Notes|October 2025
On living in a small world
For our new design collaboration with British outdoor specialists Barbour, we spent a few days on the island of Gotland earlier this year, capturing the distinctive landscape of sea, stone, and open skies, and the lives of people who live and work there.
Islands are small continents, holding whole worlds in miniature. Places of condensation, they become self-contained realms where life evolves along its own paths. The elements and rhythms of nature represent a constant presence, revealing the impermanence of all things: the silent roar of the sea, subtle shifts of light, clouds forming and dissolving across the sky, and the still flow of the seasons, marked by the coming and going of migratory birds.
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Gotland is Sweden’s largest little continent, located in the Baltic Sea about 100 kilometres from the mainland. A limestone island, almost entirely flat, it was born as a coral reef in a shallow, tropical sea near the equator. Over millions of years, the island drifted northwards to its present position between Sweden and Latvia, and after the Ice Age, it rose through the cold waters. Fossils are scattered in abundance along the shorelines, and at the far ends of the island, sculptural rock formations rise above the sea – layered remnants of ancient coral reefs, eroded, fractured, and shaped by waves – like monuments to deep time. Linnaeus called them ‘stone giants’.
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It has been said that the island is a theatre: a stage where everyday events condense into story – chamber plays in a nowhere place. Isolation calls for connection and creates a quiet sense of intimacy and belonging. The boundary of water becomes an invitation to look inward, and even the rock may transform into something new: a small world, whole in its own way.
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