Mira Bergh × Josefin Zachrisson

During the summer of 2022, Bakgården at ArkDes becomes a secluded backdrop to a diverse summer programme. Stockholm-based designers Mira Bergh and Josefin Zachrisson design a public space with private intentions.
If the public space of the city appeals to a broad and normative public, such neutrality often works to expand some parts of the public realm while restricting others. Through the lenses of pleasure and the emotional relationships we forge with the spaces we share, Bergh and Zachrisson’s secluded pleasure garden for Utomhusverket 2022 challenges tendencies to ‘neutral’ public space. Their work makes room for visibility and invisibility, trysts, assignation, and play.

Utomhusverket is ArkDes’s annual summer outdoor installation. Each commission stitches the spaces of the museum to the streets of the city by way of a large-scale outdoor installation, creating a testing ground that makes room for architects and designers to imagine new possibilities for public life. Each iteration seeks to demonstrate the potential of inclusive and design-driven public space, enabling individual and collective action in the heart of the city.

Mira Bergh and Josefin Zachrisson have collaborated since they graduated from Beckmans College of Design in 2019. The Stockholm-based duo works across objects and installations, with a conceptual and experimental approach. By questioning norms and acknowledging values beyond function, they aim to challenge preconceived notions in materials, contexts, and interactions. They are both a part of the art and design collective Swedish Girls.

Swedish Girls comprises Mira Bergh, Matilda Ellow, Julia Jondell, and Josefin Zachrisson. Alongside their individual practices, they have collaborated on and created a collective artistic context since 2019. Together, they describe their work as a ‘conceptualised reality’ and shape it through physical and digital installations.

Bergh and Zachrisson’s installation follows Studio Ossidiana in 2021.