Metropolis Residencies 2026

In July, six Nordic-Baltic performance artists gather in Copenhagen for a site-specific residency, researching the human relationship to landscapes in the context of the ecological crisis.

LAURA GORODKO is a Riga-based contemporary dance artist, a council member of the Choreographers Association of Latvia, and a member of the dance collective LDM5. Since graduating from the Latvian Academy of Culture in 2018, she has worked as an independent choreographer, performer, and dance educator, focusing on the development of the local dance community. Her versatile artistic practice spans contemporary dance, partnering, transdisciplinary works, vertical dance, and site-specific performances.

Notable recent projects include the immersive performance Freedom to Lose Control Together with the Many (in collab. with Rūta R. Pakalne), which has gained international recognition at festivals in Riga (2023), Taiwan (2025) and the Baltic Dance Platform (2026). She also recently developed the artistic documentary short film Contact. Children of the Universe during the international residency Magic Carpets. Laura is a strong advocate for inclusion and sustainability in artistic practises, dreaming of a new generation of stage art that is accessible to broad audiences. Her vision aims to move contemporary dance beyond traditional “black box” theatres and into more diverse, affordable community spaces.

During this residency, my focus will be on the concept of abandonment, exploring it both as a deliberate action and a profound state of being. I aim to move beyond the term’s negative weight to uncover its hidden potential and positive outcomes through two interconnected projects. The first, Nomale (Suburb) (in collab. with Linda Krūmiņa), investigates exclusion and non-belonging in urban environments as universal human conditions, specifically focusing on how these states affect socially marginalized groups.

My second focus, Healing Particle, is a video-documented ritual where the human body acts as “healing glue” or “playable clay” to metaphorically repair decaying, man-made structures. By placing the body in a supporting role to the landscape, I intend to restore a sense of wholeness to neglected spaces, highlighting the importance of care and reuse over disposal. Ultimately, these projects use bodily and dance-visual expression to bring awareness to the overlooked outskirts of our society and urban world.

 

MIKKO HYVÖNEN & EEVA JUUTINEN are performers and choreographers based in Kainuu, Finland. They work together long-term supporting each other in a non-competitive atmosphere and share the resources of the work together. They aim to inspire each other and enjoy the work in nature and outdoors.

By creating choreography together, Mikko and Eeva want to get inspired by each other’s various ways to approach choreography and performing, share responsibility and create a conversational atmosphere for the creation and the work. It is a movement towards a collective way of working. Mikko’s work has been performed at Dance House Helsinki, amongst others, and Eeva’s work has been performed at Weld theatre in Stockholm.

We are researching the question: Through a better understanding of ancient nature relations, traditions and ways of being in contact with nature, how can something new be seen, created and explored now and in the future? We search for physical ways of creating and practicing kinship with different animals and nature spirits. How does the relationship to nature and forest change when it becomes for us?

We are creating a multi-artwork where we combine light, sound and video design with different styles and ways of moving and performing in a way where all elements are equal. Nightfall at the edge of forest combines themes related to the unconscious, forest, nature, ecosystems/system theories and light/darkness,as well as local research in the Kainuu area forests and Finnish forest mythology.

 

HENNA KAIKULA is a performance maker, whose artistic career spans more than two decades, beginning after graduating as a circus artist in 2003. She creates accessible and communicative works in collaboration with individuals, collectives and companies across Finland and internationally.

Her understanding of circus extends beyond technique, embracing it as an intuitive, physical way of relating to the world, reaching beyond and below words. Rather than focusing on individual achievement, her wish is to create and live experiences of community, interdependence, empathy, dialogue, and encounter.

During the residency, Henna will work on movement research in and around water. She will investigate fluidity, breath, resistance, surrender, and the body’s interdependence with larger ecosystems. The process will combine somatic approaches, improvisation, site-responsivity, and physical exploration. Rather than focusing on ecological questions through urgency or distress, she seeks to cultivate attention, empathy, and connection.

 

LOTTA PETRONELLA a transdisciplinary artist, writer and filmmaker based on an island in Finland. Her practice investigates the politics of memory, archival erasure and ecological interdependence. She works across performance, film, interventions, ritual and choral collaborations to create spaces for the marginal, haunted and silenced. She is co-founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago, a curatorial collective supporting site-sensitive artistic work at the intersection of ecological, feminist and decolonial enquiries. Her work has featured internationally at film festivals and art spaces such as Helsinki Biennial 2023, Flux Factory New York, Kadist Paris, Casco Art Institute Utrecht, Centre of Art and Ecology Goldsmiths London, Bio Arts Society Helsinki, Drift Festival, Cph:Dox, Yle, Svt, Netflix, Rte.

sparrows & mystics is a choral performance and an ode to the house sparrow and the 12th century mystic, Christina Mirabilis, who lived in a tree like a bird. The work investigates how our society defines holiness and on the other hand madness. This piece and research is tied to our planet’s fragile ecologies in looking at the very familiar character of the house sparrow, which has become endangered in the last 60 years. Its biggest crime is its commonness.

I will continue with this research and the connection between sparrows and holy women living like birds or in trees such as the environmental activists who dedicated their lives to trees, to stop logging and cuttings.

 

SABĪNE ŠNĒ is a Latvian mixed-media artist who explores relationships between humans and more-than-humans, focusing on how organisms and elements sustain life on Earth and how they are affected by resource exploitation and extraction. Her work spans moving image, sound, sculpture, creative writing, and drawing. Recent exhibitions include ‘AVANT GARDENER’, Naughton Gallery, Belfast (2026); ‘Zoom In: Ecology’, Riga Photography Biennale, Riga (2026); ‘Fluid Earth’, Groundwork Gallery, King’s Lynn (2025); solo exhibition ‘Tidal Tear Sediment’, RIXC Gallery, Riga (2025). Recent screenings include Images Festival, Toronto (2026); Deep Focus, London (2026); Animator Festival, Poznań (2025).

During the residency, I will think with water as a connective medium between bodies, technologies, and landscapes. In this context, rivers, groundwater, and human bodies are understood as porous organisms in continuous exchange with their surroundings. This stands against systems of extraction and ownership that cut through these relations and separate humans from land.

Working with field recordings, I will document sonic environments of water in situ, focusing on how sound travels through riverine and infrastructural spaces, including edges where natural and built systems overlap. Alongside practices of deep listening, I am also interested in collective listening and shared attunement, where observation of place shifts into more embodied forms of being.

PIRE SOVA from Tallinn is an artist and stage designer whose work delves into questions of identity, community, and normativity. Alongside her artistic practice, she curates exhibitions and organizes festivals that confront social issues, including gender equality, consent, and the climate crisis. Sova has created stage and costume designs for large-scale performances, and her debut scenography for Netti Nüganen’s The Myth: Last Day earned her a nomination for Best Scenography at the 2023 Estonian Theatre Awards. She earned a BA in Performance Art and an MA in Contemporary Art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. From 2018 to 2024, she worked as a curator at the Academy’s gallery. Her works and performances have been presented in galleries and venues across Estonia as well as in Vilnius, Riga, Gothenburg, Vienna, Berlin, and others.

In the residency, I plan to focus on the global communal emotional states related to the ecological crisis, feelings of perplexity and helplessness, the oscillation between hope and hopelessness. How can we process negative emotions and uncomfortable truths together? What forms of thinking or imagining could emerge from this?

I plan to explore these questions through speculative fiction and character-based world-building. A world with humour, absurdity and abjective motifs. Through these, I’m looking for expressions reflecting the complexity and urgency of the current global ecological condition.

 

Photos: Heidi Strengell (3), Jussi Virkkumaa (4), Ando Naulainen (6)