Holi Biont
YEAR: 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.
![]()
Coming into Being - a worm session #3
Fylkingen November 2019
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 has a background in process oriented, participatory, and context-sensitive art practices. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Umeå University and Lund University, Sweden. Her work includes mixed-media installations, interventions, field work, text and performance, audio walks and soundwalks. She is since 2018 part of the postdisciplinary research group The Posthumanities Hub at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research investigates listening and storying as a situated practices; composition in the expanded field of genre-disobedient art practices; and the cultivation of care and environmental attention. www.jannaholmstedt.com
Åsa Cederqvist’s practice lies at the intersection of visual arts, film, and choreography. Through video, sculpture, installation, photography—and extensions with performance—she creates humorous and 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. She holds a MFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Sweden, and was between 2010 and 2020 a senior lecturer in the Textile programme at Konstfack. Currently she is taking part of the post-master course Materialities – Coordinates: Translating Form at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
![]()
Coming into Being - a worm session #1
Fylkingen March 2019
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.
Fylkingen November 2019
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 has a background in process oriented, participatory, and context-sensitive art practices. She holds a Ph.D. in Fine Arts in Visual Arts from Umeå University and Lund University, Sweden. Her work includes mixed-media installations, interventions, field work, text and performance, audio walks and soundwalks. She is since 2018 part of the postdisciplinary research group The Posthumanities Hub at KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Her research investigates listening and storying as a situated practices; composition in the expanded field of genre-disobedient art practices; and the cultivation of care and environmental attention. www.jannaholmstedt.com
Åsa Cederqvist’s practice lies at the intersection of visual arts, film, and choreography. Through video, sculpture, installation, photography—and extensions with performance—she creates humorous and 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. She holds a MFA from Konstfack University of Arts, Craft and Design, Sweden, and was between 2010 and 2020 a senior lecturer in the Textile programme at Konstfack. Currently she is taking part of the post-master course Materialities – Coordinates: Translating Form at the Royal Institute of Art, Stockholm.
Fylkingen March 2019
Coming into Being - a worm session #1
Fylkingen March 2019
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 in June 2019, and the third at Fylkingen, 9 Nov 2019. A fourth session was held Oct 12th 2020 at Färgfabriken, Stockholm. And a fifth session was taking place as part of second Alliances and Commonalities conference in Artistic Research 22-24 Oct, 2020, focusing on performative and mediated practices.
Holi Biont 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)