även kuken och dess roll i konsthistorien en tanke. Fallosen vigs en egen plats i hennes konstnärskap, och det traditionella förhållandet mellan hålet och pålen omprövas. Hos henne tilldelas kuken en ny ställning och position. Ibland är den sliten och behöver hjälp. I installationen A Study of the Relationship Between the Hole and the Pole (2011), stöttas den köttiga fallosformen upp av en kryckliknande struktur. Den är för stor för sitt eget bästa, och klarar inte att hålla sig själv uppe. I en annan del av rummet står en lika köttig brunn framför en tempelliknande struktur. Det verkar nästan som att pålen vänder sig bort från hålet. Som om den inte orkar eller vågar något annat. Kanske att han fått nog och bara vill prova något nytt?

Den utmattade snoppen utmanar också den traditionella framställningen av fallosen som ett outtröttligt vapen, batong, påle eller ståndaktigt monument. Verket In Memory of (2010) anspelar på den klassiska obelisken. Historiskt hänvisar obelisken till det romerska, krigiska idealet. I likhet med kuken i A Study of the Relationship Between the Hole and the Pole vill även denna för mycket. Den har inte lyckats anpassa sig efter takhöjden, och skjuter rätt igenom det. Av tradition ska obelisker huggas i sten för att motstå såväl väder och vind, som tidens tand. I Jungnelius version har de hårdnackade materialen bytts ut mot plast, trä och paljetter. Runt obelisken har hon nonchalant knutit en silverfärgad rosett. Med materialskiftet följer en förskjutning av innehåll, och det självklara fragmentiseras. De traditionella symbolerna för universell manlig styrka har invaderats med en symbolisk implosion som följd.

Som filosofen Simone de Beauvoir (1908–1986) påpekade redan på 1940-talet så föds man inte som kvinna, man blir det. Det är kulturen, inte naturen som lägger grunden för hur vi ska se ut och bete oss. Medan kvinnornas fysiologi och könsorgan omgärdas av tabun, uppfostras män att vara stolta över sin maskulinitet. I likhet med de Beauvoir är Jungnelius övertygad om att könets spelrum skapas av tidens och platsens unika förväntningar och ideal. I vår tid har shopping blivit en identitetsbärande handling, och Jungnelius intresserar sig för kopplingen mellan kön och kommersialism. För henne är ytan en spegling av innehållet. Ytan är inte ytlig utan en signifikant del av det underliggande jaget. Ett tema hon ofta återvänt till är makeup. Hon ser smink som ett viktigt redskap för att visa vem man väljer att vara. Som i en slags uppochnedvänd arkeologi penslar man fram sig själv. Precis som med fittan vill hon ge sminket det erkännande det förtjänar, men inte tidigare fått. Urmodern till hennes sminkserie är konstverket Vad fin du är i håret (2004), där hon undersökte attributens och materialens identitetsskapande roll och hur människan definierar sig genom objekt och yta. På upphöjda podier placerades glasobjekt i form av snippor, läppstift, stilettskor och kristaller om vartannat. Iscensättningen var som en blänkande fiktiv butik, vars strömlinjeformade, fettfria ideal är något ouppnåeligt, samtidig som det skapar lust och begär. Jungnelius är också fascinerad av hur smink kan användas som vapen, och installationen In my imagination (2009) beskriver hon som en sminkarmé av läppstift och nagellack som kämpar på slagfältet mot varandra.

På en bokstavlig nivå kan Jungnelius beskrivas som en rendyrkad materialist. Enligt henne bär all materiell kultur på ett påstående. Med materialen följer minnen och makt. Några neutrala material existerar inte. Det finns en naturlig och glidande övergång mellan materialitet och fetischism. Begreppet fetisch härstammar från latinets facticius som just betyder konstgjort eller av människan skapat objekt. I den sexuella fetischismen har materialet ofta en framträdande position. Kanske det finns några som vill slicka en Birkenstocktoffel, men de flesta vill nog hellre känna den kalla lacksmaken i munnen. I Jungnelius konstnärskap återkommer flera av de objekt och former man traditionellt förknippar med sexuella fetischer, som den svarta färgen, stilettskor och kedjor. I vårt samhälle är fetisch något förbjudet och tabubelagt. Men när Jungnelius lyfter fram fetischerna från de obskyra hålor där de oftast gömts undan, och placerar kedjor på vardagsföremål som vinglas sker en viktig värdeförskjutning. Återigen kan man säga att hon ställer sig på de utsattas sida. När hon som med Storstake (2006) massproducerar överdimensionerade ljusstakar (för minimala tårtljus) i form av enorma erigerade penisar, utsmyckade med kedjor och kukringar vänds det tabubelagda till något folkligt. När hon producerar en offentlig skulptur med sm-liknande referenser som i The Black Panther (2010) blir det allmän egendom. När det tabubelagda blir folkligt, måste det per definition upphöra att vara något skitigt.

De senaste åren har Jungnelius varit bosatt i Småland och har med tiden börjat reflektera över den plats där hon lever och verkar. I Småland finns en tradition av att arbeta med det material som naturen ger: skog, trä och sten. Dagens skogar klassificeras i tre grupperingar; urskog, naturskog och kulturskog. Medan urskogen är fri från mänsklig inblandning, är kulturskogen dess antites. De småländska skogar Jungnelius omges av är kulturskog, där alla träd planterats samtidig i prydliga rader. De uniforma statiska tallarna är enligt henne bilden av ett kapital. Skogen har förvandlats till ett kommersiellt rum. I projektet Moder Jord (2012) tittade hon på hur skogsindustrin våldför sig på sin urmoder. Inte ens skogen är förskonad från maktövergrepp. Samtidigt som det finns en allemansrätt (som ju bygger på att det ska vara trevligt att vistas i skogen) lämnar skogsindustrin enorma traktorspår och kalhyggen efter sig. Som en del av projektet gjorde hon med våld hål i naturen. Hon sprängde kratrar, och försedde ett dött träd med en kondomartad fallosliknande struktur. Naturen måste skyddas från kulturens begär. I projektet Residence in Nature (2014) arrangerar hon och sex andra konstnärer en utställning i skogen. Denna gång krävs en fysisk insats från publiken, och man måste paddla runt för att kunna se konsten så som den presenteras i den sanna urmodern. Lägg ner vapnen. Du kan inte längre köpa dig fri. Kampen slutar här. Vid alltings början.

Stina Högkvist är konstvetare och curator på Nasjonalmuseet i Oslo.

It’s no metaphor, no false promise of lust and passion. It’s pornography—but in a wider sense, far from commonplace objectification and ruthless exploitation. Storstake (the XL candlestick), Crystal Lover and Snippa (the vagina) make up a sexual mythology. Amphora, Koh-I-Noor and Sugar Bag are desirable objects.

The glass is combined with materials that carry erotic connotations, such as chains, leather and fur. It’s really not that extreme, but still, it’s hard to talk about. Gender identity, hairy pink openings, shiny black chains, and extravagance. Escalated, disfigured and utopian product porn.

Today’s economically effective, industrial manufacturing processes tend to standardize everything. This creates normative ideals of beauty, and normatively dull desires. The global market owns the contemporary design language—but it doesn’t own you.

Åsa Jungnelius, born in Stockholm in 1975, trained at Konstfack – Stockholm’s University College of Arts, Crafts and Design, Stockholm and Pilchuck Glass School. Since 2007 she has been employed as a designer at Kosta Boda. She works primarily with glass, taking up questions of gender, consumption, identity, taste, and aesthetics. Åsa Jungnelius is one of nine members of WWIAFM, a group of artists collectively involved in a wide range of artistic endeavors. Åsa Jungnelius, together with Sara Isaksson, initiated and curated the Jihani Kalapour project which took place in collaboration with Sweden’s National Museum, Tensta Konsthall, and Tensta-Hjulsta Women’s Center. The project examined questions of taste and who has the right to make aesthetic choices.

Katarina: In your work objects appear that are very seductive, often exaggerated variations of odds and ends, merchandise, which in themselves are much sort after objects like make-up, diamonds, nail polish, high-heeled shoes. Things which become even more attractive in your enlarged, polished variations. In several exhibitions you’ve also worked with the theme of shopping, desire and the disappointment that follows; for example, creating an entire exhibition in a shop window and letting the room behind it stand empty like some kind of packaging. It seemed to create a sense of desire without the possibly of satisfaction.

Åsa: In my exhibition Vad fin du är i håret [How nice your hair looks] (Smålands Museum, Sweden’s Museum of Glass, Växjö 2005) I examined commodities. I wanted to draw attention to a number of commodities, lifting them up onto a pedestal, in a fictional shop to make them more visible to discuss what they represent. The fictional shop was an aesthetic piss-take of a department store’s make-up counter, glossy and fat free: a kind of impossible surface. In the exhibition Who is it? (Blås&Knåda, Stockholm 2007) I transformed the gallery into a “boutique” and exhibited the pieces in the gallery’s windows in order to use the most common way in which we come across objects. I am interested in how we confirm or deny our identity and group conformity in the moment we judge objects through a shop window. Window-shopping awakens a sense of attraction, but from a distance. I also wanted to create a spatial effect that captures the sense of emptiness that shopping can leave behind. I personally always want more: an even redder lipstick next time.

At the same time the exhibition and the object demonstrates a somewhat ambivalent attitude to surface and aesthetics. I love shopping and how our identity is created by shaping the surface of things; but what does surface actually mean? Is it what it contains beneath it? Art and our aesthetic preferences act as a kind of shared language; perhaps the only shared language that exits given that it builds on wordless signals which we can’t control unlike spoken language. You see it in everyday contexts so that “the wrong clothes” can shatter the atmosphere amongst a group of people and that an “ugly” item can really upset people.

K: It’s interesting how an object can provoke such strong reactions. I notice myself that it’s often impossible to predict the response. What feels the least provocative can make some people really furious, whilst the “Monster cunt” – the name that was used internally for Akta – annas kommer jag och tar dig! [Watch out! Or I’ll have you!] (Crystal Palace, Stockholm 2008) – was for the most part warmly received. It’s a language you can’t control, but also a language you can’t stand outside of, or be neutral to; you’re completely ensnared by both verbal and non-verbal languages. In words, value judgements and aesthetics.

Å: I see the symbols that I work with and again and again, as well as the materials I chose to work with, as my language for telling stories. Even if I try to scream maybe it sounds beautiful. Spatial interpretation is extremely important when I put an exhibition together. I experience the language of art as something physical; it addresses so many senses, and of course, its tone is experienced in so many different ways.

K: Chains and bonds often crop up in the language of your art as, drawing a boundary between work or more often as components in your works, often in blown glass or glass chains mixed with bonds. It’s simultaneously fragile and brutal. They are stylish but at the same time separated from each other. This creates a distance between the viewer and the object, preventing the impulse to touch the objects. Again, it’s a kind of excitation, creating a desire and simultaneously creating a physical barrier to satisfaction.

Å: To block and limit something like this is a way of creating a distance between the viewer and the work itself. I don’t want the viewer to be able to get too close; I want to reinforce the distant expression that glossy surfaces signal. A chain is a symbol that has two faces: something that grips tightly or holds together. Chains are often used in the context of unity, sometimes in macho culture where a chain is a tool. At the same time, it crops up on handbags and accessories as a decoration. I’m fascinated by the dual nature of chains.

K: You use very glamours aesthetics, but you also seem to want to mess around with the object with silicon or paste; or just let the color or material overflow, like with the cosy candle holder that have just melted away. Is it a desire to destroy what you do? Or are you rejecting the perfection that goes with glass when it’s used as a material? Or du you just think that mess is beautiful? You’ve started letting lipstick melt down, haven’t you? It feels like you’re destroying your own trademark signature. I wonder, do you feel trapped by the expectations to produce just one type of desirable object or are you melting down the role of women?

Å: Glamorous aesthetic objects are great for capturing the attention of viewers and creating a sense of desire. This allows me to pose questions through work which doesn’t initially seem unpleasant because it looks so beautiful. But who said beauty is good? The flow, the goo and the need to soil things is, for me, partly a symbol of the uncontrollable body which doesn’t want to be tamed or cleaned up from the unwanted expressions like desire but also a form of beauty which engulf you. It is a reality for me. Lipstick which starts to melt together into piles of crap is a way of shaking off the expectations which come with different gender roles or any of the roles that we have chosen to take on. It’s also a way to try to describe the conflict that exists in the kind of women’s role I try to take.

K: Your work makes me really think of Simone de Beauvoir’s work on how femininity is a construction: a role which a woman learns to take on, or is forced to play, because of her own and society’s history. It’s always seemed true to me that you aren’t born a woman, you become one. But it’s getting increasingly irritating to think of your life as a false mask, and I wonder whether anything is hidden under it, and if so what.

Å: Yes, that’s where it started: with Beauvoir’s theory that gender is a construction. When Beauvoir’s words became available to me, it was a confirmation of thoughts that I’d had for a long time but had been difficult to formulate. It was a starting point to take up questions that were to do with my own identity and to make up with my own mask. I don’t know what womanhood or femininity is, but I have tried to understand it by trying to capture the symbols that I find problematic. By reworking stereotypes and suffice attributes associated with femininity I began to unravel and try to understand how we project our own notions and expectations of gender onto the surface. It also became about a question of whether it was even necessary to define what is masculine and feminine. Working with the symbols of a cursory femininity is a personal journey for me; I address something that’s very tough, but ultimately reveal my true self, the person beneath the mask.

K: When you work with the physicality of sex, with the female genitals, you describe it first as a silver-colored reflected bowl and later as a deconstructed installation: a monster cunt. What’s going on during the years that pass between the two representations? Because there’s quite a bit difference between lifting up something invisible and putting the female sex side by side with the many, practically neutral, phalluses of culture to wanting to terrify, as you put it, with a meaty, hairy and messy installation comprised of body parts, meat-hooks, chains and tears. At the same time, you save the bowl, a container for something, for an ungainly installation which exists just for itself and has no useful function.

Å: There was a lot of anger behind my sculpture Snippan [The Vaginal Lip], which I chose never to exhibit. Maybe this was because I feared I wouldn’t be taken seriously. That can happen if you shout too loudly. Or a fear of my own gender, if it can be as bad as that. Growing up with a gender that doesn’t have a name leaves its traces and it takes a lot to break out of that. Snippan depicts non-sexualized female genitalia. It’s itself. The lip is the norm, and the surrounding world is reflected in it. Monster Cunt is much more grounded in its own sexuality. It’s the monster that takes what it wants – without any hesitation.

K: Sexuality in your work is an undeniably fetishistic kind of sexuality, celebrated with absurdly high-heeled shoes (in size 36, the perfect little female foot), long false nails, fur-covered openings and piles of bubblegum. A sexuality which is simultaneously past its prime and naive, for want of a better word. It’s all “Venus in Furs”, and Lolitas. I’m thinking of those phalluses that are decorated with crystals and glitter, and riding accessories. For me it evokes a picture of a harem where small girls have castrated a giant and run a mock with the craft box and made candlesticks. It is sexuality processed through the cultural symbols of girlyness at the same time as there exists a darker undertone with chains and bonds. It isn’t a simple sexuality. There isn’t a directly bare meeting of people in some kind of utopian closeness; however, there’s masses of things in the way, masses of roles and attributes through which sexuality takes its form.

Å: There are just so many layers of stuff, bits and pieces, attributes, power positions and fetishes which are all involved; sometimes as bait and sometimes as a barrier for us to reach each other in a sexual meeting where no one is exploiting the other. I love the picture you described of the tiny Lolitas castrating the giant, pottering about, making it as beautiful as possible just for the hellish pleasure of it all. It was by deconstructing the monster cunt that I realized that so much was about sexuality. I would previously never have made the connection, and even denied it if the question had come up.

K: Luce Irigaray talks about the unique female experience of being an object of trade and barter that can talk. The only object you can trade and barter that can talk. Perhaps it’s this position that you’re talking about or talking through. For me high-heeled shoes are, for example, just as womanly as lipstick even though a lipstick has the shape of a phallus. But the object isn’t the representation of weak women, or at least for me it’s more about power rather than subordination, although I’m not able to understand this or formulate why. Your world is in some way a world you want to inhabit. It’s not a world of failure; it’s place where powerful and strong woman can play. I’m thinking about how appealing it is to find solace amongst the make-up counter color charts when life seems tough and depressing, just like Holly Golightly comforts herself in the well-ordered calm of Tiffany’s when nothing else goes right. I think sometimes that airports and department stores are dominated by their make-up counters because they offer a kind of comfort – a grown-up’s toy department with a mass of comforting promises of a new and better self. A freedom to recreate yourself.

Å: The lipstick, and even more so the stilettos, is definitely an expression of power. A way of establishing your own position and using the objects’ attributes in a positive way that you yourself control. There’s a lot of comfort in finding this in the make-up counter, and a historical safety as well. It was the first public place where women were accepted. Make-up is also an important tool that the user needs to paint and construct a chosen identity.

K: Your next step and most recent form of expression has been to create pin-ups of your male co-workers, the glass-blowers, and make portraits of them as men have traditionally depicted women for the pleasure of the male gaze. Is the next step to take on the same gaze that women are seen through? And is it a kind of revenge or a way forward? Or are men going to become just an object for powerful woman so they can experience what it’s like to be a talking product.

Å: It was good to look at my closest co-workers as objects –like goods or products that can talk. They help me depict my objects. Sometimes this turns into a public situation where there are curious visitors around us. The most interesting thing for them is the glass-blowers and their bodies, and not the objects that are actually created. So, in part, my co-workers are objects even in their daily work. I think I was forced to try and see them as my own eye-candy in order to develop, and take things a step further. The series of pictures were shown in the installation In My Imagination (Vida Museum, Öland 2009), which describes a personal political conflict: how should the meat in me be met by the expectant, learned role as a woman. I didn’t want to switch roles/gazes; instead, I wanted us to pass and go through to the other side together.

K: You often work in varying scales. Several of your works are found in a kind of tit-tat-tow store. Is that because you’re getting it to fit with whats sellable or are you fascinated by the scale of things? Your objects are seldom absurdly large; they’re more like large vases or something. What does size mean? You were saying that you want to do some really big pieces now. Is that a dream that can only now be fulfilled or is it a new direction for you now you’ve melted the lipsticks?

Å: Scale is important as it gives a recognizes object a different meaning. The phallus symbol is perhaps the clearest example here. If a phallus is massive, it’s often seen as a great monument. If we shrink the phallus down but still make it bigger than a penis its form is still visible and if we decorate with pink and glitter its meaning will have changed. Of course, scale can also have something to do with sales. A small nail polish or lipstick is like an ad for an oil painting. There’s more than one person who will appreciate it in their home. I also want to make a series of sculptures which are uncomfortably big. Monumental. Where the journey there is part of the sculpture itself. I’ll certainly need a lot of help from machinery to even carry out something like that: diggers, trucks and cranes. I think I’ve wanted to do this for a long time but haven’t got to that point before.
K:A different kind of distance between view and object, so to speak. Not just through the surface or external barriers such as chains and window panes, but the objects themselves become elusive and intangible through their sheer size. It gets harder to get an overview of a massive object and to own it with your gaze because you can’t take in everything. There’s also something vulgar about massive, monumental objects. Almost lacking in taste. I look forward to seeing what you do!