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).

I am a visual artist and work with the landscape through a performative action. I examine the many layers of the given landscape, it can be the historical, ethnological, biological and social layers. The local population in the area always has a large role in the creation of the work, and I work with the materials that are on site. In doing so, I create a new narrative that connects past, present and future with the utmost respect for the place I work with.

Thomas Seest is a Danish visual artist whose practice centres on ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and regenerative approaches to art. Rather than creating artworks solely for human audiences, he explores how art can engage with ecosystems, microorganisms, and non-human life as active participants.

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.

Oblivia was founded in 2000 in Helsinki and started to work site specifically for the first three years. Then we have explored blackboxes and theaters keeping up with the sensitivity of the sites in the performances. Lately, as we started to explore and work in experimental music theater we have returned to site specific in addition to the black box. Oblivia has always worked with ideas of structures. Whether it is the physical structures of a place or space - architectural, landscapes or political, power and emotional, social structures. iT also reflects in the way we work: collectively and interdisciplinary. Since 2024 when we returned to site specific work at the Münchener Biennale with the first work in the Turtle series, we have been and are concerned with the impact of the human on earth, and how to think, act, resonate and express the Anthropocene and it's impacts, the past and present of Earth and all who are living or has lived on earth, and in a rather metaphysical way work for a possible future for all living. The Turtle series spans from the dinosaurs time to the present with glimpses towards the future. The abstract and essayistic performances reflect on the entanglement of the past and the present, all living and not living on planet Earth.

Malin Arnell is an artist, researcher, and educator working through performance, installation, and long-term collaborative processes. Their practice explores the intersections of feminist, queer, posthuman, and ecological perspectives, developing embodied, relational, and site-responsive artistic methods. For over twenty-five years, Arnell has created spaces for collective experimentation, learning, and care, where art becomes a way of engaging with intertwined social and ecological worlds. Current long-term projects include Forest Calling – A Never-ending Contaminated Collaboration or Dancing is a Form of Forest Knowledge with Åsa Elzén, a fifty-year artistic research project on forest stewardship, and an ongoing collaboration with Mar Fjell exploring queer-feminist companionship and sustainable forms of working together. Arnell is a Postdoctoral Artistic Researcher in RESPIRE: Planetary Breathing in Asphyxiating Times at Utrecht University, contributing to interdisciplinary explorations of forests, oceans, and soils as planetary lungs.

Other Spaces is a Helsinki-based Live Art collective founded in 2004. The core of the practice is based on collective body exercises that allow participants to experience unfamiliar, non-human forms of being and visit "other spaces". In weekly rehearsals, new exercises are invented and developed. These physical techniques are used to build participatory performances, workshops, and public demonstrations. Exercises focus on themes like swimming in a fish school, growing roots like a tree, connecting through mycelium, or embodying a forest ecosystem.
The focus is placed on changing habits to better meet the challenges of the anthropocene and the ecological crisis. The goal is to increase the understanding of interspecies relations and humanity's role within the ecological system. All recent performance projects address the position and responsibility of mankind regarding ecosystem preservation. The work suggests a sustainable transformation from consumer to citizen.

Yohei Hamada is a dance artist currently based on the island of Røst in northern Norway but originally from Japan. His work explores how movement emerges through the relationship between the body and its environment. Landscape, in his approach, is a condition that continually shapes perception, behaviour, and culture. Through choreography, site-responsive performances, and long-term artistic research, he investigates how humans are formed by the places they inhabit and, in turn, become part of the ever changing landscape itself.

Recent projects have focused on northern landscapes stretching across Eurasia, attempting to grasp the missing links between Northern Europe and East Asia. Rather than separating nature and culture or human beings from nature, his practice asks how people, materials, and environments continuously shape one another. Dance becomes a way of sensing these relationships and of imagining how humans might live differently within an ever changing planet.

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.

LATERNA develops embodied practices that cultivate belonging by engaging physically, sensuously, and instinctively with what lives in and around us. We nurture capacities for connection, believing these are essential for creating artistic, social, political, and ecological change. Our interdisciplinary work always begins with movement and acknowledging our being through our bodies. Through being-ness, materials, sound, and site- and landscape-specific choreography, we create temporary collectives and rituals that reveal connections between the human and more-than-human world, and between artists, local communities, activists, academics, and audiences. In our six-year long project CoSA - Concerning the Spiritual in Art we made several site-and landscape specific performances, a choreographic growing of sister gardens in two countries (NO/RU), published a book, Utopian Gardens, and hosted a 5-days festival Hidden Connections – Visible Ecologies, with more than 25 invited artists and scholars. https://blackbox.no/nb/festival-hidden-connections-visible-ecologies/ 

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 creates participatory cross-disciplinary artworks with a relational approach, where the presence of the audience is the co-creating and central element. The base of the work is an inquiry into consciousness and an exploration of the myth of reality. An attempt to unfold the potential of possible relations between people and place and make interconnectedness and diversity tangible. The works are always spaces for an audience to experience, sense, do and meet.

hello!earth insists that art is a place for big and fragile visions. A laboratory space where new thoughts and ideas can become reality, and where we together create the world, instead of consuming it. 

Things that mattered in the past many years are being part of and contributing to a needed transition in response to the ecological emergency. And to inspire systemic change towards regenerative practices and visions.

hello!earth activities attempt to open situations in which the constant becoming can emerge as a felt reality, and where we dare to inhabit the question. Where our actions, no matter how small or personal, resonate from the immediate bodily space and transcend into the larger contexts of politics and global issues. A resonance that, from our intimate sphere, is able to spread to the larger context and hopefully touch deeper insights as notions for action, and makes us able to move from our hearts.

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 performing artist, voice artist, singer, composer, storyteller, stage director and installation artist. She is the artistic director of Teater Viva, which expands the perception of theatre into an artistic space where we can meet ourselves, each other and our living surroundings in an expanded resonance. Katrine has travelled with theatre and music and cultural bartering for many years and has extensive experience in meeting and co-creating with all kinds of places and residents. Since 2015, with Singing Our Place: an international cross-artistic project about people, our living surroundings and our common future. Singing Our Place has created performances, concerts, workshops, talks, sound installations and festivals in Denmark, England, Norway, Sweden, Iceland, Finland and Greenland. 

Entanglement is a transdisciplinary research project initiated in 2022 by Finnish choreographer Maria Nurmela, Finnish photographer-filmmaker Vesa Loikas, and Australian composer-soprano Jane Sheldon, exploring the relationship between the human and the more-than-human world at a threshold where climate collapse and biodiversity loss are reshaping how we experience time, our bodies, and connection. The project is grounded in intimate field research at the Vaarniemi oak grove, a Natura 2000 protected nature reserve in Kaarina bearing traces of a Bronze Age burial site that was held sacred by those who lived in South-Western Finland, and long entwined with Finnish cultural history. There, encounters with more-than-human beings sparked fictional narratives that the team is transforming into a range of artistic outputs — asking how humans might recognise the visible and invisible bonds connecting us to all living things, and how dialogue is possible where no common language is shared.
Drawing on theories such as autopoiesis, enactivism, phenomenology, and ecological storytelling, the team has developed a process-based methodology that gently moves between movement, visual art, music, and sound design, letting different artistic expressions meet with care and knowledge emerge quietly at their intersections. The Feldenkrais Method is at the core of sharing embodied experience, and in some parts of the project, the work extends even into AR and 3D technology, held not as instruments of control but as ways to listen more closely and connect more fully. The project's different strands also involve other arts professionals, including sound designer Jaakko Vastapuu, lighting and spatial designer Erno Seppälä, bioartist Bart Vandeput (Bartaku), and dancers Gesa Piper, Riina Kalmi, and Jonna Eiskonen.
To date, the project has produced a short film, which premiered at the Tehdasfestivaali Manifesti in 2023, and Metsänhaltijat (Skogsvaktarna), an AR-based participatory art suitcase experienced in a museum setting as a somatic/visceral installation. Next, the stage work Entanglement: I am a mouth, I am a tree premieres at the National Gallery of Contemporary Arts Kiasma, at the Kiasma Theatre, in October 2026, followed by an immersive installation at the Turku City Art Museum's WAM X gallery in August–September 2027. Choosing not to stage the work in Vaarniemi itself to protect its fragile ecosystem, the team offers instead a translation and an invitation to experience connection without exploitation. Conceived amid an era of ecological turmoil, Entanglement is envisioned as a time capsule: a reminder that human and natural fates remain profoundly entangled.

Website: www.entanglednets.org

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, aka DAILY Fiction, creates performance art drawing on threads from butoh dance, physical theatre, and sensory-based performance—all of which actively involve the audience.

DAILY Fiction uses the body to challenge the notion that the world consists of isolated parts, with the human being at the centre. She crafts experiences of interconnectedness with other life forms—such as asphalt, oil, and sand. Perceiving oneself as part of a larger whole can inspire hope and foster a sense of care for the world around us. The vision is a society capable of embracing the complex connections of which we are a part—an expanded collective consciousness.

Forging kinship with other life forms as well as the ability to accommodate complexities is a vital work across sectors. DAILY Fictions performances evolve over time, and engage a diverse network—including researchers, audience members, students, and artists—in the creative and reflective process. Through its artistic voice, DAILY Fiction contributes to a broader geopolitical conversation.


★★★★
“The body on stage appears sculptural and organic, resembling a living installation. Tora Balslev transcends objects that might otherwise seem cold or inanimate—such as stones and metals. She bridges the gap between nature and humanity by offering care and a voice to both.” 
— iScene

Sanna J. Hirvonen is a Rotterdam-based North Karelian writer, performance maker, performer and dancer. Her works pay attention to how places and their material conditions already always choreograph bodies, languages, and the social & political spheres. Sanna's written work has been published in the Finnish literature magazine Tuli & Savu, and her most recent performances have found their audiences in Rotterdam, Helsinki, Dro (Italy) and Bucharest. Sanna collaborates across disciplines in working groups and as a member of the pan-European collective Sympoietic Society, featured in e.g. Saari Residence by Kone Foundation & HIAP Helsinki. In addition, Sanna has contributed to the local art scene in Joensuu, Finland, by creating structures supporting artistic work.

Attending to practices of writing, reading, expanded choreography, and voice work, Sanna is drawn to investigate the vulnerable and contingent encounters with the audience. These encounters become means for researching leakages between bodies, places, and language.

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."

Social Choreography Lab Helsinki is an artistic platform founded in 2020 exploring the intersections of embodiment, choreography, and political life through collective processes.

Our practice is a continual exploration of the body, its potential, poetics, and political dimensions amid ecological urgency. We create participatory spaces that foster experimentation, celebration, and collective rituals, inviting diverse bodies to explore alternative choreographies of movement, joy, and community.

Through accessible workshops, performances, and community day-festivals, we investigate how bodies in motion can attune to ecological rhythms, respond to changing landscapes, and cultivate care for the more-than-human world. Since 2020, we have organized 28 public workshops and 6 festivals in Helsinki, Bergen and Copenhagen.

FRIKAR is a Norwegian contemporary dance company renowned for merging traditional folk dance with contemporary choreography and acrobatics. Rooted in the wild landscapes of Valdres, Norway, our artistic work is deeply connected to ecology and the environment. We view the human body not as a visitor in nature, but as an extension of it. Through site-specific performances, international tours, and community projects, FRIKAR explores how ancestral movement traditions can reconnect modern audiences with the earth. Our choreography often challenges physical boundaries, reflecting the raw, unpredictable forces of the Nordic landscape. By performing in dialogue with natural elements, we aim to foster ecological awareness and inspire a deeper respect for our shared ecosystems. For us, dance is a tool to listen to the land, archive its changes, and celebrate the interconnectedness of all living things.

I am a multidisciplinary artist working primarily with chalk and limestone through performance, installation, and site-responsive practice. Chalk is both my material and my method of connecting with landscape. Growing up above limestone deposits, it became a material of belonging—linked to childhood, learning, memory, and the body.

My work explores how bodies, materials, and places leave traces of one another. I am particularly drawn to quarry landscapes, where nature and industry exist in constant negotiation. These transitional sites reveal geological time alongside human intervention, inviting reflection on extraction, care, and coexistence.

Chalk fascinates me because it is both fragile and transformative: it leaves visible marks that can disappear with rain or touch. It allows me to create temporary interventions that acknowledge presence without claiming permanence. Through chalk, I investigate ecology as a network of material connections between the human body, the landscape, and deep geological history.

Landing is a production unit for dance and choreography, run by Venke Sortland and Ida Gudbrandsen, based in the field of contemporary dance in Norway. Landings’ projects are site- and target-group-specific. Landing creates projects outside of conventional performance spaces, in schools, public spaces, libraries and museums, for audiences other than those who actively seek out dance and theatre themselves. We work closely with our target groups and contexts throughout the entire project, which often leads to a blurring of the line between the process and the performance. And we experiment with what formats our projects can take, which roles we, as performers, can take on, and which audience-roles this opens for. We ask ourselves: What role can dance and choreography have in our society – as a form of social imagination and a way to give care to our surroundings. For us, art is something that happens in the encounter between the audience and a material/surrounding. Our goal is to create situations in which the audience can have an embodied aesthetic experience.

ENSEMBLE / Ellen Kilsgaard works with a choreographic practice where dance, live music and community melt together and open poetic paths to poetic and sensory experiences.  

Ellen creates works that spring from a deep sense of meaning, that arise when humans, through embodied sensory connections, immerse themselves in their surroundings. She considers dance to be an agent and bridge, which can enliven and activate our relationships to all that is Other. With this approach, her work challenges artwork as product for consumption and rather insists on artworks as shared aesthetic surfaces for embodied experiences and reflection. 

She is exploring ways in which embodied resonance, empathy and listening might be organising principles and defining her artistic concepts through vital openings of play and the unknown. In her work, she is looking for choreography as a bridge, emerging between humans and all that is Other - that be other humans, landscapes and other species. She is working with and activating the social need and ability to connect as a creative force, and thereby she explores how choreography can become an aesthetic interface between humans and landscapes. 

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.

KompaniTO is a Norwegian circus and dance company founded in 2014 by Tamar Ohana Goksøyr and Mari Dahl Stoknes. We work at the intersection of circus, dance, physical theatre, music, and text, creating stage works that are open, challenging, and welcoming.

Ecology and sustainability are integral to our work and values, both through our artistic focus and in the way we tour. As a company, we made a conscious decision in 2019 to stop flying, reducing our environmental impact while seeking more grounded and sustainable ways of working and touring.

Madeleine Kate McGowan is an Irish-Danish artist, director and curator working across performance, sound, collective singing and ecological practice. Her work explores how artistic experiences can reshape relationships between humans, landscapes and the more-than-human world. Through site-responsive and participatory formats, she works with voice, bodies, ecologies and places as active collaborators rather than subjects of representation.
Her projects include SOLASTALGIA, a performance rooted in ecological grief; BIRD OPERA, in which human voices embody the songs of endangered birds; The Garden Caretaker and Levested, which combine artistic participation, nature education and the creation of multispecies habitats; and Planting Songs, an exploration of oral transmission, plant knowledge and collective memory.
Across her practice, McGowan develops sensuous and communal ways of knowing landscapes, inviting audiences and local participants to encounter ecology through attention, imagination, care and embodied experience.

Rita Marhaug (b. 1965) is a visual artist living in Bergen, Norway.  She was a professor in the Fine Art Department (2001-13) at her alma mater KHIB (now University of Bergen). Since the 90’s Marhaug has participated in many solo and group exhibitions and performance festivals.  

Marhaug is from May -26 head of board of Performance Art Bergen (PAB). PAB is a membership organization for performance artists and others interested in visual performance art.

PAB aims to strengthen and highlight performance art by arranging professional forums, workshops, festivals and international exchange. PAB is based in Bergen but works both nationally and internationally.

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.

Katrīna Neiburga is a Latvian artist whose practice of landscape and the material world is 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.

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. 

Julie Solberg and Cecilie Solberg are performers, theatre makers and sisters. They work in the intersection of theatre, figure, contemporary dance and performance. 

Their performance WATERLOGGED (Norwegian title: DJUPVASSTRÅKK) is an alternative creation myth, slowly transforming the different outdoor locations into the mythical water of origin. The performance takes place outdoors at sunset, by a small lake or a pond, with the audience seated close to the water or seated in the water if they wear waders. 
The tactility of the water and the presence of nature bring an all-consuming filter for the performance. Through tactile and rhythmic movements of the water, intended and not-intended sounds, movement work inspired by manual labour and rule-bound games, the performance activates a collective listening in the audience. For better or worse, the inherent forces of nature and humans come into view, and our mutual coexistence is put into play. It reveals a kind of uncanny feeling of being human. A strange mix of conscious and mysterious wander between pulling and being pulled. 

WAUHAUS is a Helsinki-based multidisciplinary arts collective working across contemporary theatre, dance and live art. Our works vary widely in form, scale and context, but performance is at the heart of everything we do. We are interested in how performance can create temporary worlds that shift our perceptions of what is familiar, possible or taken for granted.

This approach takes many different forms, including site-sensitive and specific works that mark an uncompromising attempt to understand how humans fit in as part of a multispecies continuum. Their works are not narratives lamenting the destruction wreaked by modernization, but a sincere effort to fathom how we can foster new life skills in the era of eco-crisis.