At the Röhsska Museum of Design in Gothenburg, Sweden, visitors can explore multiple stations highlighting the intersection of craft, design, and speculative futures. One station features the Atmospheres of Craft video series, while another presents Brave New World, a speculative exhibition imagining a utopian craft future.
New this year is Brave New World Sketches, a section showcasing creative projects by ambassadors from four ecosystems, each imagining how their work might evolve in a utopian context. A second video station features self-taped presentations where the ambassadors explain their projects, alongside a mini-documentary on the theme of progress, built from interviews and materials gathered after last year’s symposium in Dals Långed, Sweden.
Atmospheres of Craft
Atmospheres of Craft is the first part of a journey exploring where craft stands today and how it might evolve in the future.
We started with a simple but meaningful question: what makes a place so unique that it becomes the perfect ground for craft to grow and take shape? What gives a place its identity?
Is it the nature that surrounds it, the people who inhabit it and the relationships that are created, the history that has passed through it, the traditions, the voice of its poets, its ability to reinvent and transform itself?
No matter how hard you try to grasp the essence of a place, there is always something unspeakable and essential that escapes any definition.
We tried to deal with the ineffable during our explorations of four places in Europe where craft has given life to something unique: Dals Långed, Venice, Bornholm, and the territory of Bassano del Grappa.
Atmospheres cannot be captured in a glass case: they float in the air. You must be in the right mood, ready to sense them as in a house of mirrors, grabbing occasional glimpses by the luck of the draw, in serendipitous encounters with people and places.
The result is a kind of travel log, notes collected spontaneously and tentatively assembled to share our experience with the researchers in the project and the craft communities they will encounter.
A Brave New World
The research initiated with Atmosphere of Craft led us to reflect on how profoundly different—and almost alternative—the worldview, values, and desires of those who practice artistic craftsmanship are, compared to those that underpin the current, and increasingly unsustainable, model of mass consumption and production.
It’s a kind of utopia, that of craftsmanship, which has led us to wonder: what would the world look like if our present were built on artisanal foundations rather than being the full, and now unsustainable, expression of industrial civilization?
With Brave New World, our second project, we aimed to explore a possible answer to this question by imagining a divergent story, a world where the relationship with resources, modes of production, trade, and consumption are radically different because they are more similar to those of artisanal production. What would that world be like, and how would a production system different from capitalism as we know it impact the environment, politics, the educational system, urban planning, and lifestyle?
We have engaged in a speculative dialogue with researchers in economic history, management, and organization from the partner universities of the Hephaestus project, who have become a fundamental part of our creative process, to bring this first “release” of a new world to life. We display here a selection of images exploring an artificial creativity with its blurred perspectives that reshape reality and its aberrations.
Brave New World Sketches
After getting feedback about our first release and interviewing craft makers about their reactions, we asked the artisans to be part of this new edition by imagining what they would like to contribute to a world without mass production: a sketch for an object they would like to create, a plan for better use and reuse of materials, ideas on how work could be organized, personal notes and reactions to the theme.
Brave New World Sketches, our third project, is a sequel to A Brave New World, our speculative utopia about how the world would look if our present were built on artisanal foundations rather than being the full, and now unsustainable, expression of industrial civilization.
We are very grateful to all the artisans who chose to engage and imagine with us. Their perspective, as individuals who work with material and confront the themes we have explored on a daily basis, offers an invaluable viewpoint that lends both concreteness and hope to our utopia.
Just on the side of these sketches you will find a screen displaying “Brave New Talks: Progress” a short documentary that explores the idea of progress through the values of craft, incorporating self tapes made by the craft makers to explain their idea and interviews we have conducted after the premiere of the first release of Brave New World.