Inspu is a group of students currently studying Architecture and Industrial Design at Lund University in Sweden. They approached the Nordic Art Agency with a project based upon the exploration of sustainable design within art. We felt as though this would be a great opportunity to collaborate as repurposing of materials in the arts and creative spaces was a shared interest and so that became the basis of the collaboration and concept Repurposing Material For Art.

To kick off the project we held three immersive Art Talks at the Nordic Art Agency to support and inspire the Inspu group. The first was given by John Atherton a Scottish Screen print artist who has a great deal of experience working with repurposed materials during his time at the Royal College of Art in London.

Dahl Agenteur joined us for the second Art Talk and they brought in samples and swatches of materials and fabrics which form part of their interior design and textile company based in Stockholm. They use offcuts to form new products and work with Swedish designers who work with sustainability in design, which gave the students a great insight into how business approaches green methods of practice.

Our final Art Talk was with Johan Berhin the Founder and Designer at Green Furniture Concept, who was an early pioneer of sustainable functional furniture design. The Green Furniture Awards begun in 2011 in Sweden and was one of the first companies to engage with young designers and bring value to their sustainable and functional designs.

Incorporating the repurposing of materials in design was a broad brief and the starting point for the Inspu students which would culminate in an exhibition of their final designs held at the Nordic Art Agency.

I had the chance to sit down with four of the students; Emilia Poole, August Mårtensson, Daniel Vu Nguyen and Sofia Rakhmanov to hear their thoughts on how the project and their designs evolved.

Juliet: Emilia, as the Inspu leader and coordinator how has the project developed and emerged since our initial discussions and concept talks?

Emilia: The idea was not at all to work with art in the beginning. The entire background of the project began with architecture and design being interdisciplinary. We had a clear idea that we want to create an exhibition. We want to involve creative concepts where value is placed on of repurposing materials obviously for the environmental factor but from a practical perspective as well.

Juliet: How has the project been run and developed?

Emilia: We ended up using a workshop at Lund University which has been really super. We had a weekly time slot where everybody could show up and create, hang out together and share ideas. However, I think most groups have been working independently as well. We are 17 students, some divided into different groups and others worked independently. So many different projects evolved in different directions….

Juliet: What was your chosen design project Emilia and how has your idea evolved?

Emilia: My project was obviously also coordinating everybody but as a group member I wanted to encourage visitors to the exhibit to explore the material properties of beeswax and beeswax cloth. I was really interested in the transformative concept of clothing or fabric and my partner from Inspu, Benjamin happens to know a lot about beeswax cloth and the properties of this material.

If you fold or shape beeswax cloth it somehow holds that shape essentially on its own. Yet, unlike paper for example or unlike like other just regular untreated cloth you can completely reset the material properties simply by adding heat. So, you can crumple it up, step on it and bounced on it. Then if you add heat, it can become 100 % straight again. We were really interested in exploring that concept, especially in terms of consumerism and consumption. Today people buy and consume so many products and approximately 99% of the items we buy today end up in landfill.  So by using a material that has properties which can be transformed and reused simply has value in terms of design, repurposing and sustainability.

We decided to bring it down a level and landed on a more interactive display for the exhibition. We wanted to present the properties of beeswax and then enable visitors to feel, touch and create their own ideas and sketches of products. So our design project has evolved into more of an understanding of how we need to rethink about material and how people actually interact with it.

Juliet: August, you are a third year architecture students, how did you approach the project?

August: It started as a material study with a focus on pure materials, but soon it became more of a social project. I worked with Anna Hulteberg and developed an artwork using recycled paper packaging. 

It started with actually me cycling with my paper packaging recycling to a nearby recycling station here in Sweden. It was very windy and I dropped my paper packaging and it blew out over the streets. I just looked at it all and was very annoyed but also realised that that was a lot of material. It is a social thing in Sweden to recycle, it's almost shameful if you don't recycle, which I think it's such a great thing. So Anna and I started collecting one month's worth of paper packaging and we decided to recycle that by turning piece of paper into a pulp.

We wanted to highlight consumption because of the sheer mass of it all. We didn’t realise how much paper we collected after a single month. Our design is more of a 2 dimensional aesthetic art piece and it doesn’t have a practical functional aspect to it. We were very interested in the remnants of the paper packaging, so we started by documenting all the paper packaging and then we wanted it to be still visible in the piece so you can see printed names and code on the final piece.

We gave the artwork a human name, Mika, as we wanted the human consumer quality to be felt in the finished piece.

Juliet: I think we are quite rare in Sweden, that psychological commitment that we have to recycling.

Coming from London I firstly think the statement ‘biking with your recycling’ is not something that most students in London would do. I wish it was the case, however I don't think that it is so deeply ingrained in their conscious mindset in quite the same way or a priority. I think that if you have that discipline to bike to the recycling is impressive to begin with. Initially, we talked about was how art or all visible objects can benefit from reusable repurpose materials and I think Mika is a very well executed example of this.

Juliet: Daniel, you are second year student studying Industrial Design at Lund. How did you approach the project with more of a designer’s mindset?

Daniel: I actually worked with a partner who is also a second year Industrial Design student Mira so together we approached the project concept.

The second-hand culture in Sweden is quite a big thing. We wanted to explore the concept that there are a lot of memories between objects that have been left behind in stores for somebody else to acquire and I found this concept interesting. There is often damage and usage marks found on an object which can tell a story or history about the piece. 

So, we began collecting a lot of old sporting equipment which as materials are great.  Especially we found a selection of old skis which were made of wood. Not only do trees takes a long time to grow, but the skis looked really old so they had probably been around 80 years. We assumed we could use these as repurposed materials and still keep the memories within the object and then design a piece out of it.

We decided to go in the direction of furniture piece so it would have a function. We designed a dining room setting with lighting features, chairs and a table. I think a lot of young people nowadays don’t think of sustainability and sometimes it seems like they are blinded by the trends. But I believe that deep down a lot of people feel they want to buy and acquire something that they would like to keep for life and something with some kind of authentic history.

Juliet: Sophia you are from Russia, so maybe you have a different kind of cultural reference to sustainability. You're a Master student so you are a slightly further in your architecture education. How did you approach the project?

Sophia: I decided to look at sustainability as a theme and as the war is going on in Ukraine it is currently causing a lot of emissions which impacts the whole world, that seemed my starting point. When you have bad politics all your individual achievements and things you can create can be cancelled out very easily. So, I decided to use my past drawings and sketches and the drawings of my group mates, who I asked them to donate them to me, as the beginning. The idea was to make art from art.

I created a collage of drawings and covered them in current news headlines to emphasize how easily our artworks and creativity can just disappear in all these large-scale political events which makes us think that we can't do anything or have any impact.  So, it’s repurposing artwork with repurposing newspapers to create a new visual statement.

Juliet:  Well thank you Sophia, August, Daniel and Emilia for sharing all your design concepts and projects with me.  The exhibition ‘Repurposing for Art’ opened on May 12th and will be exhibited on the 1st floor at our installation space in Hansa until July 7th. All of the designs by Inspu can be viewed below in the exhibition digital catalogue.

Interview by Juliet Rees Nilsson & Inspu