THE COLLABORATORY

THE COLLABORATORY

Through our Humus Economicus Collaboratory we will gather artists, scientists, environmental-, urban-, gender-, and heritage scholars, and connect with a growing number of soil stewards to counteract what we have come to call soil blindness, inspired by the evocative term plant blindness [1]. Below you’ll find our Companions & Partners and the Networks we are part of.

We will conduct field-work and arrange walks, exhibitions, workshops and other public events, as well as art & science retreats, to build a thriving environmental art and humanities milieu through localized and situated methods of working. Glimpses and reports from our activities will be posted on the website.

The research forms an alliance between National Historical Museums (SHM), KTH Royal Institute of Technology, and Linköping University through the lively research community of The Posthumanities Hub. The Posthumanities Hub (KTH/LiU) is a strong Environmental Humanities environment in Sweden, and is at the forefront of feminist posthumanities research in Sweden and internationally. It is an international platform for enacting, networking, and hosting research in postdisciplinary arts and sciences. Through National Historical Museums (SHM), an array of historical museums and their audiences are reached.

Please, contact us if you want to know more.

Notes
1. See Wandersee, J.H.; Schussler, E.E. (2001) Toward a theory of plant blindness. Plant Sci. Bull. 47: 2–9.

Companions & Partners

Christina Schaffer is a PhD candidate at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) and a cultivator, focusing on agroforestry in both theory and practice. She teaches interdisciplinary courses that touch on sustainable development at Stockholms University, Sweden. Her interests include a sustainable food supply and urban ecology. She is since 2012 running a summer course in a small forest garden at the university campus. The forest garden can be found on the premises where once The Experimental Field once was located.

Danielle Wilde is Associate Professor of Embodied Design at the University of Southern Denmark, Kolding (SDU). She directs SDU’s [body|bio] Soft Lab for participatory research through design, citizen engagement with science and food as a multi-species concern. Works with diverse stakeholders to forge regenerative practices, policies, technologies and relationships, using experimental means. Ongoing research involves transforming the Municipality of Kolding, Denmark, into a Food Futures Living Lab, as part of the EU H2020 project: ‘FUSILLI: Fostering the Urban Food System Transformation through Innovative Living Labs Implementation.’
Website : daniellewilde.com/wilde
Soft Lab : bit.ly/wilde_softlab

Germund Sellgren is an educator with long experience of outdoor pedagogy. He has worked for the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF for 17 years as an educator within Education for Sustainable Development ESD nationally and internationally. He has authored two books in the field of outdoor education and has created a large number of educational materials for WWF. Today he works as a consultant in the field of education. During 2020-2021, he is part of course called Regenerative Agriculture and Holistic Management at an independent adult education college. Among the interests are photography and filmmaking as well as vegetable growing as an amateur. He has recently written his credo embracing soil. Germund organizes workshops and collects soil stories for the Humus Economicus Collaboratory.

Sidsel Bonde is an artist and designer with a Master of Fine Arts from Bergen Art Academy, Norway. Her latest works explores past and present landscape transformations, as well as historical and ornamental traces related to agricultural practices and how these inform conceptions of agriculture today. She works together with Frøydis Lindén and Malin Lobell in the project Skifte.Land
Website: www.sidselbonde.com
Skifte.Land: www.skifte.land
Ichnofauna Teknoflorawww.spriten.no/sidsel-bonde-ichnofauna-teknoflora

Teemu Lehmusruusu is an artist and initiator of the transdisciplinary Trophic Verses platform that explores the phenomena of soil and its linked ecosystems. He collaborates with biologists, soil and climate scientists as well as farmers and gardeners, and is part of the Carbon Action community. He is currently doctoral candidate at Aalto University and in the process of building an art farm at Kemiönsaari, Finland.
Trophic Verses : www.trophicverses.com
Carbon Action : carbonaction.org

Åsa Elzén s an artist living and working in Näshulta, Sörmland, Sweden. Her practice is transdisciplinary and often manifests through installation, text, textile, video, performance and participatory situations. She engages currently in the notion of ”the fallow” (Swe: träda) as artistic methodology and ethical stand-point as well as in relation to temporality, memory, environmental destruction, queer feminist- and more-than-human historiography. Lately her focus has been on the legacy of the ecology- and resilience practices of the Fogelstad group, active approx. 1920-1950.
Website: www.asaelzen.com
Träda: www.sormlandsmuseum.se/utstallningar/trada/

Jenny Salmson is a permaculturist and soil activist with a background in the climate organizations Klimataktion and Klimax. She is trained for the Soil Food Web and microbiologist Dr. Elaine Ingham and a certified permaculture designer. She initiates and runs pedagogical co-cultivations in the association Odla Ihop, which currently has five large cultivation sites in the Stockholm region. She creates permaculture designs and edible gardens and develops the sites with micro-life-focused composting methods, permacultural techniques, example cultivation of old wheat varieties and a biodiversity-enhancing meadow area. She holds workshops and conducts ongoing pedagogical and organizational work in Odla Ihop. Jenny has held the full-time education Grow locally – change globally and the courses Urban Edible Garden and Life in the Soil at Långholmen’s and Jakobsberg’s folkhögskola.
Website: www.odlaihop.se

Networks

Soil Care Network is an interdisciplinary, global community of scholars and practitioners animated by the love of, sascination with, and dedication to soils. It is a place for soil scholars and those interested in soil research to find one another, and a space of supportive and creative exchange of ideas. The Network was founded by Dr Anna Krzywoszynska at University of Sheffield, UK, in 2017.

Anthropogenic Soils is a collaboratory at the University of Oslo, Norway, and part of the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. They focus on practices and understandings of remediation and soil repair in response to historical and contemporary concerns about soil health, and bring together scholars, practitioners, and artists to develop new research questions and interdisciplinary methodologies for the study of soils in the Anthropocene. Principal investigators are Daniel Münster and Ursula Münster.

The Posthumanities Hub is a feminist research group and a multi-university platform for more-than-human humanities, founded in 2008 by Professor Cecilia Åsberg at Linköping University (LiU), connected to the Gender, nature, culture platform of Åsberg’s LiU chair. Bringing science and art to the humanities, the Hub has been a transformational force of the societally relevant, extra-disciplinary, super-networked, new humanities in Sweden and beyond.

State of the Art Network (SOTAN) is a Nordic-Baltic transdisciplinary network of artists, practitioners, researchers, and organizations who have come together to discuss the role, responsibility, and potential of art and culture in the Anthropocene. State of the Art Network is initiated and headed by Bioart Society/SOLU in Finland, with The Posthumanities Hub as partner and co-pi. SOTAN is supported by Nordic Culture Point, Nordic Culture Fund, and A. P. Møller Foundation.