“Festive Customs” and “Everyday Beauty”

Arts, 2018

In the second half of the 19th century, a wave of modernization, industrialization and urbanization swept the Nordic countries, catapulting what had until then been lagging and primarily rural countries into modernity. These major upheavals, however, also plunged the Nordic countries into a profound social and cultural crisis resulting from their consciousness of their own backwardness visa -vis the countries on the European continent, as well as the recognition that a nostalgic nationalism recalling a mythical past had become obsolete in the industrial age. In response to this crisis, a life reform movement emerged that was based on Arts and Crafts movements as well as various artistic and literary reform movements and—equally absorbing rural traditions and progressive social ideas—tried to establish a new national everyday culture. In this article, the two key terms coined by Ellen Key, " Festive Customs " (" festvanor ") and " Everyday Beauty " (" vardagsskönhet ")—the programmatic core of the Nordic life reform movement—are analysed and illustrated in various typical manifestations. It also examines to what extent the Nordic life reform movement with these two key concepts as its core agenda found expression in arts and crafts, in painting as well as in the architecture of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century and contributed to the progress of social and cultural renewal.

Academic Quarter, 2019

Aestheticization is a pervasive force in consumer culture (Featherstone 2002); it is central to the invention and reinvention of symbolic resources that structure current market economies (Reckwitz 2017). A recent example with a complex nexus of consumption, identity, politics and nostalgia, is the reinvention of ‘Nordicness’ and ‘The Nordic Lifestyle’, with sub-fields such as (New) Nordic Cuisine, (New) Nordic Design and (New) Nordic Cinema (Leer 2016, Andersen et al. 2019, Skou and Munch 2016). This paper investigates the aestheticization of ‘The Nordic Way of Life’ as commodified and marketedin the form of the magazine Oak - The Nordic Journal.

Kulturelle Funktionen von städtischem Raum im Wandel der Zeit Cultural Functions of Urban Spaces through the Ages, 2019

Northern Europe is marked by some of the slowest and most recent urbanizations in Europe. In Norway, one of the most recent nations to experience urbanization processes, the majority of people lived in non-urbanized areas as recently as 1945. Denmark and Sweden had been prosperous empires for centuries, while Finland, Norway and Iceland, by contrast, were to start the process of state formation from the 19 th century onwards. This article aims to demonstrate that the topic of festival culture, festival houses and the creation of the nation state became influenced by new growing cities in Scandinavia. In addition, it focuses on the role of cultural activities in urbanization and the creation of new modern nation states. This article will try to sweep over the Scandinavian countries, but it is impossible to give a comprehensive overview over the topic. However, by focusing on some of the aspects in some specific cases, it tends to give an understanding of the subject and how the development of festivals and festival houses was, as well as the development of cultural practices in urban areas in connection with cultural activities. Even though the urban culture and the nation states of Scandinavia developed individually , there are significant similarities which are emphasized in this article. There was a pronounced growing awareness of cultural activities during the 19 th and especially the 20 th century in most Nordic countries. This awareness was significantly urban, and it was closely related to the development of the modern postwar welfare state. This examination and discussion of the topic of festival houses in Scandinavia is an attempt to contextualize the development of both culture-especially music and concert halls-in Scandinavia, as well as trying to see them as a means of providing festivals a safe haven-a festival house.

2004

Kjetil Fallan and Grace Lees-Maffei (eds.), Designing Worlds: National Design Histories in an Age of Globalization (New York and Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2016), 2016

Visitors to the Swedish pavilion at the New York World's Fair in 1939 would have been met by an introductory photo-mural showing a group of confident, young blond people gazing steadily into the future. In the emerging welfare state this group is approaching the future with the certainty that they belong and will be taken care of. The future is theirs, modernity belongs to them. It is the future of a solid democratic and modern welfare state aiming to harness the entire population into a large, inclusive and harmonious middle class. In this narrative, present as much in Norwegian as in Swedish design history, design is portrayed as democratic, in the service of the many, as building a modern egalitarian society. Yet, it is not just the future that belongs to the ideal citizens represented in the photo-mural but history as well. It is their history that has been privileged in scholarship. The result is a narrative producing and reproducing a self-understanding amongst the population of being part of relatively egalitarian but also homogenous societies in terms of gender, class and race/ethnicity. This sanctioned history thus obscures the considerable heterogeneity of Nordic societies, past and present, and relegates a wide variety of alternative cultural practices and subject positions to the margins. There is a need to question the homogenized heritage of Nordic design and analyse it further through approaches within design historical scholarship articulating hetero-geneity by applying perspectives of gender, class and ethnicity (or through an intersectional perspective). In this chapter we focus on how dominant design history discourse hides the fact that material cultures of ethnic minorities are

Journal of Ethnology and Folkloristics, 2016

This article focuses on the recent history and contemporary practice of a kind of traditional tapestry weaving known as smettvev in the rural county of Jølster in mountainous western Norway. Jølster has a rich fibre arts tradition and a rapidly changing society and economy, which make it an exemplary study in material culture as its fibre arts transform to accommodate these changes. This article draws on ethnographic research and interviews with representative practitioners and community members to examine how conceptions about producer and audience identity and the role of this art form in everyday life have evolved in light of changing context. The article furthermore discusses the ways in which the forms and motifs associated with smettvev are being re-appropriated by local contemporary artists working in other mediums, as well as by individuals and institutions who see smettvev as a symbol of local identity and heritage.

Conference Proceedings Volume 2 Design Research Society 2012 Bangkok Research Uncertainty Contradiction Value, 2012

This paper focuses on how interior decoration and taste was seen and taught in relation to the vision of the ideal home in 1940s Sweden. Two phenomena that are focused on are surveys of how people actually lived, and the attempts made to alter that way of living. The activities of Svenska Slöjdföreningen (SSF, the Swedish Society of Industrial Design) is used as a prism for discerning the discourse on domestic interior reform, and the study consists of a close reading and analysis based on archival material and publications linked to SSF. Part of the archival material consists of survey protocols and photograph, of Swedish homes, from a survey into "dwelling habits" initiated by the Association of Swedish Architects (SAR) and the SSF. In the late 1930s and early 1940s, these kinds of surveys were made in order to analyse the standard of living, and the usage of homes and furniture with the aim to find adequate ways of building better housing, of producing better furniture, and of educating people to be more modern and enlightened consumers and homemakers. Based on these findings, courses were given on how to furnish and decorate the home. Through courses in how to furnish and decorate the home, the ideal home was to become real. I mean that the concept of "taste" was almost as important as the concept of "home" in the vision of what modern Swedish society should be like, but that manifesting "good taste" in the home in the 1940s meant something more than merely creating an aesthetically pleasing or beautiful interior. Taste was, above all, seen as an indicator of the degree of modernity and social awareness of people.

Theatre Survey, 2023

2011

How are Nordic Spaces crafted in the Nordic Countries and in the United States? How do such spaces give shape to cultural heritage? Drawing on theories of materialization and ritual performance, this paper discusses vernacular gifts as a form of materializing relationships, crafting bonds and delimiting boundaries between regions and museums in the wake of migration. By highlighting vernacular gifts from individuals and groups to Scandinavian museums in the United States, I would like to address how gift exchange maps out boundaries, between inside and outside, below and above, distant and close, near and far. The paper will show how gift exchange plays a creative role when Scandinavian museums craft relationships with particular regions, nations, and areas recognized as Scandinavia and Norden.