Benjamin Huseby

I grew up in Norway. I moved around a lot, but when I was seven, we moved to the countryside. We lived near the biggest lake in the country. I remember from my childhood that there was always a field on one side of the house and a thick pine forest on the other. And that never really changed no matter where I lived.

My best friend and I played in the forest a lot. I always liked the forest best.

God, what has changed? For instance, I usually spend Christmas with my family, in my sister's cabin. I spent this past holiday there too, and you no longer have guaranteed snow in the winter. You can't ski every day! That's the biggest change.

Sometimes I try explaining my childhood, and I realize that it might be a little bit exotic for many people. I used to go to kindergarten in cross-country skis. That was quite normal! And when I got a bit older, maybe early teens, I would use something called a spark. It's like a wooden chair, with these metal bars underneath like skates.

Sort of. I think it's an invention from Finland. It's a sled, but you stand behind it and there's a wooden chair where one person can sit. And it can go really fast.

We were always quite poor because my mom was a single mother with two kids. We couldn't live fancy, but we had an allotment garden where we would grow things like cauliflower. I grew up with this inclination to garden. It came naturally.

I used to grow a lot. But unfortunately, it's quite time consuming. You also need a rhythm of being there regularly.

Yes. My first pet was a cat named Samina. As a kid, I used to play out in the forest pretty much every day with my best friend Mats. When it was dinner time, my mom would just send the cat to find us. I knew when I saw Samina that it was time to go home. Somehow, my mom could instruct my cat.

I'll cite another. My great aunt and uncle were kind of like my grandparents because my real grandparents lived far away, either in Pakistan or on the west coast of Norway. The two of them run a small farm and I grew up around their cows. There was even a cow and a horse named after me, which I loved.

I had a very close relationship to animals as a kid.

I live right on Hasenheide Park in Berlin. So when I look outside, all I see is trees and birds chirping. I appreciate that every day.

I was motivated by my interest in food and the natural world and plants in general. It came out of a ritual, or side project, that I conducted over a five-year period, cataloging edible plants that grew between my house and my studio in Berlin. It was a stretch of about one kilometer, a quite small piece of land. The idea was to show that nature is all around us, and that we have resources everywhere if we look for them.

The title is actually from a botanical guide of a horticulturist from Kew Gardens. I think the original book is from the 1940s. Obviously, the "aliens" in the title refers to alien or invasive species of plants in a certain environment. There's nothing to do with aliens from outer space, which some people misunderstand.

The book was intentionally dealing with all kinds of inherently racist and colonial language we inherit about the natural world. I deliberately used the word "alien" and invited a couple of friends to write essays that grappled with the word, also in terms of migration. Many plants we have classified as weeds or invasive plants follow human habitation. They follow our evolution, how we build cities or destroy nature. "Weeds," for instance, is not a class of plants. It's just an unscientific term for a plant that grows where you don't want it to.

I worked for three years on an exhibition in Norway for the Henie Onstad Art Center, which is close to where I grew up outside of Oslo. It's this huge sculpture park on a beautiful peninsula in the Oslo fjord. I made a permanent installation there, which is kind of a scar on the earth. It's a small field in this very perfect lawn. The idea is simple: rewilding a stretch of grass. It wasn’t done so methodically—more like deliberate chaos. The goal was to reimagine how it might have looked 150 years ago, a kind of memory of what wildness was once there.

I haven't been back much to see it, because…

Well see, it wasn't an aesthetic gesture, more conceptual. Last time I saw it, I was like, "Yeah, obviously, if I controlled it, I would do it differently."

My book was kind of a polemic in that sense, thinking about the language we use for the natural world. I did this project in Norway, and the common names for many plants in Norwegian presuppose a human geography. We seem to think that the natural world cares about nations and borders, which obviously doesn't make sense. I also don't think what we humans do is outside the natural world per se, and the changes we make are automatically contrary to conservation. I just think there's different thoughts on the idea of conservation.

Nature always evolves and is affected by humans. Let's go back to the idea of wild nature. As long as there are humans around, there isn't really wild nature. Even in the Amazonas, if you go deep into the jungle, you can find traces of human interaction for thousands of years. This impact was less invasive than what we do now, but we have always affected our surroundings.

I think the concept of “wild” is misleading. I do think it's important to preserve vulnerable species, but I wouldn't say I'm a strict conservationist either. Things evolve. At the same time, I'm obviously extremely concerned about human destruction of nature.

That is very difficult to answer. I spent my youth as a sort of eco-warrior, being very involved in environmental activism. It's an ethical dilemma to work in fashion at all. And the more I learned about what is sustainable or not, I also realized that there's just like no way you can really call anything sustainable if you're producing new objects. That's a major issue that I deal with every day. I don't think there's any material or method that is a silver bullet. Do you know what I mean?

We try to be as sustainable as possible, but it can also become frustrating if you focus very singularly on raw materials. There are always trade-offs. I mean, at one point everyone thought recycled polyester was going to save us all. For us, we strive not to focus on excessive growth. I think whatever you do, whatever business you're in, the best approach to sustainability is to engage in ways that counter a model of capitalism that strives for eternal growth.

Yes, exactly. In a way, GmbH was intended to be a platform more than a brand. It's a vehicle, a Trojan Horse for ideas.

Back when we worked on creating our iconography for the brand, we created graphic patterns based on the stinging nettle. We also incorporated it into our heraldry. There's actually a t-shirt in the last collection that has a photo of stinging nettles. Some might choose lilies or roses, but we thought of the stinging nettle as a very resilient plant. It symbolizes migration, strength, and survival instinct. And it’s prickly. I admit, I can be a bit prickly too! I have a nickname, "the cactus," among some of my best friends—because I don't hold back.

Our collection titles are intended to be evocative, not necessarily specific. "Rare Earth" obviously refers to rare earth minerals. But when we designed the collection, we imagined designing for a crew on a spaceship leaving the planet, trying to find new places to go after the destruction here. The fashion references were things like stewardesses and mechanics. We're always very inspired by uniforms, and the utilitarian and practical aspects of them. Of course, they're also quite sexy.

I think there was a point where I felt that my environmental activism stopped making sense. I felt like my impact on the issue was so insignificant. It sounds so negative to say I'm complacent, but I've gone through periods of disillusionment. I started in this eco-warrior activist group when I was 12 years old. I kind of left it when I was 16 or 17 because I got very disillusioned as well. I think it's something that goes through me in waves. I launch very intensely and emotionally into an issue and give it my all. And then I reach some point when I just get exhausted and need to take a step back.

I was actually thinking about this earlier today. It's good to take a break but then it also feels like, what the fuck! How privileged am I that I can decide to take a step back for a second just because I need to self-preserve or protect myself a little bit. Sometimes, I feel like I'm losing my mind when I think too much about the world. Recently, I stopped using social media as much. I'm not saying it doesn't have value, but personally it lost its meaning for me and became a vessel for angry self-expression at times which I felt wasn't being proactive.

I also think I can be very idealistic and go into things with a naive, childlike belief that I will change the world. It's very irrational. But it's part of being human and trying to navigate a very violent, horrendous world. Going back to fashion, I sometimes just try to focus, in the simplest terms, on creating beauty. I know that can sound like a cop out, but it's not. When we started GmbH, Serhat and I really actually believed that fashion is a useful vehicle for political messages because it is so immediate. The idea of creating something sublime, something with surface beauty. In that process, you can change people's minds, and I definitely think we've had some success doing that.

Our "Rare Earth" collection was more a play on science fiction. We like to tell stories through fashion. I have zero interest in leaving the earth. I have zero interest in being on a spaceship. I am inspired by the tradition of utopian ideas in science fiction, like Ursula Le Guin. We came at it from a more poetic angle.

I honestly don't know how to answer that. I don't even believe in a next life. I just think you just have to make the most out of the one you've got.

I don't know, just rot into the ground? These days, I have zero fear of death. I think I was very scared of nuclear war when I was a kid. But that could be because I was living in Norway near the Russian border during the Cold War. We had to have bomb shelter tests all the time, and there were always war siren tests going off. At the beginning of my Weeds & Aliens book there's a beautiful quote by Edvard Munch, the Norwegian painter. I'll read you the English translation: "From my rotting body flowers shall rise and I shall be in them."