the Nordic pavilion at the Venice Biennale 26/8 - 21/11 2010.

30 Oct 2010

American trees

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West coast tree stories.

Plant drawing

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From Panagis on his tree registration form.

Brazilian tree

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Tree map

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People started to mark and write their tree stories directly on to the map. Looking nice.

Many comments

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Classy, exclusive and beautiful.

Trendy cabbage

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Commenting plants

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Placing comment sticks on each plant. This turned out to be a very successful interaction.

Saturday rush

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Loads of people at noon on Saturday.

The tree map corner

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Reading stories.

Gender

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Rearrangement of the plant gender scale. The cactus has been placed at the both very ends of the scale.

Private plants

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Neither nice nor ugly.

Nicest cactus

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Nice and private plants.

Public/private/nice/ugly diagram

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Very public and quite ugly plants.

Information

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Visitors can read about our work and the different plant diagrams at the entrance.

Cacti and contemporary flat

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Lamprocapnos spectabilis and country house

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Bruno Mathsson and orchid

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Monstera and country house

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Matching plants with interiors and houses

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29 Oct 2010

Carving the white board

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Today people could "carve" our whiteboard tree. This seemed to satisfy their enormous need to scribble.

The center of attention

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Visitors gathering around a plant. This Zanzibar Gem is among the best selling plants during the last decade.

Office dracena

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This plant is apparently an office plant.

90s orchid

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A "common 1990s" plant.

Cool chili

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This plant is cool and trendy according to visitors.

Commenting plants

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Today people could pick a feature from a pot and comment the plants in this way. For some reason all blue sticks were left over.

28 Oct 2010

Waving trees

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Petter is making a tree top screening for tomorrow´s beer garden.

Special tree locations

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Mostly European trees on the World Tree Map.

Threatening fruit trees

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Lydia and Panagis told us the major of Athens had cut down many orange trees in the streets and replaced them with fashionable cabbage plant arrangements. The reason is the oranges were used during the riots in Athens last year to throw on the police.

Burning question

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... waiting to be answered.

Moving on up

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Lydia and Panagis from Greece switched places for the evergreen bush and the Dracena. They meant the Dracena is such a common both house, and office plant that it has become very unspecial = lowest status.

Low

And this evergreen the kids thought had the lowest status of the plants. Because it is very common.

Quick minds

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These French kids started to place our feature-signs even before we had arranged the diagram. They thought the Brake was boyish because of its loose and wild look.

Making plant figures

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Now that all plants were in place, we could finalize the arrangements of three interactive plant diagrams: one is about arranging the plants on a hierarchy-stair, one is about the plants´niceness, ugliness and publicness. The last one is a scale where the plants should be arranged according to their masculinity or femininity. All according to the visitors views.

Class differences

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The plant status ladder.

Bricks + Hyberikum.

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Hyberikum and a 60s bungalow.

Cacti + Frösakull

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Cacti and Bruno Mathsson´s summer house.

Heather + Wood House

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Heather and a new Swedish wood house.

Heather + Rental flats

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Heather and apartment block.

Matching heather

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People are quite happy about our house models and some have paired plants with houses. Funnily they have all moved the heather plant! What´s with this particular plant?

Plants to match

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Different plants to pair with the paper houses.

Match plants and style

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Arranging paper models to match house- and interior types with different plant species.

Carving substitute

People are crazy about scribbling if you leave a pen by the whiteboard. We will arrange a tree carving instead, as a more permanent memory mark of the biennale. More to come tomorrow. (NOT in these trees though, just a test don´t get scared)

27 Oct 2010

Eager tree-tellers

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People filling out the tree registration forms.

World Tree Map


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We are showing our work the Botkyrka Tree Map from this summer, where we gathered inhabitant´s favourite trees in the municipality and made a map out of it. In the pavilion we have started to collect the visitors favourite trees and their stories. They fill out a form and mark the location on a world map. So far there´s mostly European and Asian trees.

Another tree enthusiast

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The trees

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At least 80 % of the visitors seem to come to take pictures of the iconic tree stems. Our plants look very innocent in comparison, although their colours really brings some life to the pavilion.

Different look for this week

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The three stems will be joined by a new friend this week, a cheerful evergreen.

First plants

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The first plants have arrived. We will use them in live-diagrams in the exhibition. There will be five main stations with questions and activities on plants.

Venezian plant delivery

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Today, the larger plants arrived.

26 Oct 2010

Byggstudio in the house!

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Today we started to install our office in the pavilion. This is what we will do for the rest of the week and what we tell the visitors: We are designers interested in people´s relationship and use of plants at home and in public environments. Different values can be communicated through plants. They are often part of a building exterior and interior, although their individual roles and aesthetics are rarely talked of. Our studies in this temporary office forms a starting point for a plant publication by Byggstudio as well as ideas for new public plantings. Please, feel free to take part of our research. What do you think of these plants?