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. The title draws on the German Hummel and Dutch hommel, meaning “bumblebee”, bringing the insect’s busyness into Sterre’s long-running mythology of office monsters. Hummelmania Paradise Extreme Dreams Depend on Teams includes masks made during workshops with participants from the Lyon region, who also join its live activations. Visitors can wear the masks 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