PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

Amanda Selinder is a visual artist and biologist. Her artistic practice explores and makes visible processes unfolding around us that often remain beyond the reach of the naked eye. Through collaborative projects, frequently involving researchers, Amanda employs scientific methods from an artistic perspective. This approach allows her to ask questions from alternative viewpoints and engage with aspects of existence that do not always fit within the measurable: life itself, our interconnectedness with the living world around us, and the functions, life cycles, deaths, and conditions of other species and cells. 

The point of departure in Amanda’s work is always living organisms or cells, such as human retinal cells, endophytic fungi that inhabit plant tissues, or the slime trails left behind by slime molds as they navigate their environment. Traditional biological laboratory methods are combined with digital platforms, light projections, video, textiles, and wood to reveal different rhythms and layers of stories intertwined with the human body.

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.

Varvara & Mar is an artist duo formed in 2009 by Varvara Guljajeva and Mar Canet Solà. Their collaborative practice explores the intersections of art, technology, and society, often responding to the profound social transformations brought about by the digital age. Through their work, they address the impact of the information era, engaging with themes such as artificial intelligence, robotics, interactivity, and public participation.

The duo's innovative creations have been featured in numerous prestigious exhibitions and festivals worldwide. Varvara & Mar have exhibited at the Museum of Arts and Design (MAD) in New York, FACT in Liverpool, Santa Mònica Arts Center in Barcelona, the Barbican and V&A Museum in London, the Onassis Cultural Centre in Athens, Ars Electronica Center in Linz, and ZKM in Karlsruhe, among many others.

(p)Art of the Biomass is a collaborative art platform for transdisciplinary explorations, where art, ecology, science, and the humanities can meet and frolic. The platform is based in Sweden and was initiated by artist and gardener Malin Lobell and artist and researcher Janna Holmstedt. Through our context-sensitive and processual work, we explore multispecies relations, co-cultivation, speculative futures, and participatory processes. In collaboration with biologists, growers, researchers, artists, filmmakers and other curious-minded people and organizations we develop exploratory labs, exhibitions, festivals and public adventures. We refer to our work as ecosocial sculptures that unfold over time. They function as artist-led open stages, not for virtuoso performances, but for improvisations and explorations. We were part of the art and research project Humus economicus between 2021 and 2024. https://humuseconomicus.se/ 

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

Georg Jagunov (b. 1984) is a Danish-Belarusian visual artist based in Copenhagen. He graduated from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in 2011 and works across installation, sculpture, digital animation, sound, projection, and performance.

His practice moves at the intersection of nature, geology, and the human imagination. Through sensory and spatial formats, he explores deep time, geological processes, cultural heritage, and the hidden narratives of materials. Drawing on organic and geological structures, he creates works that connect the microscopic with the landscape, and the material with the mythological.

In recent years, he has worked particularly with moss, flint, water, afforestation, and ancient landscapes across different scales and contexts. Jagunov frequently develops interdisciplinary projects with architects, researchers, educators, and cultural institutions.

Fabula is a Riga-based creative research and design collective co-founded by Rūta Jumīte and Tīna Alise Kalēja. Through installations, placemaking workshops, publications, and participatory learning formats, Fabula explores relationships between people, places, and more-than-human life. The collective brings together ecological thinking, social participation, and artistic research to address contemporary eco-social challenges. Among its key projects is the self-published book Relational Landscapes: Navigation, a collection of guided practices by eight authors that invite to connect relationally with the living world. In 2025, Fabula organized the multidisciplinary summer school Design Activism: Interventions for Eco-Social Challenges, focused on urban bats, architectural heritage, and ecology of cracks. In 2026, the collective is developing experimental insect architecture project in Riga’s urban meadows to support biodiversity and multispecies coexistence.

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.

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.

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 

Amalie Risom Nyrup is a visual artist working from an interdisciplinary perspective. In her artistic practice, she explores the cross-aesthetic potential of art, expressed through works grounded in nature philosophy and shaped across a variety of media. Through site-specific fieldwork and ecocentric textile techniques, she explores the aesthetics and ethics of our environmental relations.

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/ 

Ingrid E. M. Ogenstedt is a Swedish-born artist working mainly on large sculptural projects and drawing. Fascinated by the natural world and the power of matter, materials and organisms, she tirelessly experiments with and develops large site-specific sculptures made of local materials, always pushing the boundaries of what can and cannot be achieved by adapting and morphing volumes and the natural at large scale. She has created site-specific sculptures for Moderna Museet Malmö (SE), the Luleå Biennale 2020 (SE), Wadden Tide, Blåvandshuk (DK) and Oslo Central Station (NO). Currently based between Berlin (DE) and Stockholm (SE), she has been working with the art & science programme of the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre since 2022.

Augustas Lapinskas is an architect, activist and interdisciplinary artist, actively engaged in artistic research and cross-field collaborations. Augustas' work spans ecological, socio-economical and cultural layers of wastelands, urban nature and bio-semiotics. His activist provocations, educational activities, and monumental art cover a spectrum of sensitive topics in critical architecture and urbanism. Augustas is a winner of the Tallinn Architecture Biennial competition, shortlisted for the New European Bauhaus prize, and participant in Ars Electronica, the Architecture Fund's Experiment Platform, the Venice Biennale, EIT Climate-KIC Hub, Tech Arts Incubator, and the Creating Vilnius programmes. Augustas is a co-founder of the interdisciplinary art collective Micro-empathy, a member of the speculative architecture collective 3022, and a part of the Bluma collective for biotope landscape urbanism.

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.

Demonstration and experimentation site for food forest farming in Bergen. Established and managed by a wide range of humans and animals- ecologists, architects, teachers, artists and others. 

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 center. 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

Maija Demitere is an artist and practice-based researcher focusing on ecology, slow media, and sustainability. Grounded in experimental inquiry and long-term autoethnography, her work critically investigates food systems, gardening, resource use, and changing landscapes. She explores how more ecological, connected ways of living might be imagined and practiced, directly confronting climate anxiety and the pressures of socio-ecological crises. Affiliated with RTU Liepāja Academy, Demitere is an active member of the artists' collective ASTE. Art, Science, Technology, Education and co-creator and curator of the augmented reality art platform ART+, which provides a space for site-specific ecological engagement through both her own practice and the curation of other artists.