Post Time: 2018 12 08
Project by: Swedish Designer
Project Name:NM & EN NY SAMLING
Place: Stockholm , Sweden
Photographer: PIA ULIN
Publications: Yatzer 2018 12 08
After five years of extensive renovation and modernization, National museum ,
Stockholm’s National Museum of Fine Arts, finally re-opened on October 13,
2018, offering visitors an enhanced experience underpinned by its mission to
make art and design as accessible as possible. The same vision has been the
driving force behind the museum’s new 300 seat restaurant and café which
has taken over three impressive ground floor galleries previously closed to the
public.
Conceived as an artistic project, the project gave a collective of designers the
opportunity to work together to explore materials and methods, and discover
old and new producers, in order to provide visitors with insights into the
design process. The result of this collaborative process, which was helmed by
Swedish designers Matti Klenell, TAF Studio, Carina Seth Andersson and Stina
Löfgren , is NM & - En Ny Samling, a contemporary collection of furniture, light
fittings, tableware and other decorative objects that celebrate the unfinished
and uncertain in a House already filled with artistic masterpieces.
stronger. The collection’s name, NM& - En Ny Samling, which means “a new
collection”, succinctly sums up the project’s ambitious nature but also
references the Nationalmuseum’s enormous collection of paintings,
sculptures, drawings and prints ranging from the Renaissance to the
beginning of the 20th century and its impressive collection of applied arts and
design that spans an even longer long period. In Swedish, ‘sampling’ also
means gathering which not only alludes to the restaurant’s social aspect but
also aptly describes the process of creating the NM& collection which involved
32 designers and 21 manufacturers from all over the Nordic countries.
This is not the first time that Matti Klenell, TAF Studio, Carina Seth
Andersson and Stina Löfgren have collaborated. During 2012–2014, the
Swedish designers worked together with Taiwanese artisans to create a series
of contemporary objects made with ancient lacquer techniques under the
auspices of the National Taiwan Craft and Research Institute. Titled “A New
Layer”, the project went on to foster more international collaborations, the
latest of which were unveiled last year under the name & A New Layer II:
Crafting Identities / Design Stories from Taiwan
Similarly to their previous collaboration, the concept of place and origin was at
the center of the team’s assignment to design the Nationalmuseum’s
restaurant and café, in this case as an assertion of the museum’s “national”
character and its mission to monitor and collect design and applied arts from
Sweden and the Nordic region. But more broadly, for a designer, the
importance of place is manifested oftentimes as a requirement, inspiration,
starting point or goal. In a globalized design scene where uniformity is the
rule, local can mean unique and the manufacturing location can give
distinctive character. Materials such as wood, metal, ceramics and glass are
used around the world to make similar artifacts but it is place and tradition
that set them apart and give them a distinctive soul.
At the same time, as the design team & 39;s collective journeys in
Taiwan demonstrated, cross-cultural exchanges can be a force for innovation
and renewal. With this framework in mind, the design team travelled together
across the Nordic countries, exploring local manufacturing both for research
and inspiration. From small scale workshops in Stockholm’s Old Town, to a
weaving mill in the Värmland woods in central Sweden, all the way to a glass
factory in Häme, Finland, the familiarity of the places they visited was both a
blessing and a challenge. As the team confesses, “it is for sure much more
difficult to work with your own legacy than to interpret someone else’s”.
What came out of their exploratory travels was a collection of more than 80
entirely new designed objects - each one given an archive code starting with
NM & 001 similar to a museum inventory number - grounded in a shared
palette of muted colors, eclectic materials and unpretentious
craftsmanship. Utterly contemporary and boldly idiosyncratic, they
nevertheless evocatively embody the region’s Nordic heritage. As the team
explains, ”each product in the NM &
collection has a sometimes messy but
always well documented pedigree around its origins, and just as we hoped
somewhere at the beginning of our journey, the overall final picture of a place,
our place right here, right now, is just as motley and unpredictable as we
hoped it would be”.