PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

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.

Augustas Lapinskas is an architect, activist and interdisciplinary artist, actively engaged in artistic research and cross-field collaborations. Augustas' work spans ecological, socio-economic and cultural layers of wastelands, urban nature and bio-semiotics. His activistic provocations, educational activities and monumental art cover a spectrum of sensitive topics regarding critical architecture and urbanism. Augustas is a winner of the Tallinn Architecture Biennial competition, shortlisted for the New European Bauhaus prize, and a 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.

“Kultūros dirbtuvė” (KD) is a nonprofit NGO dedicated to initiating and facilitating regenerative placemaking in urbanized territories, highlighting the biocultural uniqueness of places and empowering communities through co-creation. Building on experience since 2015 in Kaunas’ Šilainiai district - through initiatives like “Šilainiai Photo”, Fort VIII activation, and “Šilainiai Gardens” - KD uses the area as a living laboratory for regenerative practices. Founded in 2021, KD expands these approaches across Lithuania and beyond, transforming its experience into adaptable programs such as “Alive Archive” and “Nature in the City.” These methodologies support community engagement, team building, and participation, while ongoing experimentation connects their work to broader themes of culture, democracy, and climate resilience.

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.

For many years, Jenny Berntsson (SE) has developed methodologies within socially engaged art processes and art pedagogy in several national and international art projects and employments. Her working method extends beyond the mainstream art scene and, through materials, workshops, spaces, concepts and meetings, enters the body of society, green areas like the forest or the seashore and creates temporary or permanent changes and shifts. Returning concepts of the practice are ecological and sustainability, playfulness and history viewed from a feminist or/and norm critical perspective.

Berntsson is educated at the Royal Institute of Art (2008) in Stockholm and has commitments and grants from the Swedish Arts Grant Committee and Public Art Agency Sweden, among others and has exhibited continuously during the years. She is now also working as a cultural developer at the County of Västamland in Sweden.

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.

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.

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.

Sara Hagins is a visual artist born in Aalborg. She graduated in History from the University of Copenhagen (2008) and Visual Artist from the Art School Ar.Co – Centro de Arte e Comunicação Visual in Lisbon (2015). Her practice spans textile, sound, performance and participatory formats, exploring relationships between body, care and ecology in both public and institutional spaces.

Sanna Kannisto graduated from the Aalto University in 2002. Her work merges personal narrative with photography’s documentary tradition, exploring the intersection of science and art. Through her lens, she examines both natural phenomena and her own role as observer and interpreter. Kannisto has worked in rainforests South America and lately ornithological stations across Finland and Europe. Her carefully staged images, influenced by scientific illustration and still life, depict rarely seen species with theatrical precision—highlighting both the beauty of nature and the artifice of presentation. A key element of her practice is close collaboration with scientists and researchers.

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.

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

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.

Thomas Seest is a Danish visual artist whose practice centers 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.

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. 

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.

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 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

(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/