The next part of today's VDF collaboration with ArkDes features a video interview with Australian artist Linda Tegg, who has temporarily rewilded the car park outside Sweden's national centre for architecture and design.

Tegg has added thousands of plants to the asphalt of the Exercisplan car park for the installation, which is called Infield.

The name Infield comes from Sweden's infields – enclosed meadows that were often adjacent to farms – and is intended to attract myriad birds and insects to the site throughout its three-month duration.

"To me, it had this sort of possibility of a relationship where, through the care of the environment, we can create more space for more species to live well," Tegg said.

"The installation will change over its three-month exhibition. Most of the plants are about two years old and day to day, the plant's growth is increasing. We are bringing them to exhibition within quite a narrow band of time, which is the Swedish spring."

The artist's previous work has included filling the Jil Sander headquarters in Milan with "spontaneous plants" gathered from the city. In 2018, she was the co-creative director of Repair, the exhibition of the Australian Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale, alongside Baracco + Wright Architects.

"Working with animals and plants, I've grown an awareness of the multitude of perspectives that can converge on any given place," Tegg explained.

"What might be a location where we park our car for an hour, that same space could be inhabited by hundreds of species of plants and animals."

ArkDes is intended as a place of meeting and debate about the future of Swedish architecture and design, especially with regard to Sweden’s national architecture and design policy.

"That policy, passed in the parliament nearly two years ago, aims to make Swedish cities more sustainable and equitable, through better architecture, art and design," ArkDes director Kieran Long said.

"Infield adds to this debate by asking questions of what the public spaces of the future might look like, if we work with nature instead of against it, making space for non-human species and sharing the city with them."

The installation will be on display at Exercisplan from 2 June to 27 September 2020.

About ArkDes

ArkDes, Sweden's national centre for architecture and design, is a museum, a study centre and an arena for debate and discussion about the future of architecture, design and citizenship.

Its aim is to increase knowledge and cultivate debate around how architecture and design affect our lives as citizens, and to influence this change through debate, exhibitions, campaigns and research relating to Swedish and international architecture and design.

Partnership content with ArkDes.