PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

The annual International Contemporary Art Festival Survival Kit, comprised of a curated exhibition and an event programme, was initiated in 2009 as a response to the economic crisis affecting Latvia at the time. Each year, the festival's appointed curator (or curators) carefully selects the themes explored, inviting artists from around the world to offer alternative scenarios of survival. The festival's mission to critically investigate and reflect on the evolution of contemporary society has made it a key platform for the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art (LCCA) to showcase its commitment to research, creation, and development of contemporary art processes in Latvia and internationally since 2000. Survival Kit's choice of venue is an integral part of the festival's identity, as it inhabits empty buildings in Riga, exploring their potential and possible development strategies that could be used to revitalize them. Despite the often challenging nature of these spaces, the festival emphasizes the importance of accessibility, assisting people with disabilities.

New Theatre Institute of Latvia (NTIL) is a project based organisation working in the field of contemporary performing arts. Since 1995 NTIL has been organizing the International Festival of Contemporary Theatre Homo Novus, which is the largest performing arts platform in Latvia. NTIL also produces and presents projects and long term collaboration programmes together with local and international partners, strongly believing in the necessity to explore the contemporary performing arts field together with artists and audiences.

Wild Bits is a technological art outdoor exhibition triennial that explores the intersections of art, technology, ecology, and landscape. Taking place in diverse natural and rural environment of Southern Estonia, it presents site-specific works that engage directly with local ecosystems, environmental processes, and the evolving relationship between humans and the more-than-human world.

Bringing together artists, researchers, and practitioners across disciplines, Wild Bits enables critical reflection on how technological and ecological transformations reshape our perception of place and landscape. The programme highlights artistic practices that respond to environmental change, multispecies coexistence, and shifting cultural understandings of nature.

Beyond its main edition, Wild Bits operates as a travelling and adaptable platform. It is actively seeking partners and co-commissioners and develops satellite exhibitions that travel across Europe in collaboration with local host institutions and umbrella organisations. These nomadic iterations allow the project to take different forms in dialogue with new contexts and landscapes. So far Wild Bits satellites have been exhibited in the Baltics and in Northern Finland.

By situating contemporary art outside conventional gallery spaces, Wild Bits invites audiences into immersive encounters with landscape and process, creating space for experimentation, exchange, and shared reflection on ecological futures.

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.