Moni Wespi - Metropolis Residency 2024

Metropolis Residencies 2024 May-June – meet the artists

Metropolis will host two 3-week residencies this summer, each residency for 7-8 international artists.

The theme of Metropolis’ new four-year cycle is “from Metropolis to Ecopolis” with a focus on a more ecologically related artistic practice, redefining cities as more hybrid and complex landscapes.

We are interested in exploring how artistically driven processes can activate new awareness and commitment in a shared future. As we have our main focus on the “condition of the world” and the climate and ecological crisis, we have invited artists who have this consciousness as an integrated aspect in their work.

Our mission is to support artists to be able to work in and to change our notion of the public space and to develop methodologies, practice and concepts which are explorative and engaging.

The artists will be based on Refshaleøen but are free to work all over Copenhagen. You may meet them randomly, while they are out exploring, or you can keep an eye on our invitations for try-outs and showings with the residency artists.

Continue reading to get to know more about the artists and their projects.

 

MAY/JUNE RESIDENCY

Silje Erøy Sollien - Metropolis Residency 2024Silje Erøy Sollien / Tired Architecture (DK)

…created Tired Architecture +C. as a response to a deep sense of personal and planetary burnout, as an artistic platform to explore the deep collective need for designing a more regenerative future. This is based on collective embodied and poetic work, restoring a sense of truly being part of the landscape instead of separate from it, as we are so often tricked into believing. Sollien has experience working as housing and settlements researcher in South- and West Africa, the Himalayas and in northern Europe. As an urban planner, Sollien has also worked with artistic and speculative installation art in 1:1 in order to explore aspects of an urban master plan and transformation of public spaces.

Hot Compost/ Composting in Awkward Spaces 

As part of a process of grieving and taking care of acute stress illness, Sollien started composting and looking for soil to bury her tired body in, in order to ferment, decompose and grow anew. As she lives in an apartment without her own garden, composting could be quite awkward, but also a way of looking for community. This project invites the participants to take part in the soil making process and feel the warmth and care of the bacteria, the micro life and the life-giving soil-in-the making, as soil and human regenerate. In collaboration with David Sebastian Lopez Restrepo, The Performance Kitchen.

As part of her residency, Silje produced a scrapbook which doucments the project’s process

 

Adam Man (DE)

…is an artist working with live performance, video and text. Since 2017, he has been working mainly outdoors on a new relationship between body and landscape. Adam collaborates with dancers and performers; they move and speak in/with the environment. Adam is based in Berlin. He has been showing his work at Tanzfabrik Berlin, HAUNT Front Views, Tanznacht Berlin Festival), Vienna (wuk performing arts, imagetanz Festival, Tanzquartier Wien), Klagenfurt (Kunstraum Lakeside).

www.adamman.com

Aeon III

…is an outdoor performance dealing with the encounter of body and landscape. What does it mean, how does it feel to be on earth? In movement and spoken words, three performers explore being embedded in and being exposed by a surrounding. Aeon is a series of works dedicated to geological time. It was originally co-created with Moritz Majce for Tanznacht Berlin 2020. For Metropolis, Adam Man will work on a site-specific new part.

 

Kevin Trappeniers - Metropolis Residency 2024Kevin Trappeniers (BE)

…develops a stilled, visual, physical artistic language in detailed, sensate work at the intersection of performing arts and visual arts. In the performances, sound and visual art objects play a major role. Trappeniers moves freely between disciplines, mixing them together in (live) interdisciplinary visual and performative work, in theatres, exhibition spaces, and in public space. The last couple of years, he has moved away from the theatre black box, creating more in situ work, for example within Present, an ongoing series of site-specific art interventions in city and nature.

www.kevintrappeniers.be

Residency project

Trappeniers focuses artistically on the vulnerability of Earth in the age of Anthropocene, and specifically the impact of climate change on Copenhagen as a coastal city. The way the city tries to protect itself (e.g. Lynetteholm) and to adapt to it (Tåsinge Square) are of interest as a starting point for in situ work.

At the same time, Trappeniers prepares a research into ‘Dark Sky Reserves’: public or private landscapes with an exceptional or distinctive quality of starry nights and nightlife that are specifically protected for their darkness. The islands of Møn and Nyord were the first places in Scandinavia to together become a Dark Sky Park.

 

Nanna Stigsdatter & Snorre Elvin - Metropolis Residency 2024Nanna Stigsdatter & Snorre Elvin (DK)

…are both dancers and choreographers based in Copenhagen. They first crossed paths during their dance studies at the Danish National School of Performing Arts. They both have been part of initiating and establishing the dance collective Danseatelier to then embark on their choreographic research together as a duo. Their work revolves around thresholds, transformation, friendship and romance.

Waste Water Slide
…delves into the borderland of urban landscapes and the ideas of nature, exploring the ambiguity and paradoxes inherent in these concepts. This site-specific choreographic research unfolds the relationships between water and dance, drawing inspiration from springs, slides, and sources. WWS is a duet that hangs out with the harbor, each other and the dances that exist on the edge of the waterfront.

 

The New Liquidity - Metropolis Residency 2024The New Liquidity (DE)

is a transdisciplinary research platform and collective for artistic and curatorial practices, launched by artist, curator and researcher Selma Boskailo and sound artist and composer Anders Ehlin. They use the term liquidity as a referential trampoline to facilitate speculation and porosity of borders as a means of artistic expression and the creation of alternative and/or potential scenarios. The collective is currently developing the project De-territorialized Listenings – an ongoing series of site-specific binaural soundwalks, reactive to participant’s body movements and locations, offering strategies for dismantling prevailing hegemonic sensorial and imaginative structures.

De-territorialized Listenings – Impulse

The New Liquidity will create a site-specific iteration of De-territorialized Listenings. Using adaptive spatial audio, which is reactive to the participants body movements and location, they seek to challenge a site’s historical and sociological layers by regrouping the sensorial and imaginative structures of the participants. By rethinking local knowledge and environments, they are proposing a transformation of familiar soundscapes, as well as addressing deterritorialization in the context of cultural globalization and distancing from the locality developed through mediatization, migration, and commodification of life under the global capital. For Metropolis, they would like to develop a participatory and collective choreographic aspect to create convergences of multiple narratives as well as the elevation and exchange of interactive agencies between the participants. Through technological focus and a pronounced participation related to walking, they want to create a choreography that inscribes the spatial trace of the moving body, thus hoping to reveal socio-political and poetic patterns within the larger societal realm as well as within a discrete group of people.

 

JULY RESIDENCY

Brida Horvath - Metropolis Residency 2024

Photo: Attila Balogh

Brida Horváth (HU/FR)

…is a dancer, performer and choreographer born in Hungary and living in France. She creates performances on and off stage. Butoh, especially the work of Masaki Iwana, has inspired her dance since 2012. At the center of her interests are subjects such as human-nature interrelationships, the state of abandonment, the transformation, and the ritual. Her questioning about the limits between the performing space and the audience, and the role of the spectator are reflected lately in her site-specific works. She leads regular dance and movement workshops for adults, youngsters and children.

 

Dawn (Entre chien et loup)
The project relies on the artistic practice of contemporary dance, butoh and walking, and it deals with the theme of transformation: the moment when the old does not exist anymore and the new has not yet taken form. In its final shape, it will be a solo dance performance (site-specific with a possible stage version). In its actual version, it takes the form of the combination of a participative walk (guided by simple instructions), a dance performance (inspired by the theme and location of the event) and a ritual. The event happens in a natural environment that can be found in the city, starting by night and finishing at the sunrise, and/or starting by the sunset and finishing in the night.

Marika Hedemyr - Metropolis Residency 2024

Photo: Nadim Elazzeh

Marika Hedemyr (SE)

…is a choreographer/artist who creates public art, choreography, and mixed reality experiences. She explores coexistence through the emotional and political relations between people and places. Her site-specific mixed reality walks combine documentary material, mobile-based augmented reality (AR) technology, and performative formats into an affective experience that tickles the audience’s imagination, heart, and thoughts. Currently based in Malmö.
www.marikahedemyr.com

Ashes to Ashes
At the Metropolis residency, Hedemyr will develop Ashes to Ashes, a new mixed reality walk for graveyards, an immersive experience that explores our co-existence with the planet earth. The conceptual starting point is that the smallest ingredients that make up our mobile digital devices – minerals and matter that come from the earth – are also the building blocks of our human body. In such a perspective, the human body and the phone are one. In the walk, the participants hold their phone in their hand and have headphones on. With care and respect for the location, Hedemyr explores ways in which a mixed reality performance could take place at a graveyard and be both an individual and a collective experience.

As part of her residency, Marika created a video which documents the project’s process

 

Arbonauts - - Metropolis Residency 2024

Photo: Nina Photography

Arbonauts (UK)

…are the artists Helen Galliano and Dimitri Launder, based in London. They create site-specific performance at the meeting point between theatre, installation and dance, with an experimental and collaborative core. Since 2012, they have been creating climate-responsive performances in unique spaces – from tunnel shafts to coastal paths – often working with community performers.
www.arbonauts.org

Residency project

In 2021, they were commissioned by Estuary Festival, Metal and Arts Council England to create SILT, a climate-responsive performance imagining how humans might evolve beyond an impending climate disaster and dwell in water. It was performed live at dusk in the water of a tidal pool in Essex by a group of community performers made up of open water swimmers. They are now working on a development of SILT for Estuary Festival 2025 – SALT – as well as a research project ‘How to Approach an Island’ looking at islands, ecology and site-specific work. They are looking forward to exploring the waterways and urban swimming culture of Copenhagen with Metropolis this summer.

 

Aurélie Pertusot - Metropolis Residency 2024

Photo: Ana Colute

Aurélie Pertusot (FR)

…forges subjective links with the perception of space and time by transforming cultural landmarks. Focusing on social interactions and landscapes transitions, her research plays with absence and presence, instability and fragility to reflect an underlying reality. Her approach to public space is characterised by the use of architecture as a medium to create visual or sound compositions that reveal invisible spaces.

Residency project
Her intention is to enter into a dialogue with the site to focus on the transformation of the landscape and architecture’s echo. She will create an eco-instrumentation made of elements found on site to make a visual and sonic exploration of a resonant place with sand and hand-scrubbed objects on various surfaces to make the object’s wear and tear audible. Pertusot proposes a reflection on how to listen to and shape a territory, whether tiny or on the scale of the landscape and our environment.

 

Saint Machine - Metropolis Residency 2024

Photo: Ars Electronica Festival

Saint Machine (RO)

…is an experimental artist and curator working with new media, combining interactive sculpture and performance. She is the author of immersive multimedia installations that use their observer to function. Her works investigate biological processes, proposing the idea of space seen as a living organism. These are organic physical sculptures with a digital animated core, testing the human willingness to cede one’s own physicality in exchange for digital content. In interacting with these light-emitting hybrid organisms, success in controlling them is always equivalent to willingness to allow oneself to be assimilated.

Residency project

This residency is an opportunity to deepen the themes explored in previous works and explore possible ideas for a project that might test ways to create a symbiotic relationship between human and the non-human. It could mean working with emotional residues left within urban spaces and their influence on the collective identity of the city and the possibilities to reflect this into a responsive light installation. A minimalist technological creature that could capture sunlight, amplify it and reflect it back into the city. Another idea would be to work with water and light and maybe environmental sound. The challenge would be to create a dynamic interaction with sunlight, potentially involving movable or responsive components that adapt to the changing position of the sun throughout the day and to integrate emotions of passersby into the project. The collected emotions could trigger variations in the intensity or frequency of the amplified sunlight, creating a dynamic interplay between the emotions of the public and the visual impact of the installation. The idea behind this possible project would be to contribute to the understanding of the intricate relationships between technology, humans, and the environment, both urban/constructed and natural. The residency will be a reflection on the co-existence of different elements within society, provoking viewers to consider their own roles within these shifting landscapes.