PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

Through performing arts, Scenekunstkompaniet Øy explores humanity's relationship to nature, technology and community. The work is driven by a desire to break down the barriers that separate us, both from each other and from ecosystems. Using interdisciplinary methods and experimental formats, we combine biology, mythology and science fiction to challenge familiar notions of belonging, identity and interaction.

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.

The Posthumanities Hub, founded in 2008 by Cecilia Åsberg at Linköping University, is an evolving research centre where ecology and landscape are understood as entangled naturecultures. It operates as a “platform of platforms” and a “network of networks,” bridging arts, sciences and societal actors through collaborative, more-than-human inquiry. 

From early outreach and interdisciplinary events to international programmes like the Seed Box, the Swedish environmental humanities initative, the Hub has been a key starting point for environmental humanities in Sweden, cultivating ecological thinking, multispecies relations, and experimental knowledge-making.

As an online and physical collaboratory, hosting scholars, artistis and grant projects, it enables research creation across borders, connecting scholars, landscapes, and communities in shared efforts to rethink life, environments and futures.

Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts is a residency, education and contemporary art centre located on the Curonian Spit, a UNESCO World Heritage landscape between the Baltic Sea and the Curonian Lagoon. Its programme brings together artists, researchers, students and cultural practitioners working across visual arts, performance, sound, moving image, writing, socially engaged practices and artistic research. NAC’s activities are deeply shaped by its specific environment: dunes, forests, winds, waters, borders, seasonal rhythms, ecological vulnerability and layered local histories. Through residencies, exhibitions, workshops, public events and research-based projects, NAC supports artistic practices that engage with the landscape as a complex field of relations between (more-than-)humans, technology, geopolitics, and ecology.

Sisters Hope is a Copenhagen-based performance group and movement spearheading a whole new way of performance artwork. Their work unfolds at the intersection of immersion, intervention, activism, research and pedagogy. In their large-scale durational performance pieces they explore different aspects of what they call a Sensuous Society – A potential new world arising from the post-economical and ecological crisis. In their perennial performance, they have introduced a whole new artistic paradigm that they term ‘Inhabitation’ stimulating ecologic connectedness and sustainable futures. Core to Sisters Hope’s practice is what they call ‘the Poetic Self’, an inner inherent poetic potential that shapes both our inner and outer landscape. Through the Poetic Self and various formats Sisters Hope explores the potential of the sensuous across landscapes, cities, continents and unfolds what connects us as humans through sensuous and poetic encounters.

BIRCA is a laboratory for the new ecological performing arts, located in the middle of nature and fields on the island of Bornholm.

Here artists gets the opportunity to research and develop their ideas and projects, while we actively support investigative and co-creative approaches to the artistic processes through discussion and facilitation. This study is carried out in close dialogue with the surrounding community and with an eye to the local identity and nature on Bornholm. By embracing BIRCA’s natural surroundings, we want to create a vision for an ecological future that allows for connectedness, generosity and curiosity. We work in depth with creative processes, and we address the dynamic connection between the ecological systems of the environment, the social and the mental.

BIRCA focuses on how the performing arts can act in relation to the climate and biodiversity crisis we find ourselves in. We work to create and support a radical new performing arts that takes on an active and interactive role in relation to the ecological challenges of world society, and who, through strong artistic expressions and interventions, contribute to creating visions for a future where we can live in harmony with the nature we are part of. It is a performance art that is created with a limited negative impact on the world’s nature and with care for all species and life forms on the planet. The artists who apply for residencies at BIRCA are concerned with investigating the living conditions of the species and are focused on creating universal well-being. They do this through an organic, sensuous and sensorially present stage art, which must create a deeper resonance in those who encounter it.

BIRCA is created and led by the international producer and innovator Susanne Danig, who uses her extensive international experience to create frameworks and facilitate artistic processes at BIRCA.

Bioart Society is a Helsinki-based association working at the intersection of art, science and society. Established in 2008 at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station in Gilbbesjávri, the association has close to 200 members in Finland and other countries, and participates in global networks of art & science across biology, ecology and the life sciences. Bioart Society supports artistic and transdisciplinary work through workshops, residencies, long-term collaborative projects and public dialogue on how biosciences and biotechnology shape the social, political and ethical dimensions of life. Amongst other multi-year partnership projects, ongoing collaborations include Ars Bioarctica, an art & science residency programme with a focus on the sub-arctic environment with the Kilpisjärvi Biological Station, University of Helsinki, in Sápmi and the Tokyo Art & Science Research residency with the BioClub Tokyo and The Finnish Institute in Japan.