Iggesund Paperboard, part of the Swedish forest industry group Holmen, has teamed up with multimedia artist Nils Olof Hedenskog to create an installation using Iggesund’s Invercote brand paperboard as the raw material.
“We manufacture the basic material paperboard, so we are a very long way back in the processing chain,” commented Staffan Sjöberg, from Iggesund’s Market Communications department. “Our own success is very dependent on all the creative people around the world who make fantastic things from Invercote. So of course we want to foster creativity both on the artistic level but also in the form of the innovations that our customers in the packaging segment put their heart and soul into.
“In traditional business communications the aim is to control everything. In projects like this one you have to dare to give up control so that your efforts to communicate will hopefully reach further than those based on traditional methods.”
Iggesund Paperboard has a long tradition of working with artists. For example, its Black Box Project of five years ago challenged seven international designers to fill a box of specific dimensions with contents that challenged the performance abilities of Invercote. Hedenskog’s working title for the six-month project is Asylum.
It consists of six paperboard towers enclosing a space. Viewers can look into the space but not enter it. On the outside the towers are not coloured; their structure together with the lighting will create various nuances of grey.
On the inside they are painted in fluorescent colours, which will create light that will radiate out between the towers and through peepholes. Hedenskog described the project as “a reflection of the current situation in Europe – with hundreds of thousands of refugees who want to get inside but who most often only get a glimpse of what is inside Europe’s walls”.
