We LOVE Marimekko, so we are really happy that we got invited to design this print for them. It was so nice to meet all the cool women involved in designing the collection, led by Noora Niinikoski. They were all wearing beautiful colorful dresses, just as you would imagine.

Our print is called Kaiaka, which means ‘Shadowed Sea’ in Hawaiian. There is a shirt, a skirt and a dress – we will be posting more photos soon, but for now here are a couple of pictures we took after the show.

Here’s a model wearing our print.

And this is the lovely Mai Ohta, who designed the dress, shirt and skirt with our print.

This year’s theme for the festival was Feedback, and all the artists used recycled materials found in the hutong area where the factory and exhibition space is situated.

Our work consisted of 4 large weaving frames hanging from the ceiling. In between the cotton strings we wove pieces of colourful paper from used cigarette boxes.

If you happen to be in Beijing, you can go and see the whole exhibition at 8 Dawailangying Hutong, Dashilan, until October 9th. Other participating Nordic artists were Jacob Sikker Remin from Denmark, Tuomas Laitinen from Finland, Gudrun Kristjansdottir from Iceland and Baltos Kandys from Lithuania.

www.notch11.com

More soon…

We are very soon heading off to China. We’ll be doing a project with Notch festival, which we are really looking forward to. We’ll be working on an installation on an old factory building, close to Tiananmen Square in Beijing, in collaboration with our friend Been, who we also met last time we were there.

If you want to order something from our webshop while we’re away, you’ll have to be patient and wait until we get back, late September. Thanks!

All the prints will be printed by Louise Drubigny, a French artist and printmaker living in Berlin. It was such a pleasure working with a real pro, who really took the time to make everything accurate!

Here’s a sneak peak of the 3 colour print and some pictures from the work in progress.

By the way, we have now uploaded some more photos and information about our workshop at LAFA on our website!

After our guest talk, we had a cup of coffee with our Danish friend Sidsel Tuxen who is studying at the architecture department at CAFA this semester. She had made two new Chinese friends with really cool Western names – Highway and Oxygen. Later Oxygen, Been and a bunch of her friends then joined us for dinner at a nearby restaurant. We ended the day with Jessica on a roof top bar with a magnificent view of the forbidden city. Beijing is a magical city.

Yesterday we did some regular tourist business, and we also visited our friend Jessica at the architect office where she works, called Dada.

And now our trip is nearly coming to an end! It has been an absolutely amazing experience for us to visit China. Tomorrow we are flying back to Denmark, back to our little basement studio. We are looking forward to seeing our friends, family and most of all our (other) better halves…

Sculptures at CAFA

Tourist business included visiting the galleries of 798. This photo is from Olafur Eliasson and Ma Yansong’s collaboration at UCCA. It’s a giant room filled with colored lights and smoke, an amazing experience.

Today we are going meet a local friend, Been, and see more of Beijing. We are already in love with the city!

Caroline and Jessica live here