Maria Pita Guerreiro Swedish / Portuguese, b. 1991

Maria Pita Guerreiro is a Portuguese multidisciplinary designer, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. Her interest lies in design as a medium for storytelling and a way of connecting different fields. Projects undertaken in her role as a designer, in part via her co-founded Studio OJEAM and collaborations with VICARA Design Studio, strive towards sustainable solutions, where her position as a practitioner is connected with concerns and responsibilities of introducing the new. Objects and products that match planetary and societal needs, balancing both a commercial and an artistic vision. Most recently interested in exploring biofabrication and biomaterials, as a method of learning from biological processes. Her project MYCELIUM MILLENNIUM, aligns with the latest technologies and crafts that are increasingly oriented towards manufacturing with nature itself. MYCELIUM MILLENNIUM imagines a new era in which biological resources, specifically Fungi and Mycelium, are used to grow a collection of objects for everyday domestic rituals, merging the fields of biofabrication and craft. The project comes in an effort to demystify the transformation of an organism to a biomaterial and at the same time raise questions of aesthetics and cultural acceptance. MYCELIUM MILLENNIUM is an invitation to raise awareness for a material revolution, an opportunity to learn from nature and its potential, where products and objects could match the planet’s needs. The project has the material properties at its center and, more importantly, strives to invite and welcome the process of fabrication and the material itself – mycelium. The collection MYCELIUM MILLENNIUM aligns with the latest technologies and crafts that are increasingly oriented towards manufacturing with nature itself. I believe it finds itself at the border of arts and sculpture, innovation and product design, connecting issues of sustainability, local production and craftsmanship.