I ❤️Swedish Girls
- C-print
- 1 day ago
- 6 min read
Updated: 12 hours ago
C-print and artists Mira Bergh and Josefin Zachrisson aka Swedish Girls go way back. Our first meeting dates back to 2017 when the girls were still at Beckmans College of Design. A lot has happened since. We check in with the duo ahead of their scheduled return to their alma mater this week for an open lecture on their awe-inspiring trajectory since graduation.
C-P: Hi Mira and Josefin! I feel like this interview is way overdue. Have we not talked about this forever and forever? Before we properly get started though, where are you right now?
S.G: Hi Koshik! Omg we’ve talked about this interview since 2019!? But it feels like a good time to dive into things now. At the moment and for the past 3 weeks we’re in Vienna for an exhibition. Otherwise, we’re mostly splitting our time between Stockholm and Milan.
C-P: Our paths first crossed back in 2017 when you were in your second year at Beckmans College of Design. You showed great promise as designers even back then but look at you now. Superstars! I'm so impressed by your success with Swedish Girls, and how you effortlessly move between art, design and architecture which is not an easy feat. Run me through how you got started as a collective and moved on as a duo and some of the pivotal moments along the way.
S.G: Yes, we go way back! First of all, thank you! You (C-print) were the first to visit us as a duo when we did our first project Seats together in school in 2018, a project that we developed into Seats System and to this day make up a big part of our practice. We started Swedish Girls as a collective together with Matilda Ellow and Julia Jondell as we all graduated in 2019. We wanted to create a context for ourselves, to be able to share resources and for the first few years we collaborated in different constellations within the group. As a group we parted ways in 2022/23 and have been working as a duo since then. However, the collective groundwork is guiding our work and we often collaborate with others in our projects still.
As we graduated into the pandemic it was a tricky reality to navigate but we had a lot of time to develop the concept and mission of Swedish Girls. Our first exhibitions when the world slowly opened up again were two public commissions; one for Stockholm Konst’s annual summer exhibition and the other an invitation to take part in Alcova in Milan 2021. These installations caught the attention of ArkDes and in 2022 we were invited to be the designers of Utomhusverket (curated by James Taylor-Foster), ArkDes' then annual public outdoor installation and by Mayrit Bienal (ed’s note: an architecture and design biennial in Madrid) to do a residency and exhibition. Our idea of a hybrid practice between design, art and architecture developed very organically through this chain of events. And for us it became a proof of concept and approach.
C-P: In a few weeks, you are scheduled for an open lecture on your trajectory so far at Beckmans, your alma mater. Major! I'll try to attend in person but what are some of the advice, if any, you'd like to put forth to the current students?
S.G: Yes, that will be so much fun and it’s so cool that it’ll be open and free for anyone to attend! We’ve been talking about how we were missing an honest testimony of how it can be to navigate the years after graduation when we were in school. We’ll talk about how a sugar daddy can be a tempting idea but probably not worth it, how commercial projects may or may not kill your soul and that patience is key. For the most part we’ll be sharing inspiring quotes that we didn’t come up with ourselves.
C-P: I feel like the overall design/brand aesthetics of Swedish Girls is very consistent. How have you reasoned around it?
S.G: When we were still in school and exhibited in Milan, we overheard people calling us “the Swedish Girls" and felt belittled by it. After we graduated and were to decide on a name, we joked about calling ourselves Swedish Girls since people already called us that. We laughed and then realized that it actually is a great name, it’s catchy, has a lot of layers to it and you could already buy merch in every souvenir shop in Sweden! This approach has since then been a key, it’s like a joke that we’re taking way too far and can’t stop. It all comes very naturally since it’s basically a concept anchored in our own reality.
C-P: You have a noticeably strong presence in Milan. For somebody only vaguely familiar with the city, how do you find it from the point of view of young artists?
S.G: It is a very exciting scene but also very challenging. It's bold and multidisciplinary but it’s hard for young artists to get support. Much like the development here in Sweden, the government is cutting funding and cutting down on spaces for arts and culture. The club scene is vivid and it spills over in the way artists collaborate and build communities but also this space is getting restricted. Raves are banned since 2023 in Italy and they’re sadly shutting down very important spaces for communities. However, people in Milan are active in their activism and have a tradition of organizing. This makes the underground culture remain strong and interesting with a lot of independent initiatives.
C-P. You recently presented a show in collaboration with Cucina Alchimia for Vienna Design Week (September 25 – October 4, 2025). What was that experience like?
S.G: We were invited by Vienna Design Week to be a part of their annual project Passionswege where they pair Viennese craft with artists and designers and we to make this project with Cucina Alchimia which is an experimental restaurant and lab. We’ve never worked with gastronomy before so it was very interesting to do a lot of research and apply their approach to our practice. We visited Vienna this summer and got to know each other solely through eating and drinking and became good friends right away, kind of realizing that this exchange and outcome is what the project could be about. What our work has in common is the ambition to create spaces of exchange and interactions to build community. From this came the idea to design icebreakers in both figurative and metaphoric ways. The result is a series of rituals around objects that we built during a 3-week residency in September and every visitor got to eat, drink and meet in different ways. It was an experimental and witty process that actually turned into many real encounters and conversations so we guess it kind of worked!?
C-P: Looking back, what are some of your personal highlights from these past years? You must have a ton of fun anecdotes to share!
S.G: We meet so many people and are making so many amazing friends through our work, this will always be the absolute highlight of this practice.
It’s also always a highlight when we achieve something we’ve been scheming, like when ideas that seem too absurd actually materialize. Our first moment like that was our installation at ArkDes 2022, we wanted to test the idea of a public space with private intentions, transforming a space of transit into a space to build community. To see that project realized and experienced by the public was the most purposeful experience of our practice so far and we’ve been chasing that high ever since.
A moment we often return to is when in 2023 a friend of ours in Milan suggested we should design fans, fill a whole room with them and call it “Swedish Girls Only Fans”. We laughed, took the joke too far and this is usually how a project begins. When we were invited by Röhsska to do an exhibition in connection to Way Out West 2024 (ed’s note: an annual musical festival in Gothenburg) and we spiraled in the idea of Swedish Girls Only Fans and made it into an exhibition celebrating fan culture with fanfiction, fanzines, merchandise and a scenography of only fans.
I (Josefin) have been playing football all my life so when we were asked to do a project with Juventus and Adidas, I was pretty excited! The players were at the opening and we were on Italian TV as a Serie A-highlight. Mira didn’t really get the hype so that’s a personal highlight ha-ha.
It’s all just Hannah Montana though. We find ourselves working in supermarkets, cafes and cinemas when we can’t pay our rent and recently our accountant told us we could also have art as a hobby. We had to let him go, we could obviously not afford that energy in our lives nor the bill for his service!
All images courtesy of Swedish Girls.