Mikael Olsson: Sodrakull Frosakull

This book explores the heritage of Bruno Mathsson, one of Swedish modernism's leading designers, through two of his architectural works. In Frösakull - a house that Mathsson both designed and lived in - Mikael Olsson invaded, colonised and interacted with the remains of the house. In Södrakull, on the other hand - a second house that Mathsson designed and lived in - Olsson acted like a Peeping Tom, sneaking around the exterior of the house with his camera. This unethical method of trespassing a private space reveals something even more unethical, namely the fact that nobody, not even the Bruno Mathsson firm, took care of his property after his death. Frösakull was later sold, fixtures, furniture and other possessions included, while Södrakull was refurbished and turned into a glossy and artificial space. In Södrakull Frösakull Mikael Olsson has created a phenomenological interplay between presence and absence, inner meaning and outer representation, turning the very notion of the human gaze inside out.
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Mikael Olsson's photographs of two houses by Swedish designer and architect Bruno Mathsson: the summer house at Frösakull built in 1960 and the house at Södrakull built in 1964 and 1965. Over the last decade Olsson has repeatedly visited, studied, photographed and intermittently occupied these two Mathsson houses that were abandoned and in disrepair. Olsson's project contends with the legacy of Mathsson's work in Sweden and internationally, while operating on the relationship among architecture, photography and preservation. The project explores the condition of these houses that meet their first act of preservation through photography, while questioning what may be neglected or erased through subsequent repair and reoccupation.
Olsson's fastidious attention to the houses' design and to the residue of their occupation delivers an archeology of both Swedish modernist domesticity and Mathsson's own inhabitation. The houses display a characteristic obsession with air, sun and oxygen, and performed for Mathsson as setting for his interests in naturism, fitness and nudism. In this sense the photographs provide a condensation of modernist biologically oriented preoccupations, for which the houses are an extreme Swedish concentrate..