Janna Holmstedt

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| >research and artistic development projects
 

Holi Biont
, 2018 (ongoing)

Holi Biont is a collaboration between interdisciplinary artists Janna Holmstedt and Åsa Cederqvist

Our collaboration has grown from a desire to not only develop our intermedia crafts, but also to share and hybridize our different artistic practices and create a new kind of unruly organism – a being that can help us to question aesthetic choices and norms as well as decenter anthropocentric world views through zoomorphic transformations.
 
 
 
   
 
We share an interest in the mingling of technological and digital processes with organic, bodily, and down-to-earth matters. We think in terms of ecologies, cultural metabolism, and composted digital media in an ever-changing natureculture – where bodies, technologies and environments are transformed and fermented. In this ongoing investigation we create, through a series of experimental sessions with invited guests, speculative fabulations with the earthworm as companion and guide. What can we learn from these ancient transformation masters, soil-makers and great digestive fermenters? Into our compositional and decompositional processes, we bring sound, soil, play, sculptural objects, film, performance and storytelling. The sessions are both scripted and improvised in order to allow for open-ended and co-creative processes to emerge. 

Janna Holmstedt
is a Swedish artist and part of the research group the Posthumanities Hub (KTH Royal Institute of Technology). She investigates listening as a situated practice, the cultivation of care and environmental attention, and composition in the expanded field of genre-disobedient art practices. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Umeå University and Lund University, Sweden. 

Åsa Cederqvist practice lies at the intersection of visual arts, film and choreography. Through video, sculpture, installation, photography and extensions with performance she creates humorous, existential and enigmatic, troubling universes that navigate between the subconscious and the rational, the physical and the ephemeral.Her works often suggests a layered narration with a strong sense of transformation, as if they were in a constant making – her recent film Mama Dada Gaga (2019) and her sculpture series Gestures and Gaps (2015-) and the AR app Amorph Real (2019) being good examples of this. She holds a MFA from Konstfack and was 2010-2020 a senior lecturer in the Textile programme at Konstfack, Sweden. 
 
 
 


 
Coming into Being - a worm session #3
Fylkingen November 2019
Coming into Being - a worm session #1
Fylkingen March 2019
Coming into Being - a worm session #3
Fylkingen November 2019
 

The first worm session took place at Fylkingen in March 2019, the second at Vinterviken inJune 2019, and the third at Fylkingen, 9 Nov 2019. A fourth session will be held at the second Alliances and Commonalities conference in Artistic Research 22-24 Oct, 2020, focused on performative and mediated practices.

The project has been part of presentations such as "Mutispecies Communication", a lecture and conversation at Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, Netherlands, in connection to the Zoöp project (February 2019); "What is the role of feminism in relation to the Anthropocene?", part of Imaging/Imagining, the Drawing Room, at Nuda in collaboration with Stockholm University (December 2019); and in the essay "Follow the Blind, Mimic the Wind and Become a Worm" in Unlikely Journal for Creative Arts (November 2020). 

Photos/film stills: Holi Biont (Åsa Cederqvist and Janna Holmstedt)


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