Kunstplaats Vonk

The Age of Love is a multidisciplinary performance collective, born in the summer of 2021. They focus on creating inclusive and brave spaces for underrepresented talents and transforming it into a performative setting. The philosophy of brave spaces allows performers to always start from a place of empowerment.

Through listening and having conversations with first- and second-generation immigrants, The Age of Loves explores listening and dialogue as ways of resistance against silence and forgetting. By diving into their own histories concurrently, they make a collective space where different identities can move and discover themselves.

These exchanges take form in many different expressions: pole-dancing, spoken-word, sitar playing, and much more – all with the aim of giving voice to the layered and often unspoken experiences of those who live on the borders of identity, belonging and heritage.

Contact: lies@kunstplaatsvonk.be

Photo: Dánil Røkke

 ANART are dedicated to promoting human rights and democratic values through their work, and to advocate for equality, freedom, and justice through dance. Their performances are calls to action that encourage audiences to uphold and protect fundamental principles.

The members of ANART have backgrounds in Ukraine, Estonia, Spain, Brazil, USA, and Denmark. Originating in Copenhagen, ANART has evolved from the dance piece flowers also cry by Anastasia Krasnoshchoka that sheds light on the lived experiences of Ukrainian women amidst conflict and amplifies their voices in advocating for justice.

Their current project addresses the environmental impact of war, focusing on the destruction of the biggest in Ukraine Hydroelectric Power Plant and the Kakhovka dam by Russian forces in June 2023.

ANART aim to expand the boundaries of performance art to narrate profound stories and foster meaningful dialogue. Committed to social and political engagement, their projects challenge audiences to consider critical issues and perspectives by integrating activism into their art and embracing vulnerability.

Contact: admin@teater-a.dk

ISKRA Production are based in Tromsø and founded in 2024 by Prokhor Gusev and Gulnara Iskakova – two artists exiled from Russia. For their project, I am a witness of your existence, they collaborate with Sami-Norwegian composer Gøril Nilssen.

Using phones to host dialogue formats between strangers, they explore the concept of witnessing and its significance in today’s world. When we have access to vast amounts of information and can be virtually connected to events unfolding on the other side of the planet – what does it mean to be a witness in this hyper-connected era?

Navigating a different cultural landscape in a new country, ISKRA Production seek to create a space for dialogue, where identities and innovative approaches to theatre can be explored amidst a world that is on fire.

Contact: iskra1production@gmail.com

#yodo – you only die once is a project about dying, death, grief, and the politics of care – topics that are often pushed to the margins in European/Western contexts. Initially, #yodo consisted of three artists, but is now run solely by Michi Maxi Schulz as an ongoing artistic research and participatory performance project.

Rooted in embodied practice, community-based formats, and the everyday realities ofcare work, Michi develops immersive workshops, performative scores and intimate public encounters that invite participants to listen to their bodies, speak the unspeakable and rehearse tenderness, honesty, and mutual support.

#yodo is developed alongside ongoing dialogue with care workers activists, and participants, and continues to expand as a trans-local practice creating formats that can adapt to different communities and build temporary containers of trust where vulnerability becomes a collective strength and care is understood as cultural work

Contact: yodo@posteo.de

KAIHO has been working as a core team with various artists since 2015, incorporating theatre, dance, visual imagery, film, plastic arts, lighting, music, and any artistic form to tell stories. In Moving Identities, they worked on the performance A Void, in which they explored themes such as solitude and the particular notion of hikikomori, a Japanese term for extreme social withdrawal.

Developed as a solo, A Void was performed by Marina Cherry who has a background in circus and contortionism and uses her body to tell stories, and further developed into short film as the project moved through the international residencies.

Diving into the themes of loneliness and solitude, the project opens dialogue about loneliness and its common denominators across cultures – but how is it formed and dealt with in specific cultural contexts?

Contact: kaiho.company@gmail.com

Artefactourists is secretly a pseudo-acronym for: the act of remembering through movement; memories triggered by travelling through places and artefacts.

As dancers and choreographers, Artefactourists engage with European museum and archiving traditions, reading objects, and mediating history, while considering the body a legitimate source of knowledge. Their autobiographical investigation includes memory, labour, and the inherited working body in the Eastern European context.

Their co-creative nomadic performance practice concentrates on the experience of rooting amongst scattered identities. It involves triggering memories and stories through places and objects, translating them, reinterpreting, or doubting them. They scrutinize personal memory and collective memory, allowing new narratives to form, constructing and reconstructing identity.

Contact: artefactourism@gmail.com

The newly formed collective Third Figure have been developing their first contemporary puppet theatre performance for adult audiences, When the Earth Gave Way.

The performance explores the concepts of the shadow self and trickster tendencies, rooted in Jungian theory, and their role in shaping our internal and external experiences. Using human-sized string puppets, actors, and puppeteers, they investigate the battles within ourselves when facing societal norms and personal struggles.

In the dance between an actor and a puppet, who really moves who? And how do these relations reflect contemporary European Identities?

Contact: info@fondsinitium.com

The Farsi word Gomrâh means lost or the lost ones. Gomrâh have been developing a new ritual for mourning the losses that come with moving far away, and from grieving lost ones from afar. 

The three members of Gomrâh found each other in Belgium during the pandemic and immediately became friends. An actor, a musician, and a designer/photographer, they all shared a sense of lostness – not only in living far from their families, but, like most young artists, also in finding their footing in a European art scene.

While living in Europe, they have each lost friends and family members in Iran, without being able to grieve as part of a community.

This rift sits at the heart of their first collective project, Mourning in the Wrong Language. How do you carry loss in solitude? How do you grieve in a place that doesn’t carry the collective memory of your loss? And what role can art play in creating spaces for remembrance where new rituals can emerge?

Contact: gomrah.collective@gmail.com