Metropolis Residencies 2024 September – meet the artists
This summer, Metropolis hosted two three-week residencies, each residency for 7-8 international artists and one four-week residency for 5 artists from the Nordic/Baltic region as part of a strategic partnership program. Here, you can read about the resident artists in September.
SEPTEMBER RESIDENCY
Foto: Susanne Danig fra præsentation på BIRCA
Sanna Hirvonen (FI)
… is an Eastern-Finland-based dance artist who works with performance, choreography, poetry, and facilitation. Her past works, often interdisciplinary, have been meandering between language and voice, periphery and the city, hope and melancholy, public and site-specific, stage and studio. Bringing the poetic wonder into the centre of perception, Hirvonen investigates the ways in which we are in eternal and intimate intra-action within the landscapes, places, and sites – the flesh of the world – we are embedded in and becoming-with. She has worked both in the Nordics as well as in continental Europe.
Ungovernable Flourishing
The residency project by Sanna Hirvonen deals with what she calls the rural tempo of attention and rural perception. As opposed to un-belonging created by the rise of non-places in urban landscapes, the project researches how all landscapes could be perceived as intimate and complex webs of interspecies life by and in which humans are intensively affected and interacting. As a tool for doing this, Sanna practices bringing the rural tempo of awareness and rural perception into an urban context. As an artist who grew up in the countryside of Eastern Finland and who continues to work in the vast spectrum between rural and urban, peripheral and central, Sanna creates a project that utilises autobiographical elements both as methods and material of research.
Read more about Sanna’s work here
Aarni Korpela (FI)
… is a performance artist focusing on live art and community art. He creates participatory, co-creative events that offer the participants tools to perceive the reality and environment around them in new ways. The change in focus creates the sense of a new world, and perhaps also the participant will observe themselves as changed. The projects tend to have a utopian nature, exploring how we would like and could live, what a world could look like if we could decide—and what we can take away from the experiment into the everyday world. He works in the artist community Höyhentämö in Helsinki, Finland. He is also an illustrator, cartoonist, and visual artist, and his performance art also tends to have a strong visual identity.
Residency project
At the residence Korpela will continue working based on the practices developed in the project Hunter-gatherers (Helsinki, 2021-2024).
Hunter-gatherers is a community art project that attempts to look at our urban environment and lifestyle that is becoming unsustainable through new eyes. In order to observe the familiar as an unknown, it has chosen a point of view from our shared, but distant past – how would someone from the stone age perceive, use, and live in this place? Might they have insights that we have lost? The project has examined the area of Kalasatama, Helsinki, as it developed from an urban wasteland towards a built cityscape, creating in the process a “new world”, an additional layer of reality that lay on top of our everyday experience of the area.
Read more about Arni’s work here
Beate Poikāne (LV)
… is a Latvian visual artist, theatre-maker, and scenographer. Her artistic explorations manifest in various forms at the intersection of visual art and contemporary theatre, creating self-performing environments and visual performances. Thematically, she explores how imagination relates to the experience of space, investigating how the ideas of fictional worlds are interlinked with the perception of the physical world and interpretation of the surrounding environment. Her works are in conversation with non-human performers and shifting hierarchies of theatre elements. Spaces and sequences of sculptural objects are often at the centre of her compositions. She is currently pursuing an MA degree in Performing Arts at Stockholm University of the Arts. She holds an MA degree in scenography and a BA degree in Visual Communication from the Art Academy of Latvia. As part of her studies, she attended the Performance and Time-based Art program at KMD Art Academy in Bergen.
Residency project
I will focus on human relations with the ‘other’ and in exploring a ‘performative ecosystem’ as a concept. I aim to test a dramaturgical approach that decentralizes humans as the focus of a performance, working with shifting hierarchies of theatre elements and drawing attention to non-human performers—both other living entities and human-made remains. Starting from a scenographer’s perspective, I will investigate the in-betweens of factual and fictional spaces. As a response to the site – the residency outcome will manifest as a performative outdoor installation incorporating sculpture and sound. The audience will be invited to engage with it through an experiential wander. Within the sculptural and sonic elements, I aim to explore the factual data interpretation and layers of fiction. Through SF I aim to achieve an expanded perception of our surroundings.The residency will serve as a platform to further develop this artistic method, which will be the foundation for producing a new performance piece. The project concept will be further developed in connection with the surrounding area, establishing a closer understanding of critical concerns in the context of Refshaleøen and Copenhagen.
Follow Beate’s work here
Sinna Virtanen (FI)
… completed her Master’s Degree at the University of the Arts in Helsinki in 2015, from the Playwright and Dramaturgy Department. Since graduating she has worked extensively as a writer, director, and multidisciplinary artist, both as a solo artist and as a part of different groups, in both Finland and internationally. Virtanen works in both institutional and freelance contexts, in black and white box spaces, and also site specific. Various materialities, mediums, collaborations and spectatorships coalesce and actualise in her works. Her works always play with notions of time and space, sitting on the boundaries, in liminal spaces, reaching into the past and the future, into imagination and afterlives. The works are always conceived in the interconnecting surfaces of different art forms, where they test, darken and redraw the line between the work and the spectator.
Residency project
In residency Virtanen tries to find new ways of working, especially writing in relation to the site and the landscape. She is interested in exploring what kind of play could result from a complete engagement with a sense of site?Virtanen is currently working on the third part of a series of works that take place by the sea and in the sea. In its entirety, she envisions on exploring potential new futures of the sea in collaboration with different scientists. The body of work has emerged from the need to establish an emotional connection with the Baltic Sea, the need to gaze at the sea in the artistic process, with love and without haste.
Conceptually, the work reaches out to the pre dramatic theatre, where the environment, alongside the superhuman forces present in them, were always an inseparable part of the viewer’s experience.
Follow Sinna’s work here
Agnieszka Wołodźko (PL)
… is a Polish visual artist who uses various forms of expression. Recently, she has most often produced actions, collaborative workshops, installations, site-specific projects, and projects in public spaces. The starting point of her projects is research that concerns a specific issue or place. The topics that interest her are public space and the public sphere, the city as a habitat for human and non-human beings, relations between culture and nature, and scenarios for the future of our planet and humanity.
Residency project
“Dirty Legs Club” will be a combination of individual and collaborative performative practices and experiments exploring how human bodies want to function in the surrounding urban space. How can we maximize our sensory relationship with the city? Can the post-shipyard space of Refshaleøen become a testing ground for hypothetical positive futures? How can we escape from concrete? Is the proximity to water an advantage or a threat?
Read more about Agnieszka’s work here
Metropolis Residency i september er støttet af Culture Moves Europe, Statens Kunstfond og Kulturkontakt Nord.
This project was produced with the financial assistance of the European Union. The views expressed herein can in no way be taken to reflect the official opinion of the European Union.
