Studio Ossidiana: Utomhusverket 2021

During the summer of 2021 ArkDes is a place to discover new ways of being together. Studio Ossidiana’s experimental public space invites everyone to make it their own and celebrate public life. Incorporating the architecture studio’s unique approach to the hand-built craft of concrete and terrazzo casting, the project imagines new forms of public assembly that highlights the symbolic action of shared experiences—with others, with nature, and with our surroundings.

Conceived as an “archipelago” of activities and encounters between people, plants, birds and minerals, Utomhusverket 2021 celebrates the potential of public space. A planted pond offers relief from the summer heat for both birds and people. Tall perches, designed for migratory birds, cast shadows across a ground of shells, loam, and gravels. The ground elements combine to create new soils that can be shaped by digging, walking, lying, playing, and more. A sundial marks the passing of time, while radiating the captured heat of the sun. An enclosed garden offers shade, shelter and berries to birdlife. Handcrafted terrazzo ‘rocks’ afford opportunities for play, display, and gathering.

For Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti (Studio Ossidiana), the project points towards “the ways in which public space can be an arena for action—a place to transform, cultivate, and care for.” Studio Ossidiana understands human and non-human life as more than mere users. “We are all explorers, gardeners, lovers, collectors, cartographers, and more.”

Utomhusverket 2021 is the most recent in an ongoing series of outdoor projects at ArkDes that experiment with the public spaces of Skeppsholmen—a cultural island in the heart of the Swedish capital. The installation is accessible seven days a week and 24 hours a day throughout the long Swedish summer.

The Making of Utomhusverket 2021
On June 7, 2021 at 6pm CET a documentary film will premiere on e-flux Video & Film. Featuring Studio Ossidiana and the craftspeople who have contributed to the making of the project, the film details the design intentions, construction, and use of this prototypical public space in the heart of the Swedish capital.

Studio Ossidiana
Studio Ossidiana is an architecture, design, and research practice based in The Netherlands, founded in 2015. Led by Alessandra Covini and Giovanni Bellotti, the studio works to blur the boundary between architecture, design, art, landscape, and urban strategies. Playfulness, tactility, and inclusivity thread their projects: stories are told and objects are brought to life through materials and spaces that call for action, discovery, and wonder.

Utomhusverket
Utomhusverket is ArkDes’s annual summer outdoor installation. Each commission seeks to stitch the spaces of the museum to the streets of the city by way of a large-scale project, 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. During 2018 and 2019, Dansbana! created a public dancefloor outside the museum. In 2020, the Australian artist Linda Tegg created Infield, transforming the space outside the museum in to a living meadow.

Studio Ossidiana: Alessandra Covini, Giovanni Bellotti
Curator: James Taylor-Foster
Producer: Johanna Fogel
Graphic Identity: EWO (Emil Engel Andersson, William J Andersson, Oskar Laurin)
Build Coordinator: Johan von Geijer
Exhibition Coordinator: Elisabet Norin
Installation: Nord Skateparks (Sweden), Tomaello (The Netherlands)

Director of ArkDes: Kieran Long