Artists
Alina TOFAN
Alina Tofan is an actress, performer, and multidisciplinary artist active in contemporary arts, combining theater, film, dance, visual arts, and art therapy in projects she initiates, curates, or collaborates on. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at the National University of Arts, Bucharest …
Alina Tofan is an actress, performer, and multidisciplinary artist active in contemporary arts, combining theater, film, dance, visual arts, and art therapy in projects she initiates, curates, or collaborates on. She is currently a doctoral candidate in Visual Arts at the National University of Arts, Bucharest (UNArte), developing her own performative language. Her artistic practice centers on sensory communication and embodiment, using techniques of embodiment to explore and convey subtle emotions and states.
She is also a practitioner of martial arts (Qi-Gong, Taiji), which she integrates organically into her performative work. Alina isco-founder of the Plastic Art Performance Collective, promoting the concept of ecoperformance in Romania in collaboration with TAANTEATRO (Brazil). Her works critically reflect the impact of globalized capitalism on Romanian cultural identity, particularly post-1990, using symbolic recycling of materials and collective memory.
In recent years, she has coordinated interdisciplinary artistic projects collaborating with specialists in neuroscience, biology, landscape architecture, robotics, and new digital media. Interested in alternative education and the role of art in addressing community needs, Alina has initiated numerous community projects and worked as a trainer/facilitator in art-therapy workshops (climate resilience, art therapy, sensory theater, emotional education), for children, youth workers, teachers, and marginalized groups. She authored and coordinated an anti-bullying brochure distributed to teachers and school counselors.
Alina Ușurelu
Alina Ușurelu (n.1990). She is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at West University in Timișoara. An interdisciplinary artist-curator, a creator-facilitator of transdisciplinary research processes, working across photography, videography, installation, performance, and somatic practices. She plays with images, …
Alina Ușurelu (n.1990). She is a PhD candidate in Visual Arts at West University in Timișoara. An interdisciplinary artist-curator, a creator-facilitator of transdisciplinary research processes, working across photography, videography, installation, performance, and somatic practices. She plays with images, bodies, and words to open doors to unseen worlds for various communities. The themes she addresses in her artistic proposals include sexuality and sexual identity, mental health, community development, and kinship with the more-than-human world.
Ways of Being with Water: Float, Dive, Wash grows out of my current PhD research on the HyperSensing Body, a body able to perceive subtle environmental changes and to form deeper relations with the human and more-than-human worlds. During the residency, I want to explore how this sensitivity evolves in direct contact with a water body, and how attunement to water can help us cultivate ecological awareness, kinship, and care.
Anna GULYÁS
Anna Gulyás is the founder and singer of the HolddalaNap Band and a storyteller with the Évkerék Theater Company. As a folklorist, she has researched the cultures of many peoples, drawing inspiration from their tales and music to compose pieces and songs, which she accompanies on various instruments.
Anna Gulyás is the founder and singer of the HolddalaNap Band and a storyteller with the Évkerék Theater Company. As a folklorist, she has researched the cultures of many peoples, drawing inspiration from their tales and music to compose pieces and songs, which she accompanies on various instruments.
For decades, she has been leading arts workshops for children, traveling throughout the country and around the world. As a storyteller, she invites both children and parents to interactive performances where they themselves act out the various roles in the story.
Anna Siekierska
Anna Siekierska is looking for answers to the question of how we can support regeneration processes in highly degraded places and exposed to predatory forest management. The artist wants to create prototypes of structures that will help heal wounds after deep logging roads and preserve water …
Anna Siekierska is looking for answers to the question of how we can support regeneration processes in highly degraded places and exposed to predatory forest management. The artist wants to create prototypes of structures that will help heal wounds after deep logging roads and preserve water and mud in the forest. She is inspired by both structures built by forest activists and structures created by beavers.
He emphasizes that a revolution is necessary in nature conservation, revising the concept of wildness and naturalness.
Annalì Rainoldi
Versatile dancer and choreographer, contemporary dance teacher and human rights activist. At the heart of her research, the study, science and symbols are intertwined with the theme of memory, which is declined according to different interactions: the memory of the body understood as cellular …
Versatile dancer and choreographer, contemporary dance teacher and human rights activist. At the heart of her research, the study, science and symbols are intertwined with the theme of memory, which is declined according to different interactions: the memory of the body understood as cellular memory reveals the profound and undomesticated essence of the human being, the emotional memory that is revealed through the gesture guided by pure intuition, the collective memory brought through the use of signs and symbols in the interaction of different languages.
Beate Poikāne
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist and a scenographer from Riga, Latvia. Through visual expressions she plays with the liminality of ‘fiction’ and ’reality’, exploring how imagination relates to experience of space.
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist and a scenographer from Riga, Latvia. Through visual expressions she plays with the liminality of ‘fiction’ and ’reality’, exploring how imagination relates to experience of space.
She explores how physically experienced space correlates with associations and fantasy responses. She works with installation, video and performance, in the intersection of visual art and contemporary theater, creating installations, self- performing environments and performances that lean towards postdramatic visual theater. In scenography she is exploring object theatre and object agency on stage.
Requisitioning the traditional theatre hierarchies by stating that an object on stage is an active performer and no longer a prop, by introducing objects-performers and curving what does it mean to perform alongside with objects. In her practice she works with objects and visual signs as imagination provoking devices, that functions as a connection to spectators preexisting kwnolage and associative field, to ‘transport’ the viewer into another world that is built partly on the stage and partly in the mind of the observer.
Birutė Masiliauskienė
I am a professional bath master, educator, and the President of the Association of Professional Bathmasters in Lithuania. With a Master’s degree in Linguistics and a background as an author of over 120 books, I bridge the gap between cultural heritage and sensory experience. For 15 years, I have …
I am a professional bath master, educator, and the President of the Association of Professional Bathmasters in Lithuania. With a Master’s degree in Linguistics and a background as an author of over 120 books, I bridge the gap between cultural heritage and sensory experience. For 15 years, I have taught the art of the traditional Lithuanian bath globally, from Japan to the USA. I am the founder of the “Laumių Pirtis” (Pixies’ Bath) women’s movement and a co-creator of the international “Sauna Aid” humanitarian program. My practice integrates plant lore, psychology, and mindfulness, treating the bath as a living tool for emotional health and community connection.
My project focuses on the holistic bath as a natural, accessible tool for emotional health and community resilience. During the residency, I explored the universal connection between humans and nature by translating Lithuanian traditions into the local Hungarian landscape. The project emphasizes the “community bath” as a sustainable alternative to resource-heavy, commercial SPA models. A key practical aspect is teaching people how to interact with nature in a friendly way—creating their own bath tools (whisks and herbal preparations) from local flora. This approach promotes a decentralized model of wellness that relies on local resources, sensory awareness, and mutual care.Ways of Being with Water: Float, Dive, Wash grows out of my current PhD research on the HyperSensing Body, a body able to perceive subtle environmental changes and to form deeper relations with the human and more-than-human worlds. During the residency, I want to explore how this sensitivity evolves in direct contact with a water body, and how attunement to water can help us cultivate ecological awareness, kinship, and care.
BORIS CHIMP 504
Boris Chimp 504 – Miguel Neto (Sound) and Rodrigo Carvalho (Visuals & Interactive Systems) – tells the tale of Boris 504, a chimpanzee sent to the moon by the soviets in 1969 getting stuck in space forever. Since then he has been exploring the space-time continuum, jumping between several dimensions of the universe.
Boris Chimp 504 – Miguel Neto (Sound) and Rodrigo Carvalho (Visuals & Interactive Systems) – tells the tale of Boris 504, a chimpanzee sent to the moon by the soviets in 1969 getting stuck in space forever. Since then he has been exploring the space-time continuum, jumping between several dimensions of the universe.
With this starting point, Miguel & Rodrigo have been exploring the relation between sound & image since 2010 mixing techno, psychedelia and noise, along with audio-reactive visuals generated in real time, creating an immersive voyage strongly influenced by science fiction, interspersing with the most current scientific discoveries and merging reality and fiction into a narrative of its own.
Boris Chimp 504 has presented both av performance & interactive installations on festivals such as Sonar (Barcelona), Mutek.Es (Barcelona), ADAF (Athens), BAM (Liège), ECHO (Dubai), Stereolux (Nantes), Iminente (Lisbon) among many others.
Partner / Organization Name:
Sciaena
Deidre Denise Matthee
Deidre Denise Matthee is a South African Portuguese artist, writer and creative facilitator currently based at Malmaison Studios in Bucharest. Her diverse artistic background encompasses narrative and expressive arts therapy, feminist performance art, applied and immersive theatre, and …
Deidre Denise Matthee is a South African Portuguese artist, writer and creative facilitator currently based at Malmaison Studios in Bucharest. Her diverse artistic background encompasses narrative and expressive arts therapy, feminist performance art, applied and immersive theatre, and conceptual art. Previously, she was the founder of GATA (Group for Activism and Transformation through Art) in Portugal and co-founder of Birdshaped Theatre in Romania. Since 2020, her focus has been on analog collage, assemblage and mixed media art, inspired by her appreciation of poetic composition and the textured, storied nature of salvaged material. Recent exhibitions in which she participated include “Love and War” at the Faculty of Philosophy and “The New Twenties” at the Bucharest Collage Festival.
My artistic approach is guided by posthuman feminist phenomenology. This perspective challenges anthropocentrism and phallogocentrism which posit the self-contained individual as the pinnacle of existence and separate from (even above) nature. Instead it proffers an understanding of our embodiment as watery, not only in that our bodies are composed of water, but also in the sense that we leak, spill and flow beyond the boundaries of our skin. It crucially establishes our integral relationship with the more-than-human. What I am especially interested in exploring in this project is the notion of embodied attunement, by which we can phenomenologically intuit our own and (by extension) other more-than-human bodies of water, thus deepening a sense of connection and empathy. A strong reference in relation to this is the land art of Ana Mendieta, through which I trace the question of what a fluid silhouette of a watery body would feel or look like, and how to give it shape while being shaped in return.
Estere Betija Grāvere
Estere Betija Grāvere (1996, Riga) is a young artist and designer working with moving and printed images. Text and language are also consistently present in her practice. In recent years, Grāvere has focused on transforming the medium of printmaking into a more contemporary format, reinterpreting its …
Estere Betija Grāvere (1996, Riga) is a young artist and designer working with moving and printed images. Text and language are also consistently present in her practice. In recent years, Grāvere has focused on transforming the medium of printmaking into a more contemporary format, reinterpreting its traditionally static nature in various ways. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from the Department of Printmaking at the Art Academy of Latvia and is currently continuing her studies in the master’s programme Werkplaats Typografie in Arnhem, the Netherlands.
My project explores the visual, emotional, and architectural language of SPAs, wellness centres, and sanatoriums as places where care becomes both staged and sincere. Building on my video work A Bottom, I continue examining how environments of “wellness” shape our understanding of the body, empathy, and exhaustion. The residency’s location in Ķemeri is essential: the historic Ķemeru sanatorija – built in the 1930s and once famed for its sulphur springs and therapeutic mud – carries a layered past of healing, ideology, and environmental change. The surrounding national park, its mineral waters, and the fragile ecosystems tied to the sanatorium’s history offer a context where human care and ecological care overlap. I plan to work with the towel as a simple, familiar object from wellness routines — folded, hung, absorbing water and holding memories of their users.
Evarts Melnalksnis
Evarts Melnalksnis is a music theatre and performing arts dramaturge and curator. He focuses on innovative theatre strategies, contemporary music theatre, interdisciplinary and international cooperation. Evarts Melnalksnis regularly publishes articles on contemporary theatre processes, works as a …
Evarts Melnalksnis is a music theatre and performing arts dramaturge and curator. He focuses on innovative theatre strategies, contemporary music theatre, interdisciplinary and international cooperation. Evarts Melnalksnis regularly publishes articles on contemporary theatre processes, works as a lecturer, moderator, editor, translator, participates in conferences and is involved in the political processes of the field.
Jānis Balodis and Nahuel Cano
Jānis Balodis and Nahuel Cano work together in an informal, long-term collaboration that moves between theatre, music, poetry, and performance. While maintaining independent artistic practices, they come together to develop specific projects through what they describe as a slow cooking of questions …
Jānis Balodis and Nahuel Cano work together in an informal, long-term collaboration that moves between theatre, music, poetry, and performance. While maintaining independent artistic practices, they come together to develop specific projects through what they describe as a slow cooking of questions and performative strategies. They began working together during their studies at the DAS Theatre Master program in Amsterdam in 2018, and since then their collaboration has unfolded through different iterations, formats, and research phases. Their most notable shared work is The Last Night of the Deer.
Nahuel Cano (born 1982 in Neuquén, Argentina) is a performer, theatre-maker, and composer working across performance, music, and sound. His practice is grounded in listening as an artistic and political tool, and explores how ecological histories, place, and affect can be translated into musical and performative forms.
Jānis Balodis (born 1987 in Riga, Latvia) is a playwright, dramaturg, and performance maker whose work interrogates social and political realities, creates theatrical situations with communities, and blends documentary and poetic approaches. He has contributed to numerous productions across the Baltic region and beyond.
This project is an interdisciplinary research and creation process situated between music, performance, writing, and dramaturgy. We explore peatland landscapes as living systems where ecological, historical, and emotional time scales intersect. Shaped by extraction, preservation, and slow transformation, peatlands reveal how different forms of ending and continuation coexist. Through music, text, and performative storytelling, we investigate how ecological processes, human histories, and personal experiences are entangled rather than separate. The residency functions as a space for research, listening, writing, and composition, allowing us to translate these layered temporalities into a performative form. The work moves between concept and emotion, using musical structures and narrative gestures to reflect on how things end, persist, and transform within fragile, interdependent systems.
José Jesus
José Jesus, Faro 1988, Lives and works in his Hometown. He develops his work as a multidisciplinary practitioner with recurrent use of digital imagery, moving image, and objects. Exploring the manifestation of digital landscapes, human projection and organic bodies. With a critical view over the …
José Jesus, Faro 1988, Lives and works in his Hometown. He develops his work as a multidisciplinary practitioner with recurrent use of digital imagery, moving image, and objects. Exploring the manifestation of digital landscapes, human projection and organic bodies. With a critical view over the relationships between the human and non-human, José Jesus presents objects from a fictionalized anthropology. These objects and symbols refer to the occupation of territory, whether terrestrial or spatial, merging something ancestral and futuristic, leading us to encounter the heterotopia of the places occupied by humanity.
DANIELE CATALLI
Daniele Catalli is a multifaceted artist, moving fluidly across disciplines and forms.
His practice unfolds through drawing, installation, publishing and performance, weaving together relational and public art, wall painting, and ephemeral gestures into a continuous field of exploration.
Partner / Organisation name:
Marche Teatro
BEATE POIKAINE
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist and a scenographer from Riga, Latvia. Through visual expressions she plays with the liminality of ‘fiction’ and ’reality’, exploring how imagination relates to experience of space. She explores how physically experienced space correlates with associations and fantasy responses.
Beate Poikāne is a visual artist and a scenographer from Riga, Latvia. Through visual expressions she plays with the liminality of ‘fiction’ and ’reality’, exploring how imagination relates to experience of space. She explores how physically experienced space correlates with associations and fantasy responses.
She works with installation, video and performance, in the intersection of visual art and contemporary theater, creating installations, self- performing environments and performances that lean towards postdramatic visual theater. In scenography she is exploring object theatre and object agency on stage. Requisitioning the traditional theatre hierarchies by stating that an object on stage is an active performer and no longer a prop, by introducing objects-performers and curving what does it mean to perform alongside with objects.
In her practice she works with objects and visual signs as imagination provoking devices, that functions as a connection to spectators preexisting kwnolage and associative field, to ‘transport’ the viewer into another world that is built partly on the stage and partly in the mind of the observer.
Karolina Szymanowska
Karolina Szymanowska was born in Poland. Studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Wrocław. Assistant professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. In 2021 earned the PhD degree. Although the base of her work lays in sculpture, she moves across different media.
Born in Poland. Studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Art and Design in Wrocław. Assistant professor at The Academy of Fine Arts in Wrocław. In 2021 earned the PhD degree. Although the base of her work lays in sculpture, she moves across different media.
She draws inspirations from the closest surroundings and their constant change. She participates in numerous national and international projects and exhibitions. Her works were presented at galleries and public spaces.
“My artistic work features issues of deformations and distortions in the context of memory, body and space. In my artistic strategy, I often use concepts that illustrate collective and individual psychological processes. Loop, reflection, fixation, displacement, repetition are just some of the phenomena that I use as a model for my works. These mechanisms relate directly to the human relationship with the environment, as well as to the relationship between individuals involved in social situations. In my latest works, I focus on man involved in technological progress and on the costs of this bizzare symbiosis.”
MAIA ȘTEFANA OPREA
Maia Ștefana Oprea is a Romanian multidisciplinary artist, graduate of UNArte Bucharest and a full member of Union of Visual Artists of Romania, she has exhibited internationally at Vienna Contemporary, the Chișinău International Painting Biennale, the Romanian Cultural Institute in London and Venice, as well as in museums and galleries across Europe and North Africa.
Maia Ștefana Oprea is a Romanian multidisciplinary artist, graduate of UNArte Bucharest and a full member of Union of Visual Artists of Romania, she has exhibited internationally at Vienna Contemporary, the Chișinău International Painting Biennale, the Romanian Cultural Institute in London and Venice, as well as in museums and galleries across Europe and North Africa.
Recent exhibitions include the Working Art Space and Production, Botanical Garden of Bucharest, Etaj Artist Run Space, Constanța Art Museum, Meron Gallery Cluj-Napoca, Gallery-Studio 76, the National Art Museum of Moldova, AnnArt Gallery, Creart Gallery, and The Cage Kunstlerhaus in Germany.
Partner / Organization Name:
University of Bucharest
Mari Keski-Korsu
Mari Keski-Korsu (D.A.) is an artistic researcher who explores micro-macro level manifestations of the ecological polycrisis. The focus of her doctoral research was in more-than-human ritualisations in the polycrisis, and especially in the ancient microbes of …
Mari Keski-Korsu (D.A.) is an artistic researcher who explores micro-macro level manifestations of the ecological polycrisis. The focus of her doctoral research was in more-than-human ritualisations in the polycrisis, and especially in the ancient microbes of the permafrost thaw. Her postdoctoral research addresses Rights of Nature; art’s role in more-than-human decision making in sentient ecologies. Her expertise is in postdisciplinary artistic research with participatory methodologies such as walk-with, performance and sensory ethnography. Her work evolves in transdisciplinary, collaborative research and art projects focusing on e.g., more-than-human values related to Arctic environment in Changing Perspectives (2020–2024, Access Abisko), contemporary more-than-human heritage in Coal Forest Ambassador (2024) and With the River (2023 & 2025/26) and multispecies empathy in Interfaces for Empathy (2016–2018). In 2025, she initiated More than Person River as a part of VOICE which is using Art-Technology-Society Interactions to bring people together to solve environmental problems.
The preliminary project plan is to facilitate a socially-engaged art work process related to the theme of water, more spesifically to the local spring water in MediCina Valley. The work reflects the vunerability and the chanhges in the underground water system. The waters and the local community is approached through learning with ritualising, steam bathing traditions, and its’ local applicably, as well as connecting to the underwater sound-scape. The perspectives of local traditions, scientific epistemy (hydrogeology) and various sensory registers are addressed, to create a synthesis.
Miguel Sbastida
Miguel Sbastida (1989, Madrid) is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of visual arts and environmental studies, to create installations and performances that explore the deep networks of planetary ecology and the processes of climate breakdown. He graduated from an MFA at …
Miguel Sbastida (1989, Madrid) is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of visual arts and environmental studies, to create installations and performances that explore the deep networks of planetary ecology and the processes of climate breakdown. He graduated from an MFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (2017) and a BFA carried-out between Spain, Holland and Canada (2013). Over the last decade, his work has been exhibited internationally in nearly a hundred solo and group exhibitions across Europe, the United States, Canada, South America, South Korea or Kazakhstan; and has carried-out art residencies at important art centers including EKWC, ACC South Korea, Harvard University, Matadero Madrid, or the BilbaoArte Foundation, among others.
Partner / Organization Name:
Sciaena/Marmotto
Location of the residency:
Faro, Portugal
TABOR IDEMA
Tabor is a multidisciplinary artist who explores theater, dance, performance, and video art. Through personal, conceptual, and provocative performances, he seeks to go beyond words. This results in a simple yet incisive visual language.
Tabor is a multidisciplinary artist who explores theater, dance, performance, and video art. Through personal, conceptual, and provocative performances, he seeks to go beyond words. This results in a simple yet incisive visual language. In his theater productions, he listens closely to his body and the space around him, responding to the architecture so that the venue becomes his co-performer. They engage in a dialogue with one another, creating a moving and serious form of slapstick.
Now he is primarily interested in the social aspect of theater; that’s where he likes to find a challenge. In his view, theater is a meeting place where you listen to other people’s stories.
Partner / Organization Name:
Tamás CSEKE
CSEKE Tamás is a Hungarian photographer mostly preoccupied with existentialism, social issues, capitalism and its effects on world. He uses images and text and makes mostly research-based photography. His conceptual works have been exhibited at Budapest Photo Festival (2022), Different Worlds festival in …
CSEKE Tamás is a Hungarian photographer mostly preoccupied with existentialism, social issues, capitalism and its effects on world. He uses images and text and makes mostly research-based photography. His conceptual works have been exhibited at Budapest Photo Festival (2022), Different Worlds festival in Ljubljana (2023), PEP x BPM exhibition “(Im)possible worlds” (2024) in Mulhouse, France. He was featured online on Vogue.com and i-D magazine. He is also deeply interested in people and the relations between them, taking every opportunity to explore this energy of the human body from dance – to fashion photography. He is a member of Association of Young Hungarian Photographers (FFS). His aim with the SOIL Project is to find new ways of experimenting with the connection between the human body, visual interpretation, and the philosophical aspect of pollution.
Partner / Organization Name:
Pro Progressione