Mette Sterre – Hummelmania Paradise Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams, 2026

The office belongs to the hummelman in Mette Sterre’s bureaucratic dreamscape. Creatures made from rubber bands occupy desks and drift between photocopiers and towers of paper, rooted in the mythology of monsters that Mette Sterre has been developing for many years. Hummelmania Paradise Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams includes masks made with the contribution of residents of La Mulatière during collective workshops. The masks are activated through performances created with members of Lyon’s drag community: Cody Debord (aka Vega), Luse (aka Thanatos), Eloan and Sarah Seini (aka Fagottyfrog). Visitors can wear helmets and propel themselves at speed on wheeled office chairs around a rally-like course of turns and obstacles. The installation recalls office-chair racing, whose first German championship was held in 2008, following earlier races in Switzerland. Its emergence coincided with the global financial crisis and a wider destabilisation of work and office life.

Through performance, sculpture and installation, Mette Sterre develops a practice centred on the fabrication of full-body masks and wearable forms. These structures alter movement and perception, generating new bodily languages shaped by restriction and extension. Drawing on grotesque and carnivalesque traditions, she mobilises material transformation to disrupt conceptions of the human body. Her practice combines intuitive improvisation with sustained material research, producing environments in which bodies appear hybrid, unstable and continuously in formation, testing the limits of embodiment.

This work was created as part of Biennale en territoires