[ID: Big electric blue capital letters read ‘MASSIA SPROUT’ against the backdrop of a darkened water surface. Water plants and the reflections given off by light and the overarching tree–crowns blur to a fertile looking soup.]
SPROUT is a residency program at MASSIA inviting 14 artists who work at the intersections of art and ecology to attend to their working processes whilst growing a community of practice within the Nordic-Baltic region ((and beyond)). Here we introduce the participants* sprouting new conspiracies with us and caring for life-sustaining agency during October 2023 and June 2024. SPROUT is embedded within the invitation of MASSIA’s broader open residency model, open to all those interested for self-initiated residencies.
(*in order of residency dates)
Kseniia Schtral is a Latvian-based anti-disciplinary artist and researcher with a background in biology and design. Her work questions human viability and investigates possibilities of existence in an archaeological record vanish mode. She creates performative and participatory situations that evolve around culinary and textile crafts, collective practices and social fermentation, intertwining scientific knowledge, crafts making, poetry, body being and interlacing the urban, rural, natural and wasted.
Residency dates: 15 September – 15 October 2023 + 15 March – 15 April 2024
Liene Jurgelāne works both, individually and collectively, creates and co-creates holistic learning spaces, rituals, and sensory experiences that invite people to rediscover and experience their innate connections with the Earth and each other and to move from a sense of isolation to a sense of community and participation. Her artistic and research dedication currently belongs to exploring plant-human relationships and allyships through artistic methods, with specific focus on the Baltic Sea region and the ancestral practices of communicating with plants. Liene is part of the myceliums of artistic and educational collective new visions and cultural platform Institut for (X).
@liene_liene @newvisions_ www.newvisions.me
Residency dates: 10 October – 12 November 2023
Sara Blosseville is a visual artist, raised in Normandy in France, and currently living in the woods of Vantaa in Finland. They have spent the past years experimenting sustainable ways of making sculpture by using only materials that they make, grow, find, that are recycled or second-hand. For them art-making is about finding ways to ground oneself in the material world and deep-diving into the interconnectedness of the world. Their work explores the place of desire and sensuality in gardening, transposes permaculture principles to art curation – often in collaboration with other artists, for example via the publishing press Fétiche Editions and the curatorial project Light-harvesting Complex.
@gueule2raie @fetiche.editions @lightharvestingcomplex
Residency dates: 15 October – 15 November 2023
Shifa Doğuştan is a Copenhagen based artist using dance as a medium for listening better. For her, it is a technology of porosity, contemplation and enchantment. Sometimes this quality of movement is observed and experienced everywhere: in a protest, in a warm embrace, in the darkness of a nightclub, in the magic of singing together or when a fermentation crock bubbles like a jacuzzi in the kitchen.
In ‘Spontaneous fermentation: Collaborating with wild yeasts and revealing Massia’s terroir’ she will meld multispecies choreography. A time for encountering and anchoring in the space, dancing and fermenting, culminating in the production of a beer that encapsulates something we don’t know yet about this specific ecosystem. What is to be learned from this divinatory revelation?
Shifa is also busy within the fields of music, community organising, conflict resolution, healing, raving, food production, and in the outdoors. She finds the interstices of these smaller worlds a great place for her to thrive, stay curious, be sensitive to difference, grounded and engaged.
Monika Kļaviņa‘s work evolves around the pirts, the Latvian tradition of what many know as sauna. They consider the pirts as a space of confluence where fire, water, air, earth, and plants are the guides and guardians. Simultaneously a space heavily overwritten by heteronormativity, Monika’s pirts practice centers queer questions of care and healing, and more-than-human community building. They create spatio-temporal healing spaces, borrowing from architecture, design, distillation, foraging, plant practices and bodywork.
Residency dates: 15 March – 15 May 2024
Feminist Culture House x Mustarinda will SPROUT together at MASSIA
During SPROUT Feminist Culture House and Mustarinda come together to research and discuss post-fossil futures from feminist and decolonial perspectives, and begin to work on tools and ways of promoting feminist thinking and practices, whilst foraging, dreaming, and planning together.
Feminist Culture House (FCH) collective is a non-profit curatorial platform in Helsinki that works with and for underrepresented artists. FCH’s working practices are constructed to advocate for more equitable collaborations, fair working conditions, better representation, and more inclusive institutional structures.
The Mustarinda Association is a group of artists and researchers whose goal is to promote the ecological rebuilding of society, the diversity of culture and nature, and the connection between art and science. Mustarinda House is based in the woods of northern Finland.
www.mustarinda.fi @mustarinda www.feministculturehouse.org @feministculturehouse
Gladys Camilo, Michaela Casková, Paola Jalili, Miina Kaartinen, Katie Lenanton
Residency dates: 1-15 April + 10-24 June 2024
Alice Edwall // Hydra Community Care is a sensory artist, community herbalist and herb farmer exploring sensory connections to bioregional multi-dimensional time relationships. Their practice revolves around resource sharing, ocean and land art, dance and installations centering more-than-human ecologies, collective practices of care and grieving, politicized bodies and relationship to land.
Their work explores and challenges the white gaze and amnesia dominant in Nordic herbal and botanical knowledge, and makes proposals for re-grounding in and re-composing to knowledge edifices in intentional ecosystems that embrace grief, playfulness, collaboration, equity, participation and repair.
Alice is a member of the Mobile Herbal Clinic Calais which serve refugees and migrants in Calais and Dunkirk. They are also part of and Rights for Roots Collective in Denmark which fight for better health care access and rights in the danish asylum system. You can support their work by donating to @mobileherbalclinic_calais and @rights4roots.
Residency dates: 1-30 May 2024
a guttering is a project centering production of food and a dinner performance where agriculture meets fermentation meets somatics meets queer meets decolonization meets unionising. The collective consists of artist and plant-based cook Sal Reis Trouxa, choreographer Ar Utke Ács, and artist and horticulturalist Sarasvati Shrestha. We will investigate value systems around food and the act of sharing meals together in order to bring forth the people and the more-than-human labour behind the dishes. Furthermore we will look into how we can invite for an aware way of eating. a guttering works to subvert traditions of the dinner table to create space for caring communities and ecologies. Can we deepen our connections through sharing a meal?
Ar Utke Ács, Sal Reis Trouxa, Sarasvati Shrestha
Residency dates: 15 May – 15 June 2024
MASSIA SPROUT is funded by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture
