Shubhangi Singh’s Birth of A Grenade and Niina Suominen’s Good Stuff part of LABOCINE’s July 2025 issue Fruitopia

3.7.2025

Birth of a Grenade

Shubhangi Singh‘s Birth of A Grenade (featured image) and Niina Suominen‘s Good Stuff are part of LABOCINE‘s July issue Fruitopia. In this curated selection of films, the fruit becomes a prism—splitting into themes of innocence and decay, labor and leisure, climate and colonialism. The films stretch beyond the literal, exploring how fruit seduces, stains, and seeds stories across cultures.

Shubhangi Singh’s experimental film Birth of A Grenade (2024) explores, how for over a hundred years, when the ships belonging to the East India Company brought barrels of saltpetre to the shores of England, they also brought with them a force that determines how we exist in the world today. Saltpetre, also known by its chemical name, Potassium Nitrate (KNO3) was a coveted global commodity that was mined, traded and fought over for its role in the production of gunpowder by competing colonial powers. The film has been hand processed solely in bananas, dates and cocoa powder— that is, materials that would otherwise not be available for use in Helsinki had they not once been carried in the bellies of ships across the heaving seas and into Europe. The hazy, somewhat ghostly images of the film are made possible from the flesh of the fruits thus inherently carrying within them traces of their history and the violence.

Hyvä meininki

In Niina Suominen’s animation Good Stuff (2009) one person’s loss isn’t another’s gain – everyone loses. In the world of losers different laws prevail and there is always plenty of good stuff around. All the food used for the animation was collected from bins.

LABOCINE
July 2025 issue Fruitopia
July 1-31, 2025

More information: LABOCINE – Fruitopia

LABOCINE is an ever-evolving streaming platform that showcases science in cinema in all its flavors, challenging stereotypes in scientific representation.

AV-arkki has promoted and distributed Finnish media art since 1989. AV-arkki’s promotional efforts have made the artists’ participation in this event possible. If you want to hear the latest news from our distribution, subscribe to our newsletter!