Nau Ivanow

The five Afro-Catalan creators in Las Sistahs are focused on how black women’s bodies are perceived. How they are read in terms of pain, strangeness, and pleasure/joy.

Las Sistahs have been researching the history of a group of enslaved black women who were used for gynaecological experiments during the 19th century. Thanks to them, progress was made in medical issues – however, the names of these women (Anarcha, Betsey and Lucy) were forgotten for years, while the doctor came to be considered the father of modern gynaecology.

Las Sistahs share a common search for social justice, and understanding of black feminisms, while they believe that the biggest revolution is working from and with tenderness and love.

Contact: info@nauivanow.com

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

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

DRIVER is a choreographic research project that speculates on the universe of truck drivers; the romantic americana imagery, escapist wanderlust, and idealized loneliness – stories of adventure and freedom, but also, or perhaps even more so, bleak realities of long days, underpayment, and loneliness.

The artists had been thinking about engaging with the work reality of drivers, in comparison to working as a dancer/choreographer, for a while before Moving Identities. The perceived physical passivity in the work of drivers – sitting down for long periods of time, whilst also being in motion. Through a lot of reading, they got curious about truck drivers and the myths and fictions surrounding their work.

DRIVER materializes and discusses speed as a sensuous, individual, but also common and socio-political experience. It questions who has the agency and ability to influence speed and who must abide by the speed of others, or alternatively, fall behind.

Contact: info@udviklingsplatformen.dk

Liquid Logic’s work flows between physical theatre, butoh, and futuristic cuteness. They abandon classical forms to dream collectively with body and sound. They investigate how unseen ancestors, silenced histories, and suppressed emotions can find form.

Their current research, Oh deathmother oh! Rituals for the unseen, begins with dreams and turns them into rituals of remembrance.

Always grounded in a queer- feminist and decolonial perspective, they understand performative art as a practice of resistance: a political spaceship that breaks down patriarchal, colonial, and normative structures.

“Liquid” describes the way they create intuitively, embodied, and in constant transformation. Their work is not only performance, but a process of transformation and listening to what was hidden, to what still needs to be said.

Contact: info@hellerau.org

M0nster.L4b create an imagery of queer creatures through performance, choreography, film, and drag. They often work site specific and collect and engage with material from specific environments.

With personal backgrounds in Chile and Brazil, the collective’s works go beyond Barcelona with a deep interest in borders, identity, and moving as sites of transformism. The materials, objects, and impressions they collect allow them to build relationships between their own identities and the territories they work within by activating drag technology.

To M0nster.L4b, the phenomenon of drag, and its hybrid identities, are queer methodologies that allows them to relate to contexts like ecology, migration, decoloniality, and transgenderism.

Contact: m0nster.l4b@gmail.com

Photo: Nyam Nyam