Missing poster campaign, Tampere – Hämeenlinna, Finland, 2025

Photo: Eva Bubla

Microbial Childhood Collaboratory

Artist-scientist team: Erika Aalto, Eva Bubla, Mira Grönroos, Zsuzsa Millei, Jan Varpanen

Sound designer: Tuure Tammi

At the start of August, posters began to appear in the city of Tampere and Hämeenlinna, calling attention for “missing kins,” lifeforms once thriving in our cities, and a human-sized gut invited families to rediscover these connections at Hippalot Festival.

The guerilla poster campaign and interactive installation of the Microbial Childhood Collaboratory, a multidisciplinary artist-scientist team, is dedicated to exploring the deep interconnections between human health and biodiverse environments.

The posters popping up in the city directed the passers-by attention to orphaned trees longing for their mother’s care, or the soil beneath them yearning for the shelter of fallen leaves and the hum of pollinators it once hosted. But it’s not just the forest that suffers — our own bodies are missing the environmental microbes that once made us more resilient to disease. We are all deeply interconnected with the living world around us. Like members of one vast, extended family, we must care for one another — tree, soil, insect, and human alike.