The Subterranean carnival. Episode 2 – (p)Art of the Biomass / Janna Holmstedt & Malin Lobell, with guests
Exhibition, project rooms
In the project rooms, (p)Art of the Biomass / Holmstedt & Lobell once again descend into the hidden life beneath the ground. The Carnival of the Underground. Episode 2 presents two installations, a further development of the work MIKROBio, dedicated to the subterranean: the teeming life on which we humans depend, yet rarely see or give much thought to. It becomes an exercise in shifts of scale, a play with relationships, and a meditation on landscapes and lifeworlds in transformation. What emerges when we spend time with microbes and their ways of being in the world?
Through the film installations, you are transported into the realm of microbes. They function simultaneously as stage, film studio, cinema, and laboratory. A green-screen stage allows you to “shrink” and be projected into microscopic landscapes of soil life. On the projection screen, which also functions as a microscope slide, you can dance with nematodes and amoebae. You can also crawl into hibernation sacks and, close to the ground, slip into a resting state inspired by cryptobiosis: a dormant mode of life that rotifers and other microorganisms can enter when conditions become too harsh. In this state, life can be paused for thousands of years, only to resume when circumstances once again become favourable. Lying in the hibernation sacks, you can contemplate the cycles of the earth.
The work is part of Holmstedt & Lobell’s ongoing collaboration with Edith Hammer’s Lab and The Soil Chip Project, together with researchers in microbial ecology at Lund University, within the project Windows to the Underground (funded by Formas). Edith Hammer’s Lab has developed a unique method for studying and filming soil-dwelling organisms and fungi without removing them from their living environment or tearing apart the soil ecosystem.
About (p)Art of the Biomass
(p)Art of the Biomass is an art platform for transdisciplinary collaborations and investigations, initiated by Janna Holmstedt and Malin Lobell. They invite exploratory labs, ecosocial sculptures, and site-based investigations where art, ecology, microbiology, cultivation, and speculative thinking intersect. They have worked together since 2019, from Jordmarknaden, initiated by Mossutställningar and Stella d’Ailly, through the art and research project Humus economicus on the role and value of soil in urbanised landscapes, to collaborations with Malmö Art Museum, Gylleboverket, Art Lab Gnesta, and Österängens konsthall. They are members of Den Kollektiva Hjärnan and are also part of the research network The Posthumanities Hub at Linköping University.
About the artists
Malin Lobell is an artist and gardener with long experience working at the intersection of ecological practices, art, and society. Her work centres on questions of the politics of cultivation, plant agency, and how humans and other species shape shared living spaces. She has celebrated the soil work of earthworms, woven networks with pine trees, and crawled into hibernation sacks to learn from rotifers. For several years, she explored the idea of the civic garden as a site of both community and resistance, with plants becoming collaborators and teachers. Her visual language moves between conceptual strategies and poetic investigations, often using participatory processes as a method. Lobell is educated at HDK-Valand and is also trained as a professional gardener, a background that informs her way of combining care, formal sensitivity, and critical thinking.
Janna Holmstedt is an artist and researcher with an interest in listening practices and relational ecologies. In her work, she invites walks, events, and sound-based installations that revolve around places, objects, or beings often relegated to the background. She has accompanied dolphins and earthworms, as well as bladderwrack, maize, and cow parsley, to explore human relationships and entanglements with other species. Holmstedt is educated at Umeå Academy of Fine Arts and earned her PhD in Fine Art in 2017. She led the transdisciplinary research project Humus economicus at the National Historical Museums of Sweden (2021–2025, funded by Formas) and is currently active as a researcher at the Royal College of Music in Stockholm.