Landet Stay and WAY Gallery Bring Art Into the Swedish Landscape
Text by Natalia Muntean
“From the first time I experienced Landet Stay, I felt it was a dream project to curate,” says Francesca Berlin, co-founder of WAY Gallery in Stockholm.
Just outside Trosa, one hour south of Stockholm, a new kind of artistic residency has been taking shape as a result of the collaboration between WAY Gallery and Landet Stay. The cabin hotel, founded in 2024 by Umberto Garabello and Ted Wachtmeister and designed by Andreas Martin-Löf and Tobias Vernon of 8 Holland Street, has been hosting six emerging artists-in-residence this May. “Art has been important to me ever since I was a kid, so it felt very natural for it to become part of Landet Stay from the beginning. We never wanted it to feel like just a hotel in nature, but a place shaped by creativity, culture and thoughtful people,” says Umberto Garabello about the initiative.
The residency brings together Tove Eklund, Johan Bjurmar, Anna Mörner, Thyra Weiss, Elsa Ekman and Rebecca von Matern for an open-ended stay on site. There is no fixed brief and no formal exhibition outcome. Instead, works developed during the residency are gradually introduced into the cabins and shared spaces, where guests encounter them as part of their stay.
Founded in 2020 by Francesca Berlin, Estelle Graf and Felicia Berlin Baumgardt, WAY Gallery has been seeking a different format to work with art, and the approach developed together with Landet Stay reflects a deliberate departure from the conventional gallery model. “From the very first time I experienced Landet Stay, I felt it was a place where art could exist differently, not confined to white walls, but integrated into the atmosphere, architecture and nature,” says Berlin. Works are available to acquire, offering guests a more direct and personal entry point into collecting. “What also excites me is the idea that guests will encounter these works in a more intimate and unexpected way during their stay, living with them, even briefly, rather than simply viewing them in a traditional gallery setting. The fact that the works are also available to acquire opens up a more personal and intuitive way of engaging with collecting outside the conventional gallery walls.”
The artists, for their part, have responded to the conditions the setting offers: more time, fewer distractions, and a material and sensory environment distinct from the urban studio. For Thyra Weiss, who explores the boundary between presence and disappearance through weaving, the landscape became inseparable from the work itself. “My soft materials, meeting the scent of moss and misty landscapes, inspired the creation process. I am interested in what remains hidden around us at all times, things that only become visible if you look very closely,” she says. In her weavings, forms slowly emerge from the surface in a search for the threshold between life and death, lightness and dissolution – “life, grief, and love woven together within the same surface, where memory carries not only loss but also tenderness and warmth.” Tove Eklund, meanwhile, found herself drawing on immediate surroundings rather than memory and imagination for the first time. For Rebecca von Matérn, the experience went further still: “The pieces I created for Landet Stay came from a feeling of being spiritually sheltered and held. I feel connected to the idea behind Landet Stay, that an atmosphere itself can hold you.”
“What excites me most is the idea that guests will encounter these works in a more intimate and unexpected way during their stay – living with them, even briefly, rather than simply viewing them. The fact that the works are also available to acquire opens up a more personal and intuitive way of engaging with collecting outside the conventional gallery walls,” concludes Berlin.
