HELSINKI.- Secret Universe (5 April – 22 September 2019), Design Museum’s main exhibition of the season presents the work of Aamu Song and Johan Olin of the COMPANY design from over the past ten years. This is the first time their work in design is being displayed to this extent.

Designers Aamu Song and Johan Olin work like explorers. They look for traditional crafts methods and manufacturing skills in different parts of the world and consider the ways in which they could be included in present-day material culture, social debate and discussion. It all began in 2007, when the designers investigated what crafts objects were still being made in Finland. Together with master crafts practitioners, the designers created a collection of objects called Top Secrets of Finland. Their work involving the secrets of craftsmanship continued later in Korea, Belgium, Estonia, Russia, Japan, the United States, and most recently in Mexico.

Secret Universe presents for the first time all of Song’s and Olin’s expeditions from 2007 to 2019, focusing on the designers’ exceptional method, a combination of anthropology, folklore and mysticism. In their works, the unique world of Korean-born Song and Olin of Finland merges with the skills of masters of various crafts. Over the years, Song and Olin have created a large collection of furniture, fashions, accessories and art objects reflecting a wide range of skills in materials and production methods. The exhibition will also include an immense mural painted by the designers and showing all their various visits to factories in different countries. The space features a soundscape by architect-composer Tuomas Toivonen, which combines the clanging of tools that Song and Olin recorded on their trips with a chorus of mechanical and synthesised sounds.

Secret Universe prompts us to consider our own consumer habits. How and where are the objects that surround us made? Who makes them? How can we protect crafts methods and manufacturing skills that are in danger of becoming extinct?
Song and Olin address the connections of production, manufacturing and the global movements of objects in a touching and human way, with the means of intelligent humour and narration.

Locally made products are disappearing, because they are being replaced by cheap products and locally manufactured goods are too expensive without any good reason. This influences our decisions about where to go next, to what country and how we will create our designs, Aamu Song and Johan Olin point out.