“I love Swedish Girls,” quotes a T-shirt with a fiery red heart and black block letters. A manifesto statement, potentially controversial, so simple in its directness. Let us start here to describe the artistic duo Swedish Girls, a name that encapsulates not so much their individual works as their approach to creating: simple, true, and above all, shaped on each other. Because, as they themselves tell me, “the reaction to our name says more about others than it does about us.”
But let’s start from the beginning. Mira and Josefin meet ten years ago in Stockholm. First days of university, same class. No Swedish Girls yet, not even the idea of becoming a duo. Just a collaboration that starts almost immediately and, over time, takes more and more shape. First small projects, then the first piece made together during bachelor’s: a metal structure designed for a club context. It is still there, after all, the beginning of everything. “We realized right away that we worked very well together. We had the same aesthetic language, but also a very fast dynamic in confrontation.” That’s something that comes back often when talking to them: speed. Not as productivity, but as alignment. The idea of being able to contradict each other all the time without slowing down the process, of having enough confidence to let conflict in as well. And that is perhaps also why their visual language came so early. Today, their work is immediately recognizable: metallic structures, repeated lines, forms that seem more to draw the void than to really occupy space, but nothing in their narrative seems to have arisen from an overly theoretical construction.
The name, too, actually comes almost by accident. During their first exhibition in Milan they hear someone refer to them as “the Swedish girls.” A somewhat reductive, superficial definition. Initially they don’t like it either. But then it stays there. “It was already the way people called us. At some point we thought, okay, then let’s use it.” And indeed Swedish Girls works precisely because it remains ambiguous. It may seem ironic, it may seem provocative, it may seem like a critique of stereotypes about Scandinavian design or an exaggeration of them. In fact it holds all these things together simultaneously, and is open to the interpretation – opinion – judgment – of the other. Irony, in their work, never serves to distance, rather to destabilize the rules of the game a bit, to embrace the other, the dialogue, the possible. “Many projects are born from a joke. From something said almost in jest.”
It also happened with Swedish Girls OnlyFans, a project that initially started as a play on words and then became a real work: a multidimensional art experience entirely dedicated to fans and their expression. But it is interesting how they talk about these insights: without ever really separating lightness and research, as if the point was really to let the two coexist.
Even the metal, which has become a central part of their practice today, did not stem from an identity choice. “We never decided to be artists working with metal. “Simply, it was the right material for that first project. It had to be in a club, so it had to resist, be easy to clean, function within a space that was constantly crossed by bodies, lights, movement. From there then came the workshops, the time spent in workshops, the familiarity with the material. Yet their work never returns that feeling of coldness often associated with metal in contemporary design. On the contrary, their structures always seem to want to create a physical relationship with those who encounter them. “We were thinking a lot about the rhythm of space. The light coming through the forms. More than designing the object, we were designing the air around it, the air that inhabits any environment.” This is probably what makes their work so different from a certain metallic minimalism that is very present today: the idea of the perfect, aseptic, distant surface gives way here to something that always maintains a tactile and relational dimension: to be touched, passed through, used.
The relationship with the body, in fact, is central. Not only because many of their installations exist in public space, but because all of their work seems to be built around the idea that an object only really begins to live at the moment it loses control. When it is used, badly, well, neither, when in short it LIVES. Interesting in this context is the question about belonging and the ‘finiteness’ of their work: when, I ask them, does a piece stop being yours? When is it finished, ready to become of the world?
Exemplary of this is what happened, they tell me, looking at the children. At A Public Space with Private Intentions, an extension of Utomhusverket 2022, a large outdoor installation first presented at ArkDes, the Swedish Center for Architecture and Design, in 2022. There, the public and children interacted with their installations, running, climbing, turning the structures into tools, games, hiding places. “That’s the most interesting part. When you realize that the work doesn’t belong to you anymore.” This is also why they continue to call themselves an artist duo rather than a design duo. Their practice constantly moves between design, art, performance, installation, video, with no particular interest in setting a clear boundary. “People always want to put you in a specific category. But for us, the point is really about staying open.”
In recent years Milan has been an important part of this process. First the exhibitions during Design Week, then Alcova, then the actual move after Covid. They were supposed to stay three months, they became three years. An intense experience, at times complicated, but also fundamental in the way it broadened their creative context. In Milan, they recount, the boundary between design, fashion, music and art seemed much more fluid, more spontaneous. “We found a very hybrid scene. People were collaborating naturally, without all those rigid divisions.”
And it is exactly this hybrid dimension that they want to continue to build. Not so much moving from one medium to another, but letting each project change shape depending on the space, the people involved, the context. Now they are starting to think more and more about performance. About how to get physically inside their works, about what happens when they themselves activate the space they’ve constructed. “It’s something that scares us a lot. And that’s probably also why we’re interested in it.” Meanwhile, they keep moving between installations, takeovers, exhibitions and collaborations. Recently they occupied a bar during Milan Design Week, transforming it into a completely Swedish Girls environment, among furniture systems, gossip magazines and parties. Then Venice, for the Biennale, with a public installation for a collateral project supported by Bottega Veneta.
All very different, and all, somehow, consistent. Perhaps because the point lies, yes, in their creations, but also in the kind of space they manage to create around things, their own and others’. And when, at the conclusion of our conversation, I ask them about the future, the desire that really comes back is one: to finally create a permanent public work. A space that remains, that really becomes of others, that continues to be used, traversed, transformed, without them.
[đź“· Courtesy of Swedish Girls]
