Material Dialogues

In February 2025, we had just left behind the first year ever with a global average temperature increase of more than 1.5 degrees. Few years remain until 2030, when global greenhouse gas emissions should be halved. The curves are pointing in the wrong direction. But the solutions exist. More of us need to start using them.

Material Dialogues was a 500 square metre exhibition during Stockholm Furniture Fair 2025, with an exhibition space, a stage for conversations and a café. The starting point was three transformations that researcher Johan Rockström identifies as decisive: away from fossil fuels, towards circular business models, and towards a sustainable food system. The focus was on solutions, not on problems.

In the section on fossil fuels, a large illustration of the carbon cycle was shown, highlighting one of the most important insights: that time is decisive. Carbon moves in cycles. The biogenic cycle, comprising trees, plants and soil, is measured in decades and centuries. The fossil cycle is measured in millions of years. Think of carbon like money: above the zero-line is our debt, and below is our savings. If a tree takes 70 years to grow, a chair made from it should ideally last at least as long, otherwise we increase the debt rather than the savings. Toilet paper made from trees that took 70 years to grow, used for a single minute: that is what a carbon cycle out of balance looks like. Time is everything. Since at least 50 percent of a piece of furniture’s emissions come from the material itself, this edition again included my earlier exhibition 1kgCO2e, different materials shown in the quantities you get for one kilogram of greenhouse gases counted as carbon dioxide equivalents. The differences are significant and consequential.

In the section on circularity, a large illustration, made in collaboration with Stena Recycling, showed exactly what happens to the materials when a chair or lamp is handed in for recycling. Which parts actually become new material? In front of the illustration stood concrete examples of genuinely circular products: a jacket from Houdini that can go straight into the compost, recycled polyester fabric turned into new thread, a lamp from Enkei made from, among other things, old toilets and discarded sailcloth, and reused chairs from Swedese and Balzar Beskow. On a separate podium, products from Act of Caring: maintenance products for furniture that extend their lifespan, which in itself is one of the most effective circular actions we can take.

In the section on food, the third transformation was made tangible. The food sector accounts for 22 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, and the solutions lie in how we produce, handle and value what we eat. I asked sustainability chef Paul Svensson to contribute. In the café, he cooked according to the principle that nothing should go to waste: circular cooking as a living and flavourful response to what the transition can look like in everyday life.

The exhibition tried to live by its own principles. All furniture was borrowed: lightweight wooden pieces from Tre Sekel, benches in fossil-free steel from Vestre, textiles from Ludvig Svensson. The walls were painted with Toniton’s fossil-free paint, one of the only alternatives on the market entirely free from a petroleum base. We calculated the exhibition’s own carbon footprint.

The exhibition was made in collaboration with a wide network of partners: researchers, producers, material suppliers and organisations, all sharing the conviction that the transition is not a question of will, but of choice.