Metropolis Residencies – june 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 JUNE

Heidi Miikki is a circus artist and dancer who works both in Finland and abroad with vertical dance, site-specific art and aerial acrobatics, treeclimbing, tightwire and contemporary dance. In her work she combines environmentalism and performing arts, working actively in the core crew of contemporary circus company Acting for Climate with performing, producing, project leading and artistic directing.

Heidi’s projects often deal with connection to nature, and in this residency she will work on a project dealing with the themes of landscape and the human-nature relationship in combination with the vertical dance/ harness practice. Heidi works with her solo projects researching the themes of home, belonging & becoming, hope and taking a stand for the Baltic Sea. Heidi will also work on Acting for Climate’s new project Alive, a site-specific dance and contemporary circus performance that explores the entangled relationship between the human and the tree.

Eeva Kemppi (b. 1979) is a Finnish artist, writer, theatre critic, researcher and producer. Key themes in her work include ecological issues and crises, interspecies understanding, hospitality, transgenerational practice and policy, and both personal and collective remembrance.

Last years Kemppi has been creating transgenerational and experiential performances with Helsinki based Live Art collective Other Spaces and with some other working groups. Kemppi has worked in Other Spaces as a performance designer, performer and workshop instructor since 2011 in more than 15 different productions and projects.

In her residency, Kemppi will continue her ongoing writing, performance and workshop project dealing with reproduction of different species. Her focus will be how location and landscapes – in a time of environmental/climate change – effects reproduction. This project will be developed in the context of a unique framing on Refshaleøen, through a process of wandering, cataloging, writing and development of suitable exercises on how to physically study the reproduction of the areas species.

In her residency, Kemppi will also be working with her colleague Sanni Priha on developing their mutual practice of artistic swimming.

Sanni Priha works across practices of performance, moving image and artistic research. Central to her work is embodied research, experimental documentary, participatory performance and site-responsive processes that often unfold at the intersection of body, environment, and narrative. She is a member of Helsinki based live art collective Other Spaces that develops collective physical exercises that brings us into contact with different, non-human modes of being and experiencing. Her current film project explores the meanings related to the loss of snow in the global north, as a polyphonic experience.

In Sannis current work, she explores emotional and bodily responses to the threats and tragedies of ecological crises through their locally specific manifestations. At Refshaleøen she will engage with the vulnerability of coastal landscapes in the face of rising sea levels and storm surges. She explores architectural ideas of reclaimed land and floating structures through collective physical exercises and haptic visuality, as well as by exploring the techniques of artistic swimming and the possibility of utilizing them to navigate, connect and imagine the relationships between these concepts.

Sofia Filippou born in Crete (1995) and currently based in Tallinn, is a dance artist working at the intersection of dance, embodied storytelling and ecological imagination. Often engaged in site-responsive performances, Filippou creates spaces where human and more-than-human narratives intertwine. Rooted in a desire to cultivate practices of deep sensing, her works are poetic explorations of world-making; worlds that exist at the edge of things.

During her residency, Filippou will work towards developing a site-responsive performance emerging from the meeting of Refshaleøen and her eco-mytho-eulogies practice. This practice is seeking to carve out a space for loving stories of life/death to be told with and for more-than-humans, with or without humans. Leaning into art as attunement: singing to crisis, mourning with soil, and rehearsing resilience through non-linear narratives, she will develop a piece envisioning a world where bodies—human and other-than-human, past and future—co-create an evolving ecological mythos.

Anumai Raska (b. 1997) is a performance artist based in Tallinn. Anumai is captivated by the technically precise, yet emotionally charged authentic body. Often, their creative starting point lies in the individual’s relationship with their surrounding environment and the loneliness found therein. Anumai’s work has been shown at various events, galleries and theater stages, and their latest co-production, “Rat’s Rumba” at Kanuti Gildi SAAL, was nominated for the Estonian Theatre Award in the Performance Art category this year.

Raska investigates how psychophysical techniques may be applied in urban space to redefine embodied relationships with the built environment. Starting from movement, somatics, and spatial studies, they explore how public spaces carry certain social values and behavioral expectations — and how these can be challenged or reimagined through performative intervention. The residency period will be used to develop methods that bridge individual sensing with collective spatial experience, moving from introspective practices toward site-responsive actions.

Metropolis Residencies are facilitated in collaboration with Annekset and is supported by Nordic Culture Point and Danish Arts Foundation.