LWRNTZ 01 (Workers’ housing, Karlshäll, Luleå, 1911–13, with T. Stubelius) and more works from Mikael Olsson ongoing serie LWRNTZ are currently on view at Havremagasinet 8 juni - 29 sept 2024.

Both the feeling of home and the memory of home thus move between different, often shifting, poles. Such a movement can be discerned in Mikael Olsson’s LWRNTZ 01 (Workers’ housing, Karlshäll, Luleå, 1911–13, with T. Stubelius), a photograph that portrays a home – but a home that no longer exists, materially, in the topography. Olsson explores the tension between perception and representation, here in the form of traces from architect Sigurd Lewerentz’s working-class housing on the outskirts of Luleå. They are now gone, but for some may still constitute a ”home”, in the sense of a place to return to, at least in memory.

What is a home, beyond the purely concrete space, beyond the architecture, beyond the imagery of home advertisements? The exhibition “The Foundations of the Home" explores what constitutes a home in its most basic parts: material, sensual and conceptual. Centered around eight foundations – memory, space, the hearth, tradition, care, the shell of the home, the measure of the home, food –, the fundamental and timeless characteristics of the home are interpreted and reinterpreted based on practical, economic, architectural and ideological aspects. In this, the home appears both as a concrete place and as an image, in which current issues of sustainability, authenticity and security are deepened and problematized. The contributions to the exhibition cover building construction, furniture design, carpentry and art, and demonstrate how rules and norms, standardizations and language shape our understanding of the home materially and metaphorically.

Curated by Mikael Andersson och Erik Törnkvist.