PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

Recover Laboratory (RecLab) is a Finnish multi-art collective based in Helsinki whose surrealistic works and art experiences vary from obscure performance art pieces to immersive art productions. In RecLab’s works, moments stretch and stop as glitches, where anything can happen – just like on an ordinary day. One of the pioneers of Finnish immersive art, Recover Laboratory is led by two artistic directors; contemporary circus artist Miradonna Sirkka and visual artist Sofi Häkkinen; along with the executive director and experience designer Inna Huttunen. The collective’s artistic thinking is based on contact between people, honesty, queerness and a certain freedom provided by art. RecLab’s repertoire is divided into 3 segments: CORE works represent the artistic research and practice of RecLab’s ADs – the deep end of performance art, and a testing ground for new practices and ideas. AVEC consists of carefully curated co-production works that are independent and supported by RecLab. MORE entails all the other stuff the collective does, ranging from workshops and talks, to publications and residencies in the group’s working space in Helsinki. At the core of the group's expertise are participatory and immersive artworks, with key themes of interpersonal encounters, the feeling of being seen and heard, and the weird surrealism of the mundane. RecLab works extensively with developing more responsible practices in the arts field and was awarded in 2024 with a Maineteko award for its extensive work in advancing equality and new modes of operating in the performing arts. In their artistic work RecLab explores and creates alternative ways or being in and seeing the world, taking in account also the other species living with us on this planet – treating the world we all share with tenderness.

I’m a research-based, interdisciplinary artist, focusing on installation and performance. Acknowledging the vibrancy and equality of material embodiments, be they human or more-than-human, the developed work is often sculptural, but it is a sculpture that is attuned to the changing nature of things; sculpture that is, in this sense, always a performance. I work with relationality as the essential structure of being and imagine futures of more sustainable coexistence.

Co-creation and collaboration across species and disciplines is an important part of the way I work. Previously, I’ve collaborated with composers, botanists, mineralogists, breakdancers, various orchid species, biotope experts, beatboxers and web developers. I’ve worked with leading scientists from the National Botanic Garden, Institute for Environmental Solutions and Nature Foundation in Latvia, as well as the Association for the Conservation of Antalya Orchids and Biodiversity in Turkey and various individual nature experts and scientists.

I hold an MA in Performing Arts from the Iceland University of Arts (2026) and a BA in Contemporary Art Practices and Philosophy as a joint degree between the University of Dundee and Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art and Design (2016, Scotland).

Thomas Seest has been working with landscapes and natural materials. At Vild Park in the municipal Guldborgsund he has worked in collective formats and collaborations. He holds a PDC in permaculture and insists on regenerating nature and culture through his works - Art can make the sun rise and the earth quake.

Fern Orchestra is an Art and Science Collective that has studied subjects such as photosynthesis, closed biosphere and plant neurology in their works. Works are characterized by the presence of living organisms other than humans.

Land Before Time is an artistic partnership from Sweden, formed by Joanna Holewa Chrona and Yared Tilahun Cederlund. Blending dance, deejaying, choreography, and sound composition, their work explores rhythm, connection, and the spaces between movement and music. Rooted in both local and global influences, they create performances that merge streetdance traditions with experimental sound and improvisation. Land Before Time’s piece Waterkind was selected by Aerowaves as part of the Twenty25 Artists, and presented at the Spring Forward Festival 2025. By drawing inspiration from the properties of water, the company encourages a deeper awareness of interdependence, between people, nature, and community, highlighting water as both a physical and spiritual connector that sustains all forms of life.

I am a Polish visual artist, who uses different forms of expression. Recently, I most often create actions, collaborative workshops, installations, site-specific projects, and projects in public spaces. I am interested in a creative tension that arises on a border of a problem that I find worthy of engagement and the question of a proper and interesting aesthetic form, in which I would like to present my reflections. Using a variety of media, I do not try to become a 'specialist' in any of them. My projects are most often research-based and relate to a specific issue or a specific place. I am an extrovert rather than an introvert. Topics that interest me are public space and public sphere, urban space/habitat, the relationship between culture and nature, and possible scenarios for the future of our planet and mankind. I like collaborating with other artists and representatives from other fields. I am a person with many hats. Apart from creating visual art, I am a curator of exhibitions, and I write texts about contemporary culture.

Krista Burāne, a visionary artist from Latvia, transcends the boundaries of creative expression. Born in 1971, she dons many hats – a theatre and film director, an editor, a playwright, a scriptwriter and an interdisciplinary artmaker. A true believer in art's capacity to ignite new perspectives, her creations challenge senses and provoke deep reflection. Krista Burāne fosters a space for dialogue not just between humans but also between humans and other beings. As an advocate for documentary, participatory and site-specific theatrical formats, Krista passionately believes in the capacity of art not only to engage viewers intellectually and emotionally but also to involve them physically and actively. Her works have travelled to many international festivals and have been nominated and awarded multiple times for national theatre and cinema awards in Latvia.

Our artistic approach is always site-specific. We carefully consider the environmental, social, and historical context of each location in which we work. Whether creating projects in the natural landscapes of Neringa or in the public spaces of Klaipėda, we seek to reveal the unique identity of a place and foster meaningful connections between people, environment, and culture. We believe that landscapes are not merely physical settings but living spaces shaped by memory, community, ecology, and ongoing transformation.

Tuvumi is an independent dance organisation characterised by creatively innovative productions and the systematic, sustainable dissemination of dance performances and events. It is difficult to separate Tuvumi from its founders—the dance artist collective IevaKrish—whose choreographic work largely takes place under the organisation’s umbrella in a symbiotic collaboration. While based in Riga, Tuvumi strategically expands its activities to Latvian regions, the Baltics, the Nordic countries, and Europe. Tuvumi and its associated artists regularly represent Latvia and the dance sector at international events, including festivals, conferences, symposiums, and platforms. 
Since 2022, Tuvumi administration has been supported by the State Culture Capital Foundation’s co-funding program for professional non-governmental performing arts organisations, which has enabled Tuvumi to implement an extensive dance performance and event program at the renovated Riga Circus building, launch HOROS, a dance exchange program in Aizpute, Southern Kurzeme, featuring dance residencies, a curated mini-festival, and regular guest performances, transform previous occasional guest performances into structured national and international tours, making high-quality contemporary stage art more accessible to audiences in Latvia, the Baltics, and the Nordic region, and in 2024, expand its participation in the Latvijas Skolas Soma program, focusing on engaging and developing young audiences.

Marika Hedemyr is a Swedish choreographer, artist, and artistic researcher working with public art, choreography, and mixed reality. She is a pioneer in Sweden of site-specific augmented and mixed reality performances in public space. Her work explores coexistence through emotional and political relationships between people and places. Her site-specific mixed reality walks combine documentary material, augmented reality technology, and performative formats. Between 2024 and 2030, she is developing a series of performances exploring coexistence with planet Earth through the elements earth, water, fire, and air, as immersive experiences that open new perspectives on relations in the landscape. She also engages in artistic research and regularly publishes on artistic practice and the role of art in society.

Wunderland is an entrance to a world where conceptions open and multiple possibilities arise; where understanding is sensually kaleidoscopic. A place without known definitions. Wunderland creates experiences, performances and workshops. The performances are usually held in specific places and are immersive and participatory. They can be held indoors, in city streets, on the water, in tents, public spaces or in nature.

Other Spaces is a Helsinki based Live Art collective founded in 2004. The group’s artistic work is based on collective physical exercises that allow us to get in touch with forms and ways of being and experiencing that are unfamiliar to humans, in other words, to visit "other spaces". Through the exercises we get familiar with e.g. plants, animals, mycelia, stones, cars, humanoids, particle level events and galaxy groups.

Beyond Darkness is a choreographic duo which creates higly immersive experiences through sensorial performances and ecological installations. They view their creations as ecosystems, where they invite for explorations of human and beyond-human perspectives, lives and stories.

I work cross-aesthetically within the fields of choreography, performance, video and installation using the body as a living instrument for encounters, research and co-creation. The works revolve around encounters and intra-actions between humans and more-than-human bodies and worlds including rocks, fungi and plants, wind, waters and tides, soil types and larger geographical areas.

Since 2020 I focus on landscapes shapes by human intervention like extraction, production, waste and infrastructure to explore, what care and reciprocity looks like here. The works employ immersion, co-creation and long duration and draw inspiration from both scientific and academic research to develop embodied knowledge and encounters of reciprocity and co-creation.

My work formats includ performances (both participatory and solo, site specific and in art spaces), sound and video installations, exhibitions, writings and publications.

Previous performances and exhibitions (selection): Metropolis (DK), OIT (NO), Louisiana Museum of Modern Art (DK), Kunsthal Charlottenborg (DK), Roskilde Festival (DK), Heartland Festival (DK), KØS Museum (DK), The Danish National Gallery (DK), Festival of Future Nows / Hamburger Bahnhof (DE), Pergine Festival (IT), Breath Days (IT), Art Center Silkeborg Bad (DK) Liselund (DK), The Tunnelfactory (DK) amongst others.

Sinna Virtanen is a writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist based in Helsinki. She creates performances, writes plays, and develops multimedia installations. She is particularly interested in expanding the understanding of what theatre can be and in exploring its possibilities beyond established forms. Her works play with notions of time and space, liminal spaces, reaching into the past and the future, and different forms of afterlife. Working across scales and contexts is central to her practice. Virtanen works reach toward the predramatic where weather conditions, natural forces, and more-than-human beings strongly shape both the reality of the performance and the experience of it.

Secret Hotel creates performances that are both immediately sensory and stimulating for the intellect. The focus is to raise people’s attention to our relation to the natural world, or as it is called these years: the more-than-human. Secret Hotel at present have performances about (and with) ants, about bees and about the forest. Our work ranges from site-specific events and performances, to artistic as well as concrete hands-on work in the food gardens of “Space for Earth Wisdom” and Earthwise Residency.

Linh Le is a performance artist and climate activist. She explores the sensuousness and philosophy of species, makes rituals for the diversity of life and builds interactive spaces for contemplation and action. As a child of freedom fighters who came to Denmark as boat refugees from Vietnam, and as a witness to their struggles in Danish society and her own experiences with racism, Linh Le is strongly called to free herself through dance and performance. Linh Le is educated in Aesthetics and Culture from Aarhus University and Performance Design & Planning from Roskilde University.

Sisters Hope is a Copenhagen-based performance group and movement spearheading a whole new way of performance artwork. Their work unfolds at the intersection of immersion, intervention, activism, research and pedagogy. In their large-scale durational performance pieces they explore different aspects of what they call a Sensuous Society – A potential new world arising from the post-economical and ecological crisis. In their perennial performance, they have introduced a whole new artistic paradigm that they term ‘Inhabitation’ stimulating ecologic connectedness and sustainable futures. Core to Sisters Hope’s practice is what they call ‘the Poetic Self’, an inner inherent poetic potential that shapes both our inner and outer landscape. Through the Poetic Self and various formats Sisters Hope explores the potential of the sensuous across landscapes, cities, continents and unfolds what connects us as humans through sensuous and poetic encounters.

Katarina Skår Lisa is an educated choreographer, dancer and teacher who through artworks conveys the relationship between poetry, art, and nature. She lives in Nesodden, a half-island outside Oslo, but she is also finding her home in the very north of Norway, in Varjjat / Varanger in the Sami area of Finnmark. In both these places she makes relational inquiries towards and with the land, cultural relations and to the two fjords Bunnefjord/Oslofjord and Varangerfjord. In her master project in choreography ‘Gift of Stone’ 2019, she explored what good relations means to and with landscapes and intangible cultural heritages, seen with inspiration from an indigenous worldview. From this point of view she hopes that relations met and shared through the artistic practices, can create spaces for deep being and listening in togetherness, yet also integration through caring/soft actions and contemplation of our and theirs belonging to a multiple and diverse more- than human world.

hello!earth is Jacob Langaa-Sennek, set designer and visual artist, and Vera Maeder, choreographer and performance artist. With hello!earth, the audience is at the center as co-creators of the artistic works. The audience experiences, senses, and acts in performances that explore our consciousness and the myth of reality. Through several years, hello!earth has worked on developing gently staged sequences that lead to a heightened awareness and consciousness in a search for new spiritual and sensory communities. With input from philosophers and experts, hello!earth creates an artistic laboratory with space for big and fragile visions. Here, new thoughts and ideas can become reality, and here, the world is created instead of being consumed.

Olive Bieringa and Otto Ramstad have been working collaboratively as BodyCartography since 1998. Our artistic and educational work cultivates tools for collective evolution in this moment of planetary crisis. Through somatic, dance, choreographic and curatorial practice we work with resonant, relational and regenerative approaches that support the vital materiality of bodies, minds, and the more-than-human world.

Katrine Faber is a performance artist, voice artist, composer, stage director, video and sound artist and installation artist. She is the artistic director of Teater Viva in Denmark, which investigates and develops interdisciplinary spaces, where we can meet ourselves, each other and our living surroundings in an expanded resonance. She is educated as an actress at Istituto Di Arte Scenica in Italy and as a singer and voice teacher at The Roy Hart Center in France and at Nadine George`s Voice Studio International in England. In addition, she is an educated psychotherapist specializing in voice, body and mythology. Faber has done a year-long exploration of the human voice and of the voices of the more than human; song, sound, narrative and resonance as a way to connect with the world and ourselves. Since 2015 with Singing Our Place: an international cross-art project exploring the resonance between people, our living environment and our shared future.

Höyhentämö is a community of artists producing contemporary theatre, dance and other performances. An interest and curiosity in different and emerging forms, techniques and perspectives of performing arts, and an exploratory method of working are at the core of our artistic practice. Through our work, we seek to challenge our own perceptions and habits, and we believe that in doing so we can also enter into a dialogue with viewers, other artists and the world. Our work is informed by an awareness and concern for our relationship to our environments (both human and non-human) and its future. It has included approaches such as community-based efforts to reimagine our lifestyle (Hunter-gatherers, 2021-2024, hoyhentamo.fi/h-g), explorations of activism and catastrophising (Katastrofiesitys/Catastrophe performance, 2022), poetic exploration of the cycles of life (butoh-performance Death and Withering, 2025), and straight-up utopias (always, in some way). 

Helle Siljeholm is an artist and choreographer based in Oslo, Norway, currently pursuing a PhD at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts. Her multidisciplinary practice spans film, installation, sculpture, choreography, and performance. Her research focuses on geological entities—such as mountains and land formations—and their complex entanglements with human, natural, and cultural systems across geological time, the present moment, and possible futures. Helle’s artistic work and research are strongly influenced by a decade of collaborative artistic projects in the Middle East, particularly in Lebanon, Palestine, and Jordan.

Her work has been presented at a range of international venues and festivals, including: Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo (No), Festival 10 Sentidos (ES), Reykjavik Dance Festival (IS), Walk&Talk Biennale- Gestures of Abundance (PT), Greek Film Archive (GR), Sísmograf (ES), Biennale Gherdëina 9: Parliament of Marmots (IT), Bolzano Danza / Haydn Foundation (IT), PCAI – Polygreen Arts and Culture Initiative (GR), Landart Gjerdrum (No), The Machine Is Us (MUNCH Triennale) and MUNCH (Opening) (No), VEGA | ARTS (DK), Black Box Teater, Høstscena, Rosendal Teater, Jugendstilsenteret and KUBE, Oslo Kunstforening, BEK, Akershus Kunstsenter (No), National Gallery of Iceland (IS), Ramallah Contemporary Dance Festival (PS), Athens Biennale (GR), BIPOD – Beirut International Platform of Dance (LB), Nordic Panorama – Film and Documentary Festival (SE), Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart (DE).

www.themountainbody.com 

Tora Balslev/Daily Fiction is a dancer and performance artist. Using the body as a tool, she practices strategies for presence. She explores relationships between human and more-than-human bodies in a movement-based work related to existence and perspective. Tora's works are created over time and are part of an ongoing dialogue with researchers, audiences, students, and various local and social groups.

Emma Fält is a multidisciplinary artist working with drawing, installation, performing arts, and participatory practices. Their main interests are in live acts, contact and togetherness. Fält is inspired by the body, its boundaries, and possibilities to connect. Fält is exploring the trace we leave and seeks to expand and stretch the understanding of drawing and the ways to present it.

"For me, drawing is a multidisciplinary way of doing things. It is not directly related to visuality, but above all, it is corporeality. It creates a possibility to study the experience and thinking processes through the trace. My practice focuses on soundscapes, dialogue and the relation between traces and matter. I understand drawing as a way of being, a journey of finding one’s voice, an intimate, wordless dialogue, and a manifestation of presence. Doing it together can allow strangers to experience connection and share space. Drawing touches from a distance."

Sara Gebran is a choreographer, dancer, lecturer at Stockholm University of the Arts, author of 4 books, and urban planner. Her works are situated within the expanded field of choreography. At the moment she is combining the power of art’s aesthetic and environmental law, assisted by environmental lawyers from GARN. Her 4 years research-performance is called The Forests Imaginary Trial (2023-2026). In The Forests’ Trial 2024 with premier 07.10.24, she combines choreography and environmental law practice in a staging of a fictional trial. The audience is invited as judge, representing nature, to point out those responsible for two interconnected environmental disasters: the mercury pollution from the Cheminova factory in Denmark and the mercury pollution from illegal mining in the Amazon in Venezuela. Welcome coproducers for next years sequal: The Forests’ Trial: Repair 2025. www.saragebran.com & www.la-chicharra.com

WunschMachine is a Denmark-based performing arts company creating site-specific, sensory works rooted in landscape, local communities, and lived experience. Working at the intersection of performance, dramaturgy, physical theatre, anthropology, and ritual, we develop artistic encounters that unfold beyond traditional theatre spaces—in gardens, cemeteries, quarries, villages, and public landscapes. Our practice is grounded in deep research into specific places and their human and more-than-human inhabitants. Through participatory performances, walks, installations, and community-based projects, we explore how art can strengthen relationships between people, place, memory, and ecology. Local citizens, choirs, children, and community groups often become active collaborators in shaping the works. Based in rural South Zealand, WunschMachine is committed to creating accessible yet experimental performance—what we call a “popular avant-garde.” Our work invites audiences to experience landscapes not as backgrounds, but as active agents, fostering embodied attention, ecological awareness, and new forms of collective imagination.

Katrīna Neiburga is a Latvian artist in whose practice landscape and the material world are not a backdrop but a participant. In works created over more than twenty years, she works with found objects and seasonal rituals, observing how place and matter hold memory. Melting, decaying and earth-bound materials become a way of listening to the more-than-human world and of slowing the gaze towards what is alive around us.

Maria Viftrup (DK b.1993) is working with care for the unvalued, the dusty, the smallest, and the sensuous. Her mixes visual art, performance and experimental design. She facilitates meetings between humans and matter. Her practice often includes other people into experiments, which is a way of challenging her own artistic control and creating a generous space for dialogues between artist, viewer and matter. Her colorful, sensuous universe invites into care and curiosity about themes such as other-than-human worlds, ecosystems, resources, waste and value.

Through performing arts, Scenekunstkompaniet Øy explores humanity's relationship to nature, technology and community. The work is driven by a desire to break down the barriers that separate us, both from each other and from ecosystems. Using interdisciplinary methods and experimental formats, we combine biology, mythology and science fiction to challenge familiar notions of belonging, identity and interaction.

My artistic practice is about relationships between nature, technology, and science. For the first time nature in my works was shown in 2011 in an experimental photography series Recycled Nature. Since then, I have continued to work with these themes related to nature and moved to work directly in nature, not only reflecting on it. I have noticed that my work has sometimes been considered to be about ecology. For me, my work is not about ecology. It is about our relationships with nature, environment, and technology after introducing nature to my work by augmenting some aspects of an environment. This symbiosis allows me to observe what is happening when the environment meets a foreign body. Not only do I use science to support the concept of my works, but also I am trying to use scientific methods to conduct experiments and document and visualize their outcomes of them. I see my role as a mediator between my work and the environment. It is important for me not to interfere with my work, while it is in its designated environment. I am driven by unknown results and wish to find something new. At the same time, I am enjoying the process of my experiments while performing them.

Annelie Stokke Grimwade is a Swedish Sámi-British artist based between Copenhagen and Oslo. She works across sculpture, writing and performance, transforming gathered and upcycled materials through ceramic processes into speculative artefacts, installations and participatory situations. Her practice is an active engagement with landscape, memory and more-than-human relations, often beginning with materials marked by ecological, historical and social forces. Informed by Sámi ways of knowing, animist thought, archaeology and feminist ecology, Grimwade’s work asks what the living world might teach us about relation, responsibility and the imagining of more thriving futures.

Tellervo Kalleinen is a Helsinki-based artist and songwriter whose projects spark creative processes and generate temporary communities. Her conceptually driven participatory practice takes diverse forms, from moving image works to performance. She embraces absurdity as fertile ground for unexpected perspectives and unlikely encounters. For her, performance is a means of creating improbable situations between performer and audience, such as Recycle You, in which she recycles audience members’ outdated opinions.

Kalleinen has been one half of the artist duo with Oliver Kochta-Kalleinen since 2002. Their Complaints Choir project has been realised in nearly 200 cities worldwide. Alongside moving image works such as The Making of Utopia, People in White and Archipelago Science Fiction, they have realised several public art commissions. Their most recent work is The Most Valuable Clock in the World as part of Oulu2026, the European Capital of Culture. The large wind-up mechanical-electronic marvel displays valuable everyday moments donated by locals, framed by slow moments from local nature – phenomena, species and habitat types that are vulnerable to climate change or otherwise under threat.