Råsnickeri

Creator: Finn Ahlgren|Art form: Design|Knowledge valorisation : Co-creation|Place: Stockholm,Sweden|Location : Offline|Target group: General public|Domains: Climate Action and Environment|Duration : One-time event
cof
cof

Teaching everyone to make furniture from waste material

Challenge: How to empower citizens to make their own furniture and be satisfied with what they have as alternative to wasteful consumption striving to satisfy infinite desires.

By teaching workshop participants to create wooden furniture from scrap material in only a few hours, Råsnickeri (Raw Carpenting) not only teaches a valuable and practical skill, but also makes the participants question their disempowering consumption habits, aesthetic assumptions tied to the home environment and broader issues of sustainability and desire for the new. The artist Finn Ahlgren has developed a unique way of constructing furniture that is accessible for everyday people without prior experience, but that also require participants to rethink what a beautiful object can look like and place value on the unique, handmade object.

Resources needed

Waste materials, saw, drill, nails.

Purpose of artistic intervention

The artistic intervention here functions as a form of anti-aesthetics where the artist demonstrates to the participants that they can make objects without the demands of “professional” aesthetic requirements and shows a perspective where the worn out and used also has its own sense of beauty. The artist then guides the participants through a creative process grounded in alternative ideals of beauty and function.