to participate in the to-day workshop “You
can do it!” The newly minted group pre-
pared tons of Play-Doh for area residents
to sculpt. The results, scores of primitive
clay people and animals, seemed to demon-
strate the universality of handcraft and
the potential of figuration to bridge lan-
guage barriers.
“You can do it!” set a precedent for
future collaborative work. “We don’t have
a political agenda—we do what we think
is interesting or fun right now,” Jungnelius
says. Even so, one can read some deeper
meaning into wwiAFM installations. So
much so that the group’s mission statement
promises projects that expand aesthetic
norms and protest social conventions.
To Jungnelius,
Happy Campers
, an in-
stallation conceived for New York’s Inter-
national Contemporary Furniture Fair
in 2006, exemplifies
w w i a f m ’s
aesthetic
ambitions. The partners gave birth to a
giant troll, comprising Styrofoam-filled
burlap sprouting disheveled red hair,
nail polish-painted digits and loosely knit
undergarments, hunched over in a corner
of Skylight Studios as if she had just con-
sumed a supermarket aisle of portable
kegs. “We were invited to show Swedish
style, and every Swedish person has a troll
in his or her house but doesn’t talk about
it. Our troll is more Swedish, more demo-
cratic, than some beautiful piece of wood
furniture,” Jungnelius says.
Asked to identify a favorite project that
defies social conventions, Fjellman points
to a 2005 performance given at the Gothen-
burg art gallery Roda Sten. There,
w w i a f m
screened its own, fully clothed version of
Kylie Minogue’s music video
Slow.
Shots
of the members practicing their moves next
to neglected molds and seeping gathers left
untended are interspersed among the group
choreography. “We showed in a very gentle
way how we all work or think alone, and
then we come together and dance,” Fjell-
man says.
Dancing hardly accounts for all the ac-
tivities.
w w i a f m
has converged on a paint-
ball field, summer cabins and, recently, the
kitchen that Jungnelius shares with her
boyfriend, fellow member Ludvig Lofgren,
in Kosta, Sweden, where the Kosta Boda
glassworks now employs the couple. That
effort,
Mansamala201,
produced a marble-
ized canvas hung at the Stockholm venue
Crystal Palace in January 2008. The act
of collaborative making is just as important
as its result, underscoring the importance
of community to these artist-designer-what-
evers—and to craft.*
Gimme More!
weworkinafragilematerial.com
Above:
Asajungnelius’s size 3
6
Stiletto Heel Shoes,
2005,
of kiln-cast glass, and
her rabbit fur covered
Amphora
, 2005, subvert
motifs of femininity.
Left:
Jakob Robertsson’s
work
Let Him Live,
2005, appears to be an
industrial object imper-
fectly rendered in clay.
apr/maj'09 american craft 035
