Stockholm: The Excess of Meaning and the Labour of Joy in a Queer Practice of Architecture
Bui Quy Son and Paul-Antoine Lucas of Exutoire speak with Katarina Bonnevier about queer(er) futures for spatial practice
Stockholm, 10:10am, a sunny, cold April morning
On a sloped street in Slussen, we waited for artist, architect, and researcher Katarina Bonnevier and her dog Tia with a recorder in hand. We had invited ourselves into Katarina’s life, into her obsession with space and architecture, and into her love story with Mariana Alves Silva and with Thérèse Kristiansson and with their shared project, MYCKET. The day started with a conversation around coffee and crackers with cream cheese and raspberry jam at MYCKET’s office, followed by a walk among the remnants of the old “queer Södermalm” district. Between tunnelbana rides swinging west to east, from Ropsten to Bredäng, we met with Katarina’s friends and long-time collaborators and discussed the past, present, and future of her career—an elusive, ever-evolving queer practice of architecture. Generous with her words, Katarina shared with us her hopes for a queer(er) future.
Katarina Bonnevier (left) and Paul-Antoine Lucas on a walk around the neighbourhood of Slussen, Stockholm, 2022. Photograph © Bui Quy Son, Exutoire
- BQS
- Katarina, could you tell us who you are and what brought you to Stockholm?
- KB
- My name is Katarina Bonnevier, and I’m an artist, architect, and researcher. Or, really, I’m a designer and I work in the field of spatial creation. That’s how I usually frame it. At the centre of all I do is an obsession with spaces and architecture. I live between Stockholm and Sankt Anna, and recently more in Stockholm; I’m currently transitioning into my urban self.
I work with two fantastic people, Mariana Alves Silva and Thérèse Kristiansson, and together we formed MYCKET. We call ourselves MYCKET Collaborations because we not only collaborate with each other but in much larger networks of people. We work with architecture, art, and design, and we try to imagine spaces where the social and material meet. - BQS
- What got you interested in the queer in architecture? How has your lived experience of Stockholm influenced the way you practice?
- KB
- I was brought up with feminism, and when I was in architecture school, I wondered, Why do we not learn about any female architects in architecture school? Why are the things that I’m interested in not being taught? I was always interested in theatre; I really enjoyed storytelling and how spaces support narratives, but unfortunately theatre was not an option at that school. Teachers would tell me I was too theatrical and decorative in my projects, and they treated this like something bad. I understood it as connected to femininity; I was intensely interested in the feminine and in exploring things that had to do with extravagance, with the theatrical, with the festive.
Around the year 2000, I had the chance to meet Jennifer Bloomer at a lecture she gave in Stockholm and, on her generous advice, I then ended up in Ames, Iowa, at this little campus town surrounded by corn fields, for a one-year master’s program. A kind of queer attitude started to grow in me there, and after my master’s, back in Sweden, I started to think about how I could push this attitude further. I stepped into queer theory and found a way to access my passions and desires. I got a PhD position—I wanted to work with the decorative, with masks and masquerading—and in that role, I learned the history of gender studies and was able to place the 1990s and the time I studied architecture into history somehow. I could finally see the development of feminist theory in relation to queer theory. I needed that to understand where I was; I needed to see that there was a genealogy, that there were other people thinking what I was thinking. - BQS
- Would you say that Stockholm has played a role in the development of this research and practice?
- KB
- Absolutely. There was this fantastic queer movement in Stockholm around 2002. Everyone was queer; queerness was everywhere. There were bookshops, lesbian bars, queer bars, restaurants, lots of activist movements; even politicians were queer. In 2004, at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH) in Stockholm, we created, together with students, the first gender and architecture course called Jalusi, Forskningsstudio om queer feministisk arkitektur (Jalousie, Research Studio in Queer Feminist Architecture). There were so many applications, it was amazing. There are always gaps in these big institutions where you can move freely, and KTH gave us this kind of freedom.
Coffee and breakfast with Katarina Bonnevier at MYCKET’s office in Stockholm, 2022. Photographs © Bui Quy Son, Exutoire
- PAL
- You started to discuss queer and feminist perspectives in architecture in the early 2000s, first within the academic field and now as a research-based practice. How did you build MYCKET as a spatial practice?
- KB
- By 2011, I wanted to leave academia and do something else. Thérèse approached me and suggested she, Mariana, and I should work together on what became The Passerine, our submission to a competition for the European Capital of Culture in Guimarães, Portugal. Working together was really like an infatuation; we were so immediately in love with each other. At about that time, I got a request from the Umeå School of Architecture to do a workshop there, and that’s where we started to develop The Passerine. It then also became part of the Reykjavík Arts Festival. It’s a nice example of how we got the idea and proposed it for one thing, and then when that didn’t work, we took it in another direction. This is how we built the practice.
Later, I got funding from KTH for a research project called Architecture in Effect based on a pilot study that Mariana, Thérèse, and I conceived of together. We started the project, The Club Scene, by asking ourselves: What queer spaces have been important for us? We realized that nightclubs have been super important places for each of us, places where we could feel a sense of belonging and a community, places where we became adults. So we worked on three different club concepts. The first club, Lalasalon, was like a lesbian literary salon; the second, Culture Club, was tied to movements from the 1980s—Queer Nation, Act Up—and took an activist view of clubbing culture; the third club was Sappho Island in reference to a club in Kampala, Uganda, that had been open for only a year between 2010 and 2011. Each club had a distinct aesthetic and was a different expression of a safer space. With these three pilot studies, MYCKET got research funding for three years from the Swedish Research Council. I thought then that I lived in the best country in the world: There’s actually state money here for people to work on clubs for queer people? We’ve been working on it for nine years and are still on it somehow. - PAL
- How would you describe MYCKET?
- KB
- It’s an architecture, art, and design group, with those words in no particular order. At some point, someone called us a queer feminist architecture office—we had come together thanks to our shared queer, feminist, antiracist, class-aware, and more-than-human values and consciousnesses—but it just felt so alien and alienating. To use the word “architecture” already induces anxiety for clients sometimes, let alone “queer feminist architecture.”
- BQS
- I see a form of queerness in the multiple ways that Exutoire and MYCKET both define our practices. We don’t necessarily fit the stereotype people have of architecture offices, but we tend to act like an office. We also want to have artistic practices, to do research, to design and build. To use these words correctly depending on the context is kind of the game: we adapt to different environments.
- PAL
- We instrumentalize the words a bit, willingly. If we talk to students about our practice, we say it’s an architecture practice, because we want them to understand that an architecture practice can be so many things.
- KB
- At one point we called ourselves craftitects, because we were crafting so much with our hands. We even said that we were doing sexytecture. I really like that cheeky, fun way; it’s also a queer way of doing things. You can’t nail us down. It’s a queer tactic, of course.
Katarina Bonnevier (left) and Bui Quy Son on the T-bana heading to the western suburb of Bredäng in Stockholm, 2022. Photograph © Paul-Antoine Lucas, Exutoire
- BQS
- How does MYCKET approach projects?
- KB
- We want to shape spaces physically and materially. I think that’s our drive: to make visible, touchable, tangible alterations to the environment. Theory only comes along later. We’re also interested in aesthetic expression and what it means; our aim is to have as large a palette as possible of aesthetic expressions. We say that we’re an artistic research-based practice.
- PAL
- Some weeks ago, when we met in Oslo, you told us that you were working on establishing your own commercial practice and a more commercial practice for MYCKET. What did you mean?
- KB
- Before the pandemic, we had been working on large public interventions with lots of people and big audiences, and then it all went completely silent; the events we had planned were cancelled. I realized how fragile the practice was and thought, I can’t make a living from this. So MYCKET shifted to more commercial projects. Last year, we did the interior design for a recording studio. They wanted a social space, so we designed a club for them.
I also have my own firm, parallel to MYCKET. I like creating nice things for people— buildings or extensions of small houses. With private clients, there’s never so much money in these projects; if it were three of us sharing one project, there would be no money at all.
Then I also do lectures, workshops, and writing, and have done a radio show for the Swedish National Radio called Fasad. I’ve also been working for theatre and films, doing set designs and costumes. I’ve done a few pieces for Unga Klara, a theatre in central Stockholm, and was the production designer for a film called Flickan, Mamman och Demonerna.
I do many things by myself because I need to, and because it’s important for MYCKET to remain a project of joy and not a project of necessity. We choose each other; I work with these people because I want to, because it gives me joy. - PAL
- I loved something you said during your lecture in Oslo in March, which I wrote down. It’s about how the act of queering architecture—or a queer practice of architecture—is not necessarily about the way it is perceived, but more the lens through which it is made.
- KB
- Daring to be specific, daring to work with a local community or a very specific group of people, even if you’re making a public space, you’ll get so much more variety. It’s a way of avoiding universal design or being generic.
- PAL
- We also view the act of queering as a way of taking much more into consideration than we normally do in the making of a project. That input will somehow naturally translate into something different from what’s normative, both in design and use.
- KB
- I think all spaces are queer spaces, and all spaces are also quite normative. There’s always an excess of meaning in architecture. Even if you build a prison, it can be transformed into something else eventually. My intention doesn’t matter in the end; it’s the way it’s used, and what it means for people. It doesn’t mean that you can just throw anything out there. You need to give out a strong proposal, and then it will be easier for people to use it in manifold ways.
Afternoon fika in the Sätraskogen Nature Reserve with Katarina Bonnevier and her friends, Stockholm, 2022. Photographs © Paul-Antoine Lucas, Exutoire
- PAL
- How do you see your practice evolve in the near and far future? What future, both ideal and realistic, do you imagine for your practice?
- KB
- I see MYCKET as continuing to work together for probably all our lives, in one way or another. We will sit in a garden when we’re 80 thinking about projects. For the near future, it would be so fun if we could continue finding ways to explore things in the physical world. The dream project would be, of course, to make a cultural centre somewhere. Our office should have a workshop of our own, and maybe we could do a residency somewhere. And perhaps Exutoire and MYCKET should do some projects together? That would be fun [smiles]. Everything should continue to be driven by joy. Hopefully, by working like that, we will transform the way things are being done.
- PAL
- What about your own personal work?
- KB
- I have two things that I’m thinking about a lot right now. One of them is to build a house for myself, a studio and a place where I live. I began making drawings of it, but it will take time. When I craft, I really miss writing, but when I write a lot, I miss the hands-on material of crafting. I guess that really sums it up: I want to design a house and write something—maybe a book. And I want to fall in love [laughs].
- BQS
- What would be the ideal conditions—social, political, environmental, ideological—for a queer practice of architecture to flourish?
- KB
- Ah yes, great question. Well, we have to decrease the income gap between the richest and poorest. This whole system of national borders, dictatorships, wars—all that needs to go. Goodbye to all that. Patriarchy needs to be erased completely. What would be wonderful is for each and every one of us to have a given place. Then we can really think about how we organize our ways of living, which would be as manifold as there are communities or groups or individuals. How we get to all of this is another question [laughs]. We have to learn to live with the planet; we’re living like we have 4.2 planets, but we don’t, we only have one. It should be completely unthinkable to create waste or to kill off any species.
You might think, “Is this queerness?” Of course it is. Queerness is about shifting against any culture that doesn’t support its people, any culture that supports a select few at the expense of the majority. Queer theory is so great because it manages to really address the individual. I can feel it in my own body—how the norms ache me, the wounds they have created in me—but I also have it as a theory, a lens with which I can use to look outside of myself. It connects my being with other beings, with society.
This is the first in a series of three articles conceived by Exutoire titled “Queer Practices in Architecture: New Views from Stockholm, Brussels, and Paris”
