Residue – Open Studio

Artistic resarch project about artistic practices as a driving force for circular industrial transition

Participating artists

Residue is an ongoing collaborative project developed by seven artists from the artist collective Korvfabriken, working across sculpture, installation, moving image, sound and material-based practices.

Sara Ekholm Eriksson
Marcus Bergman
Sofia Zwahlen
Sarali Borg
Caroline Nord
Lior Nønne Malue Hansen
Olga Krüssenberg

Emerging from a two-year research project, Residue explores how materials move through geological, industrial and technological systems, continually transforming in form, function and value. During the Open Studio at Färgfabriken, the artists will use the space as a shared working environment, continuing the research through material experiments, conversations, tests and artistic processes. Rather than presenting a finished exhibition, the Open Studio makes an ongoing process accessible to the public and allows the project to develop and change throughout the period.

Developed with support from Vinnova, the project has evolved through field research, visits to mines, steelworks and industrial sites, and investigations of residual materials from the Swedish steel industry. These encounters have become points of departure for individual and collective artistic investigations.

Rather than approaching residue primarily as an abstract or individual notion, the project begins with the collective and material consequences of industrial production and societal development. We work, physically and conceptually, with materials for which industry and society currently have little or no use, exploring the often overlooked traces of extraction, production and the infrastructures that sustain contemporary life.

Transformation lies at the centre of the project.
Through extraction, we transform and reshape our physical surroundings. Mountains become ore. Ore becomes metal. Metal becomes infrastructure, technology and data. Matter continually shifts between geological formations, industrial processes and systems of value.

Industrial by-products accumulate as material remnants, while extraction simultaneously produces absence. What remains is inseparable from the material that has been removed and the landscapes transformed in the process. Residue considers this relationship between material presence and absence.

A contemporary paradox emerges from this material perspective. As society increasingly appears immaterial through digital technologies, artificial intelligence and cloud-based infrastructures, it becomes ever more dependent on physical resources. Every server, mobile phone and AI model begins as geological material extracted from the earth. Behind these seemingly immaterial systems are mines, metals, energy and landscapes. Rather than illustrating these systems directly, Residue seeks to reveal the hidden material relationships that sustain them.

About the Open Studio at Färgfabriken

At Färgfabriken, the seven artistic practices come together within this shared field of research. The Open Studio functions as a temporary laboratory where research, materials and artistic experiments can be brought into the same space.

The artists will work individually and collectively, testing ideas and materials, sharing knowledge and allowing new directions to emerge through the process. Visitors are invited to encounter this process as it unfolds, rather than only its final outcomes.

Extraction is often understood through what is produced, yet every act of extraction also shapes what is removed. Mountains become voids. Landscapes are rewritten. Matter changes state, and value is continuously reassigned.

Residue emerges within this space of transformation, following the material, cultural and geological traces that continue to exist in new forms.

Image above: the group outside Ytterby mine, Resarö, 2026. Photo: Olga Krüssenberg

The project is developed with support from

Vinnova