PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

Krista Burāne, armed with master’s degrees in philosophy (Univesity of Latvia) and audiovisual arts (Academy of Culture of Latvia), 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 and involve them physically and actively. Through her work, she aims to cultivate empathy and foster a conscientious and compassionate attitude toward all living beings and the environment. Particularly in recent times, her creative endeavours have revolved around themes of biodiversity preservation and environmental advocacy, reflecting her commitment to reshaping the dynamics of human-nature relationships. Her recent performances, including “Nocturne” (2019), “2020 Steps” (2020), “..trees Have Stopped Talking Since Then” (2020), “The End of the World and Other Nonsense” (2021), and “All Birds Sing Beautifully” (2023), serve as profound mirrors to our anthropocentric lifestyle. These thought-provoking works serve as poignant reminders of the repercussions of humanity’s myopic relationship with nature, beckoning audiences to reassess their roles in preserving the ecosystem’s delicate balance.

Sound artist, drummer composer, improviser, author of projects in the field of music and art. He focuses on field recording, soundscape and acoustic ecology, creates sound installations. Key concepts in his work are soundscape, noise, vibration and groove. He is interested in explorations in the sphere of percussion and live electronic, improvised and electroacoustic music, composes using a computer, carries out projects devoted to contemporary music, conducts sounds workshops. He was awarded with a scholarship from the Museums Quartier in Vienna and the Ministry of Culture and National Heritage in Poland and City of Gdańsk. He has received a scholarship from the Visegrad Foundation at Galeria Skolska 28 in Prague and the ArtsLink Foundation in New York – a residency at the Ohio State University School of Music in the USA. He has stayed and worked at the EMS electroacoustic music center in Stockholm. Participated in a residency at the Skalar Center for Sound Art and Experimental Music in Seyðisfjörður, Iceland

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.

Mari-Liis Rebane is a sound artist and visual artist working across experimental sound practices, installation, and visual media. Her work explores the perception of sound as a spatial and material phenomenon, often focusing on the intersections between listening, environment, and embodied experience.

In her practice, sound functions both as subject and medium, shaping environments that invite attentive and slowed-down modes of perception. She is interested in how sonic and visual layers interact, and how subtle acoustic and visual elements can reveal hidden structures within natural and constructed landscapes.

Rebane’s work often engages with field recordings, spatial sound composition, and site-responsive installation formats. By translating ecological and atmospheric processes into auditory and visual experiences, she creates works that reflect on human and non-human entanglements, memory, and the shifting boundaries between inner and outer landscapes.

Through her interdisciplinary approach, she seeks to expand the ways we perceive and relate to environments, foregrounding listening as a critical and embodied method for understanding contemporary ecological and spatial conditions.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.