What would you store in a root cellar? Potatoes, pumpkins, cauliflower – or perhaps memories and knowledge? In troubled times, the root cellar’s function as a place for storage and protection has gained renewed relevance. The group exhibition Survival Kit takes a closer look at artistic strategies for confronting the challenges of the present and the future.

In politically turbulent times, art serves as a way to process and give form to change, conflict, and resistance. Using the root cellar as a conceptual model for storage and preparedness, the exhibition explores art as a resource for ideas, practices, and resistance. The exhibition combines works from the collection of Kalmar konstmuseum with two new site-specific installations by Kultivator and Linda Persson.

The Öland-based art collective Kultivator, run by Mathieu Vrijman and Malin Lindmark Vrijman, has since 2005 been one of Sweden’s most influential voices in eco-social contemporary art. In Survival Kit, they present an entirely new installation based on the root cellar’s qualities of storing and preserving. The installation can be described as a kind of workspace where visitors are invited to reflect on hope and anxiety.

For Survival Kit, they are also reactivating parts of their earlier work Elder’s Hill from 2013. The work consisted of two main components: a root cellar and an outdoor classroom. It was built in Dyestad on Öland, and a model of the work was exhibited at Kalmar konstmuseum the same year.

Linda Persson, an artist based in Småland, works with sculptural processes, material experimentation, and alchemical methods that deepen questions surrounding ecology and matter. For Survival Kit, she is creating an installation that, through water, seed pods, and drawing, engages with cyclical processes and transience. During the course of the exhibition, visitors will also be able to follow the slow erosion of a cannonball back into iron dust.

Survival Kit also includes works from the collection of Kalmar konstmuseum that in various ways evoke the root cellar’s capacity. Visitors encounter paintings by Christine Sundberg (1837–1892), Anders Lindgren (1933–2018), and Sven Ljungberg (1913–2010), alongside dystopian landscapes by the Russian artist Pavel Otdelnov in a series of graphic works from 2022. The series was created in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine and the war crimes committed not only against people, but also against nature. There is a horizon out there – but what awaits beyond it?

The exhibition is part of the Småland Triennial: Worry – Art, Preparedness, Resistance and is produced in collaboration with Linnaeus University within the framework of the interdisciplinary research project Hopemaking: Nurturing Cultures of Positive Resistance.