PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

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.

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.

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

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.

Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė is a digital artist and experimental architect based in Kaunas, Lithuania. Her interdisciplinary practice explores the intersection of digital and natural realities, creating innovative visualizations that uncover the intricate- and often invisible- relationships between environments, textures, and forms. Her work emphasizes sustainability and the symbiosis between human-made and ecological systems. In December 2024, Ambrazevičiūtė defended her practice-based PhD at the Vilnius Academy of Arts with a research project titled Lichen Grammar, investigating the spatial and material relationships between lichen growth forms and their habitats. ​ Her ongoing artistic research develops architectonic surfaces inspired by diverse microecologies, furthering her interest in the multisensory and textural dimensions of natural environments.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.