INTERIOR WORK: OUR SPACE BE YOND THE OFFICE BY HELENA MAT TSSON Since the beginning of the 2000s, Uglycute have produced a number of interiors, furniture, exhibitions, trade fairs and other types of environments. Most of their works have received much attention from the media, as in more professional contexts, and been discussed and analysed in catalogues and journals. But there is one work – and yes, I would like to call it a work – that has not been subjected to public scrutiny in the same way. I am thinking about their work space in Stockholm, which Uglycute, on their homepage, label “Our Space”. There is an ambiguity in the term “Our Space” which appeals to me, and which I believe describes this space very well. The term refers to a material and concrete space with walls, ceiling and floor, and at the same time it is about an immaterial and virtual space, filled by thoughts yet to be developed into ideas, and of materials yet to receive their shape. “Our Space” is both the soul and the factory – the spirit and the matter. Here, a possible future is produced at the very moment a plank is sawn off and the fan is switched on. When Virginia Woolf wrote of the imperative of having “a room of one’s own” in order to have a life of one’s own, she produced the room through her writing – through her text. In a similar way, the actual place on Kvarngatan makes possible the creation of a multitude of “rooms of one’s own” through the physical production which this space provides room for. There are surely many rooms that function in a similar way, perhaps even all rooms, if we only understand how to use them. Rooms are produced by our imagination and our actions and if we choose to view them as multi-functional, new worlds open up.
It is at 14 Kvarngatan that Uglycute have their workshop, or their office, if you wish. A basement space, approximately 380 square metres in size, it comprises a horizontal room – low, long and wide (a Freie Universität both in shape and in content) – which has been divided into smaller spatialities and functional sections, sometimes using material elements – such as draperies, screens and walls – and sometimes with the help of objects and furniture, including tables, stools and pyramids. Rooms are created by physical demarcations or by the objects’ intensities, which create their own environments. It is a poetic landscape of grey wool-felt rugs, glazed plywood fragments, suspended pyramids or old branches fastened in ski straps (a clothes hanger) – an openplan office. At the back of this (work) environment are the worktables, arranged with their short sides against one another. Arm-to-arm, the workers (Jonas, Fredrik and Markus, when I visit in 2011) sit at their computers, all facing the same way, towards the sofa, the coffee table and the kiosk. Light streams in through small basement windows and through the skylight, it pours into the space like the sun filters through the foliage in a dense wood. Clearings are created, as well as open fields, caves and groves, paths and resting places. From Uglycute’s workstation one can either move along a darker path or a somewhat lighter room section lit from above by natural light (the conference room) to another workstation populated by the graphic designer team Research and Development. If you turn sharp right here, another sequence of rooms opens up towards the entrance. Dining areas, resting place and an open square – a kitchen, auditorium, lecture hall, exhibition space and a stage – together they form a large open place. There is another room which is sometimes integrated into the place and sometimes completely hidden behind the closed wall: the workshop.