Metropolis Residencies – July 2025

Continuing to expand our network within the Nordic-Baltic eco-region, which we established last year, Metropolis invites two teams of artists from the Nordic-Baltic countries for residencies in Refshaleøen this summer. The artists work across formats but share an embodied, eco-critical practice connected specifically to the collapse of the Nordic-Baltic as a shared eco-system.

RESIDENTS JULY

Ildze Jurkovska is a scenographer, costume designer and visual artist from Latvia. She has created scenographies and costumes for plays and performances in Latvia. Together with the artist collective Grāfienes, she created the scenography “It’s my favorite day” for the theater festival Homo Novus. Curates and organises the Environmental Art program in the experimental art, music and theater festival Optižūns in Latvia.

In her residency she will explore the site and create a moving object performance/installation based on the specific location. She is interested in nature, how it copes with industrialization, and what’s left of it. A focus point will be indoor plants and how the same plant has adapted to almost any indoor space all around the world. That indoors – homes and workplaces have become capsules not only for humans but for their pets, plants, objects, completely closed off from the natural environment outside.

Līga Ūbele is a dance artist and scenographer based in Riga, Latvia. Her practice brings together different art forms, with movement always being at the core. She is committed to working in ways that support sustainability of the work and well-being of an artist. She explores how the body interacts with space both the space around us and the inner spaces we carry. Līga pays close attention to the presence of both performers and audience, using this shared experience to deepen the connection between the body, mind and heart, as well as the environment and events around us.

During the residency, Ūbele will focus on three central themes currently guiding her artistic practice: surrendering, dancing on ruins, and the potential of rest. She will explore the relationship between humans and nature, asking how we can care for our mental and physical well-being in a world increasingly shaped by global events beyond our control. As both society and nature grow more fatigued, Līga seeks to explore how we might respond not through resistance alone, but through softness, rest, and attentive presence. Līga’s focus will be on the dual experience of letting go – the personal relief it can bring, and the collective grief it often involves, especially when people are forced to leave their homes due to climate or political crises. She will explore this theme through movement, working with gravity, balance, and repetition to embody the emotional weight of both release and loss. 

Riina Õun is a multidisciplinary designer and researcher from Estonia, working at the intersection of craft, biomaterials, and regenerative futures. With roots in traditional leather glove-making and a background in luxury fashion, her current practice explores sustainable material innovation through hands-on experimentation, storytelling, and collective involvement. She is particularly interested in biodegradable, non-toxic alternatives that challenge the dominance of fossil-based materials in design, while also facilitating co-making projects and workshops that foster engagement with local resources and circular practices. Her work blends material research with cultural narratives, often highlighting overlooked waste streams and symbiotic relationships. Riina’s process is grounded in care, curiosity, and collaboration

The project planned for Metropolis residency expands on Riina’s “installations for the non-human” workshop concept, inviting the local community to co-create a large-scale installation using biocomposites made from local food industry waste. Developed through low-tech, kitchen-scale methods, the materials will form sculptural structures designed to slowly biodegrade and return nutrients to the earth. The installation is not intended as a finished object, but as a living, transforming entity—continuing to evolve in response to its environment. By centering on non-human audiences and ecosystems, the work challenges extractive design norms and proposes an artistic practice rooted in decay and regeneration.

Rusto Myllylahti (they/them) is an artist based in Helsinki, Finland, working widely on the fields of installation art, sound art, video art, performance and music. Since 2015 they’ve been making music and sounds by the name Elatu Nessa, performing around Europe and Finland in various art and music festivals and art and music venues. They’ve been part of exhibitions and festivals such as Liaf, Lofoten International art festival, Flow festival in Helsinki, Aine art Museum in Tornio, Sinne Gallery in Helsinki, Sorbus gallery, Titanik Gallery and many more.

In the residency they work with music and sound based on the field recordings made in Copenhagen and surroundings. Possibly colliding with installations, body work, trash, night-time wondering and summoning the soil. In the music of Elatu Nessa they often combine the intimacy of live performance and acoustic music with the processed electronic sounds of animals, humans, sounds from the cities and nature. Together these elements make a meditative and mind-diving experience, where the audience are able to dream, rest and imagine in time and space.

Saara Isola (b. 1996, she/her) is a Finnish performance artist and a BA in theatre (Turku UAS Arts Academy, 2022). She works mainly in the field of contemporary dance, theatre and puppet theatre. Her interest is to work with projects that are completely biodegradable, perishable and temporary.
Isola is a member of a multi-faceted and eco-conscious art and science collective Fern Orchestra. Fern Orchestra is an internationally award-winning group working with plants and microorganisms. Their works highlight the relationship between humans and nature as the artistic practice is approached through sustainable manners – both ecological, economical and social.

For Isola, inventing art is a way to practice climate activism. Her aim is to popularize scientific research by dancing and singing songs that raise activating emotions in front of the climate emergency. In the residency the idea is to work with plants in a public space, searching for ways to imagine and integrate in interspecies reality. The aim is to question anthropocentrism and highlight plants as active, living creatures. Working in public is an invitation for more people to consciously surrender to plantzation (plant civilization) as well as feeling love between species.

Metropolis Residencies are facilitated by Annekset and are supported by Nordic Culture Point and the Danish Arts Foundation.