In this reading seminar, Janna Holmstedt and Malin Lobell from the collaborative art platform (p)Art of the Biomass invite participants to imagine potential soil ceremonies amid the everydayness of soil work and soils’ work - a slowing-down and attentional shift that does not ask for grand gestures, but rather a different attunement to the things at hand.
Through their project Compost-o-scene, they explore soil conviviality, naturecultural heritage, and entangled, hidden life through microbial composting as a form of ceremony. The session will include a presentation of their collaborative practice and the story of how a letter to soil led them to attend to composting as ceremony - and to stage a dance party in the underground.
(p)Art of the Biomass is a transdisciplinary art platform where art, ecology, science, and the humanities meet and frolic. Based in Sweden and initiated by Holmstedt and Lobell, their context-sensitive and processual work can be seen as ecosocial sculptures that evolve through invitations, walks, installations, performances, and other public events.
Bios
Malin Lobell is an artist and gardener who has worked with plant–human relations for more than fifteen years. She has initiated and facilitated community gardens and creative collaborations with researchers, schools, and municipalities.
Janna Holmstedt is an artist and artistic researcher with interests in interspecies communication, media ecologies, and listening as a situated practice. Her project Humus economicus at the National Historical Museums, Sweden (PI: Holmstedt), focuses on human–soil relations at the intersection of cultural heritage, urban planning, and ecoart.
Their recent initiative Window to the Underground is an art and science collaboration led by soil ecologist Edith Hammer and her team at Lund University and The Soil Chip Project, in which the interactive studio–stage–cinema Microbio by (p)Art of the Biomass will take new forms.
Link to the event on Zoom.
