Janna Holmstedt

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| >statement
 

Voice, listening, situated practices and sense of place

I am an artist and researcher based in Stockholm, Sweden. I work transdisciplinary with various media and contexts with a particular interest in listening (see for example the artistic research project Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening). In recent years, I have primarily worked with installations, sonic fictions, performances, and lecture performances.
My work is rooted in both contemporary art and performing arts and several installations have been co-produced with Teatr Weimar in Malmö. I often use fictionalized situations and set-ups together with sound. Voice and time are vital ingredients, as well as the situation at hand and what you as visitor bring into it. The stories told, fictional and documentary, are related to what you see, but also the situation you find yourself in while listening. Voice and vision, or lack of vision, are thus used to activate specific perceptions and preconceptions.

Collaborative projects are an important part of my artistic practice and I see them as temporary universities where new approaches and activities can be tested and specific topics explored. In the two-year-project "Monument for the Masses", for example, made in collaboration with Po Hagström, narrative strategies as well as sampling and recontextualization of already existing material were used on a large scale. Here we took an existing proposal for a monument in Estonia, altered it in substantial ways and presented our re-make as a counter-monument. Our proposal was used as a point of departure for mapping stories and rituals surrounding art in public space. Rather than focusing on the values and virtues monuments are said to symbolize, we explored the misunderstandings, conflicting relations and stories associated with them. Another example is “To Mushroom”, made in collaboration with Anna Högberg. We produced a collection of maps that explored social systems and different types of public spaces from an ecological perspective. Concepts such as social capital, exclusion, and democracy were examined – this in order to discuss more or less invisible social values in relation to urban planning.

Together with the film maker and director Karin Wegsjö, I run Nu-institutet [The Now Institute], which is an independent and non-profit culture organization. We have among other things initiated collaborations and international exchange projects with artists and film makers in China, and made the short fiction film "Happiness, a Five-Year Plan" together, which was shot in China and Sweden.
In 2005 I started SQUIDproject.net together with the artist Katja Aglert. "SQUID" is an ever-expanding, online archive of texts written by cultural producers from different countries, but also a framework for offline activities such as readings, artist talks, screenings, etc. Between 2008 and 2013 Martijn van Berkum [NL] was a third project manager.

Research
Since Jan 2018 I'm affiliated researcher with the Posthumanities Hub, and since 1 May, 2019 I'm also Research Engineer for the Hub at the Division of History of Science, Technology and Environment, KTH Royal Institute of Technology.

In my PhD Are You Ready for a Wet Live-In? Explorations into Listening (Lund University, 2017) I explored entangled issues such as multispecies relations, interspecies communication, and the intra-action of bodies, environs and technology. It focused on how sound and listening, in a visually dominated culture, could mediate new relationships with the more-than-human. I depart from the archival material of American neurophysiologist John C. Lilly, who in the 1950s and 1960s conducted controversial scientific experiments with dolphins, as well as on himself.

In my current work I explore and develop situated modes of storying and listening at particular sites and with special attention to soil (human-soil relations, multispecies soil communities, and soil care). My research is situated at the intersection of art, gardening, feminist materialist philosophy and the emerging field of environmental (post)humanities. Mixed methods from place-based, process oriented and participatory art, as well as sound art, are used in combination with non-representational theory and posthumanist methodologies that seeks to transform our way of thinking, storying, be
ing in, and caring for the world.

Theatre
Since 1992 I have also made works for the stage.