PERFORMING LANDSCAPES NORDIC/BALTIC

Since 2010, non-profit association Mustarinda promotes dialogues between arts and sciences, the diversity of natures and cultures, and the role that arts and sciences—especially contemporary visual art—can play in ecological reconstruction. The association’s core activities are artistic, exploratory, and collective in nature, and its boundary-crossing research is directed at individuals, local communities, and broader society.

Through hosting 50-70 residents annually at the Mustarinda House, located next to the Paljakka Nature Reserve in the Kainuu region, Finland, the association brings together multidisciplinary practitioners to research, discuss, experiment, and explore more sustainable ways of working and thinking. Activities include a residency program, exhibitions, education activities, a volunteer program, workshops, events, publications, and long-term development and lobbying projects such as the Vaara-Kainuu Art National Park.

Earthwise Residency is artist-led, placed on an old, protected farm in the middle of National Park Mols Bjerge. The residency activities have developed since 2013, and the name and organisation were made in 2020. Our focus has always been the more-than-human, aiming to regenerate both land and with the tools of art and a strong relation to the living land. We welcome artists and researchers with the same sphere of interest in the living world. We have a residency house, various facilities, food gardens, animals, 13 hectares of land, sauna, and a library of more than 700 titles related to the paradigm shift towards greener and more holistic life approaches. The performance company Secret Hotel is the sister organisation of Earthwise, led by director, dramaturg and performing artist Christine Fentz, who is also host of Earthwise, and lives there with her husband Brice.

Maajaam is an art and technology farm located in the rural landscapes of Southern Estonia. Operating at the intersection of ecology, contemporary art, and emerging technologies, Maajaam serves as a site for experimentation, research, and critical reflection on the relationships between humans, technological systems, and the natural environment.

Through artist residencies, exhibitions, workshops, and site-specific projects, Maajaam explores how technologies shape our perception of landscapes and ecological processes. The organisation supports artistic practices that engage with environmental change, multispecies coexistence, local knowledge, and the cultural implications of technological development.

Rooted in a working rural landscape, Maajaam offers a unique context where artistic inquiry can unfold in direct dialogue with forests, fields, agricultural practices, and non-human actors. By bringing together artists, researchers, technologists, and local communities, Maajaam fosters new ways of imagining sustainable futures and cultivating meaningful connections between ecology, landscape, and contemporary culture.

Maajaam produces the Wild Bits Outdoor Exhibition Triennial, an international exhibition of art, nature, and technology.

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.

PAiR is a residency for inventive encounters — a space where artists, researchers, and curators from diverse disciplines come together to reflect, create, and connect. It offers a peaceful, distraction-free environment in which ideas are allowed to evolve and grow. Located on Latvia’s rugged west coast, PAiR invites a dialogue between the local and the global, tradition and experimentation, solitude and exchange. By hosting artists in a setting shaped by both history and natural beauty, PAiR fosters new meanings and creative transformations. Founded and managed by the VV Foundation, PAiR was established to support interdisciplinary artistic processes and to help contemporary art thrive in both intimate and public forms.

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.

Baltic Art Center - BAC is one of Sweden's most prominent residencies and has been based on Gotland since 2001. We are an internationally established meeting place in the Baltic Sea region, connecting artists and organisations from all over the world. As an artistic residency, BAC provides artists with the time, space and resources to work individually and collaboratively to develop new ideas and art projects. BAC is a small and dynamic art institution with offices and guest accommodation in the heart of Visby, a medieval town on the UNESCO World Heritage List. We are a flexible organisation that support the artistic process and tailors our approach to suit specific art projects. We invite artists to use the whole island as an extended studio to explore and connect to different places and local communities. We work with artists and cultural practitioners to develop, produce and present ground-breaking artistic projects in collaboration with local and international partners who share our commitment to a sustainable society.

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.

Kintai Arts is a non-profit organisation and art residency, located in the rural environment on the coast of the Curonian Lagoon near the peninsula of Curonian Spit and Vente Cape.
Its main mission is to actualize, develop and explore the unique tangible and intangible cultural and natural heritage of the Pomeranian region and to foster creativity, reflection and exchange of ideas in the spheres of contemporary art and contemporary music and interdisciplinary art practices.
As an international art residency, Kintai Arts aims to develop interdisciplinary artistic practice and the exchange of knowledge and ideas in the fields of art and science, nature and ecology, historical and cultural in situ heritage. Curated residency programmes are developed around site-specific research rooted in the local landscape, encouraging critical engagement with the region’s fragile ecology and natural heritage. The landscape and ecology related topics act as a central protagonists across both visual and sound-based residency programmes.

Luster Mikromakeri is located in Luster, Sognefjord, Norway. It is a non-profit cultural organisation and a creative collective working across a wide range of craft disciplines and artistic expressions. The studios are personal working spaces used daily by designers and craftspeople who practice on a full-time or part-time basis.

The barn that houses Mikromakeri was built in 1902. The building is being rebuilt and adapted so that art, craft and culture can take root in a space with deep history and character.

Luster Mikromakeri hosts a variety of events, including film screenings, workshops, concerts, talks, performances, open days and a pop-up local café. 

The initiative is run by the three founding members. After spending the past 10–15 years travelling internationally for our work, we have now settled in Luster. We wish to bring the world to us—and give back—by offering an inspiring, calm and beautiful working environment for artists who need time and space.
 

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.

Neringa Forest Architecture (Jurga Daubaraite, Egija Inzule and Jonas Žukauskas) is an architecture, art, and research collective focused on the agency of cultural practices in framing environmental relationships and enhancing ways of sensing and understanding forest. NFA involves a growing assembly of collaborators and participants to read forest as constructed space – an environment of natural systems governed, exploited, and regulated by human interventions, technologies, industries, institutions and agencies. The collective works through transdisciplinary engagements with diverse partners, developing site-specific work that takes form in publishing, exhibitions, film, educational programmes, and other context-specific formats.

The collective has its starting point in the Curonian Spit, a sand dune that separates the lagoon from the Baltic Sea, where afforestation formed a constructed cultural landscape containing the aeolian processes of wind-blown sands. Developing a project at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in 2020, NFA established a process to redirect timber cut in the forests of the Curonian Spit, a protected cultural landscape of afforested sand dunes, from biofuel processing to construct a Timber Archive and Library. This archive is both: a material storage facility and a material document of the environmental forces and processes shaping the forest landscape in this unique site. Building on this resource, NFA initiated an artistic research residency programme, inviting artists, architects, filmmakers, researchers and geographers to develop their inquiries into the multiple directions of intersectional research that the forest enables.

NFA leads a COOP study group at the Dutch Art Institute, runs Kirvarpa Books, and since 2020 has curated a residency programme at Nida Art Colony of Vilnius Academy of Arts in Lithuania. In 2023, NFA designed, curated and produced the Children’s Forest Pavilion, Lithuania, for the Venice Architecture Biennale. As part of the Season of Lithuania in France 2024, NFA carried out research beyond the Curonian Spit for an exhibition at arc en rêve in Bordeaux, presenting a playscape installation devoted to the many histories, practices and processes that have shaped and continue to shape the Landes forests in the Nouvelle-Aquitaine region.

NFA projects are conceived with long-term and multiple lives in mind. Following its presentation in Venice, the Children’s Forest Pavilion branched into two distinct sites. The roof structure is now installed in the old-growth forest in Juodkrantė, where it functions as the Neringa Forest Classroom, a destination for forest walks and environmental education workshops. The play platforms, shadow play projections and other elements are installed at the Education Space of the Stasys Museum, supporting its research and learning activities led by the pavilion’s contributors together with the museum team.