Katja Pettersson

Climate anxiety. Guilt. The feeling that whatever you do is wrong — or at least not enough. Designer Katja Pettersson has long thought about how we can change that feeling, and in her work she wants to try to understand environmental problems as well as our experience of them.

Pettersson's exhibition explores the Anthropocene, the age we now find ourselves in, where almost everything we surround ourselves with is influenced by man — the oceans, the earth, the climate, etc. Pettersson invites us into a post-apocalyptic room, as if we were museum visitors from a future where the four elements (air, fire, water and earth) no longer exist.Freestanding objects and ingenious self-constructed machines — inspired by Polhem's mechanical alphabet — act as historical capsules through which we are tempted to test our thoughts and feelings.

The four elements are also explored from elsewhere, as Pettersson de-dramatizes and picks apart the familiar. With the help of research, she shows how new realities can be built from old parts. New nature in the form of new earth, new fire, new water and new air. For example, she filmed in a research laboratory how carbon dioxide under high pressure — with surprising beauty — turns into liquid. Making this invisible, vital but also dangerous gas visible is one way to establish a relationship with its impact on Earth's warming.

In preparation for the exhibition at Vandalorum, Pettersson has conducted a collaboration with class 7AB at Gröndalsskolan in Värnamo. They have worked to find, analyze and find solutions to environmental problems in their immediate vicinity — in schools and on schoolyards.

Katja Pettersson (b. 1972) is active in Stockholm as an independent designer, entrepreneur in fair design and lecturer at Konstfack. She was a founding member of the design group Front.

‍The exhibition is created in collaboration with Gustavsberg Art Hall, Gröndalsskolan in Värnamo, Teknikcentrum at Campus Värnamo and Children's Film School at Valand Academy.

^{Photo: Patrik Lindell}