A Phantom Collection Inspired Fiction

Laercio Redondo creates a fiction, imagining a life through a collection of fragile design objects.

From my house, I see a deserted street; already it’s Autumn again. The pandemic has limited my life to what I see from this window.

Isolation creates a kind of fog that gets denser with the strange way that time moves forward now. The images I recall don’t always bring back anything of great importance; trivialities mingle with scenes that were decisive.

It was on one of those afternoons that I began to understand why my first visit to Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum, when I was five, was such a defining moment: there, I experienced a sensation of eternity in the fragility of the glass cases.

Those objects, those phantoms of other people, other times, another world, held something that could no longer be revealed. How could they possibly have survived mens’ violent moods and caprices for so many centuries?

On that afternoon, the museum revealed to me the plot of a fiction built up so that the world would make sense. I think it was precisely there that something clicked inside me, something that would later make me a collector.

Today I look at these objects, this vast collection of vases and ceramics from such different times; I think they are witness – partial, maybe, but nonetheless, comprehensive – of what I have lived through. Of course, the history they carry is not mine alone, they were created with their own singular intentions and purposes, but the gestures and intentions of whoever made them – just like my gaze – have been embedded in their forms.

I move through that strange smother of memory in which the objects are almost a living presence around me. I try to return to the point where it all began, as if I could revisit my gaze of other times to learn how it was that I perceived the world then, and how everything has changed to the point where I find myself now.

My life has not been extraordinary, but it was somewhat different from the lives of most of the people around me. I am the only son of a single mother. We lived abroad for years, but returned to Sweden while I was still little so that I could continue with school.

In Stockholm, we moved to a building put up in Södermalm in 1933, where I live to this day. It was largely from there that I witnessed the reforms that made their mark on Sweden in the twentieth century: so many new theories about health, consumption and wellbeing, which were accepted by the scientific community and, eventually and gradually, were taken up by society.

Because Sweden remained neutral, we got through the world wars relatively unscathed. With the end of the conflicts, in 1918 and 1945, we experienced a time of relative continuity here. Our windows, as it were, were not shattered as happened elsewhere in Europe.

Sweden took advantage of that circumstance to try something new: the Folkhemmet, a social welfare State equidistant from capitalism and socialism. It invested in a daring idea of the social-democrat movement: we had to be a true community where everyone contributed and looked after one another.

We continued attentive to and interested in the technical and aesthetic innovations that were arriving from the continent, especially from Germany, where a new culture of form seemed to be growing.

Here I am thinking of the Deutsche Werkbund. Under the banner of “typification” and with a view to production in series, it aimed to bring greater uniformity of form in furniture, glass and porcelain. Then there was the Bauhaus too, which – in an increasingly industrialised society – intended to elevate architects, craftspeople and designers to the status of true artists.

As from a stone thrown into a pool, these thoughts spread outwards in a succession of ripples, which were interpreted by the Swedish Society of Industrial Design (Svensk Slöjdförening, SSF), led by Gregor Paulsson.

In 1919 a book he published introduced a truly remarkable change here: Vackrare vardagsvara proposed that we strive for quality in things for everyday use, with an emphasis on their function as central. He taught us to see purity and frugality of materials as aesthetic properties inherent to manufactured objects that would form part of our lives.

The function of Art itself should be altered: “Artists for Industry”, “Museums for the General Public” were the new rallying cries drawn from a production programme whose central goal was to build people’s aesthetic appreciation.

Paulsson envisaged a direct equivalence between the forms of objects and of society. If people could see “good form in society’s institutions”, he wrote, “then their taste would certainly improve significantly”. The democratisation of form would itself be the form of democracy.

And, without our noticing, that process started to affect everyone on unprecedented levels – socially, psychologically, financially and also materially – starting with the interiors of our homes.

In my own home, I saw how hygiene became an aesthetic ideal, a metaphor for social organisation and order.

Now the rest of the world had to be shown how far our domestic revolution extended. After the 1925 International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts in Paris, which in retrospect gave birth to the celebrated Swedish Grace style, it was the 1930 Stockholm Exhibition that, in fact, confirmed the importance of Swedish Functionalism.

With that exhibition, it was as if we were telling visitors “We want to be like everyone else and we are ready to renounce all our old national traditions so as to embrace modernity – and with it, all its contradictions”.

My mother was one of those visitors in 1930 and – as here we are risking a return to the past – I am going to allow myself to say that I remember perfectly when, some time later, she told me what she had found there. She had been intrigued by a section devoted to Svea Rike, organised by Herman Lundborg from the State Institute of Racial Biology, which put forward the view that the Swedish were racially superior to most other peoples. I remember how her words unsettled me, but it was only years later that I understood why.

Today it is easier to perceive that kind of paradox. For better or for worse, the large glass cases of modernity – its exhibitions – encouraged various forms of nationalism and prejudice. I don’t remember my mother contesting that outlook. I think she even took it naturally, in the colonialist spirit of a large part of society. “National Expression” was almost a kind of prerequisite for the new internationalism that was intended there.

Sweden actually introduced the utopia of a collective political subject – and nowhere else in the world was the term “public” so intimately associated with “the highest standards of quality”.

The institutions that de-commodified and universalised society incorporated the individual into a large collectivity: libraries, swimming pools and public schools were built and offered to everyone as their right as citizens and not just as customers or consumers.

The same had to be true of everyday objects: they must be of quality, functional and accessible, so that everyone would be able and willing to buy them. The idea was, by spreading a popular lifestyle (en folkhemsk livsstil), to create a private sphere in the image of the public sphere, with no visible markers of social class.

This, however, was the dream of the country’s cultural elite. Their consensus on taste and education was first legitimated by the Svensk Slöjdförening (Swedish Society of Industrial Design) and then spread to the rest of society through committees, cooperatives, courses and interior design study circles.

And there lay the whole contradiction: the new aesthetic culture of beautiful democratic form was itself normative and had been imposed unilaterally. People ought to welcome the spread of elite taste with gratitude – and it is intriguing to think what that same elite thought of popular culture.

I say “us” a lot – and I often see myself as part of that “collectivity” – but the truth is that my very existence, together with my male partner, was a secret for decades.

We ourselves were at odds with the system, living in that old 1933 building, we made a home that was nothing like the normative model of the time. It was there, in the intimacy of our space, that we selected and amassed our collection – which is all that remains of the affection we shared.

Today, when I think about the SSF’s position, its exhibitions all over the country and also the publication of Paulsson’s Vackrare vardagsvara, I have to ask myself: If that progress really happened, where did it take us as a society?

Equating ethics and aesthetics, Ellen Key said that “a beautiful house should produce happy people”. But then, would an ugly house produce unhappy or even immoral people? And, after all, who is to decide what is ugly? Or bad? Or wrong?

And so it is, from my isolation in these uncertain times, that I understand why the news of the fire in Rio de Janeiro’s National Museum three years ago affected me so strongly: I reencountered my own fragility in that false promise of eternity.

Some objects do not survive mens’ violent moods and caprices after all – and that was how, in the end, the childhood fiction constructed to make sense of the world came undone.

Something analogous happened with the Folkhemmet. As with many other ideologies, it too proved incompatible with the development of the society it engendered. In the 1990s, it was clearly eroding. Nonetheless, instead of trying to resolve its contradictions, we simply relegated those social ideas to the memory of generations past.

That is how I see my collection: the memory of a collectivity-building project – today apparently lost and gone. These objects are like fossils of that modernity – still so close, but already so far away.

But that’s not all. Here, there are more recent objects, produced in other parts of the world, reworked, not uncommonly using cheaper labour and distributed by large companies. At first, it all seems quite familiar, but looked at more carefully, they are pieces that, although still referring in form to the modern project, nonetheless have abandoned its underlying ideology, the distinctive production of a collective common good.

These fetishes of modern form, I keep them too and even have some frank fellow feeling for them, I treat them with the same care I lavish on the others, their first cousins or, who knows, their ancestors.

When they ask me why I live my life among objects, I am content to say that, as I am neither artist nor creator, I made this collection the portrait of my time and of the crooked dreams that inspired it, but in the end what I am really trying to understand is what was done with us.

If the objects could talk, they would surely tell us another story.

This text was originally written for The Phantom Collection exhibition by Birger Lipinski and Laercio Redondo at Södertälje konsthall in 2021.

Text editor: Daniel Jablonski