READING

Saturday, June 13, 14.00 - 15.00, with Anika Spindelmann & Monika Szuba

Step into the world of cyclical archive of baltic correspondences - an experimental poetry collection co-written by Anika and Monika together with the more-than-human beings and lands they lived alongside over twelve months. Weaving between Aarhus and Gdańsk, the collection blends text, images, drawings and recordings into something between a poetic field guide and a diary - rooted in ecological listening, myth and multispecies ways of knowing. They will read from the collection and share reflections to inspire your own practice of noticing and attuning to the web of life around you.

SOUND INSTALLATION

Saturday 12.00 - 18.30 & Sunday, June 14, 10.00 - 15.00 (drop-in, piece lasts 30 min), with Liene Jurgelāne

Birch Time Listenings is a sound installation created in collaboration with birches - an invitation to slow down and listen to their stories, and the human memories we share with them. At physical listening stations near birch trees, you can experience woven together poetry, folksongs, personal stories and embodied tree connection practices - an intimate meeting with the trees and their world. The listening stations are designed and built by Mads Peter Laursen.

RITUAL

Sunday, June 14, 16.00 - 17.00, with Upē

We will close this year's festival together with a collective singing session led by Upē - a ritual gathering to sing plant songs, connect and let the festival settle. Upē is a singing collective based at Institut for (X), named after the Latvian word for "in the river," and they bring together songs from European traditions and members' own cultures and lineages.

PERFORMANCE

Saturday, June 13, 12:00 - 13:00 & 14:00 - 15:00, with Wunschmachine

HAVEN is a sensory performance walk through the botanical garden. Wearing headphones, you move slowly through the landscape guided by sound, poetry and live performers — encountering stories from real gardeners, music composed from garden sounds, and intimate moments with plants, scents and textures. A slow invitation to reconnect with the living world beneath your feet.

INSTALLATION/ PERFORMANCES

Saturday & Sunday, see opening hours and performance times in program, with Katrine Faber, Liene Jurgelāne and others.

House for Homeless Grief is a space for the grief of our time - a multidisciplinary installation that holds our sorrows through performance, sound, music, text, ritual, and dialogue with plants and the more-than-human. During ROOTED it can be experienced both as a sound installation and through live performances at different hours, gathering a diverse group of artists, voices, and a Crying Choir into a shared space for recognition and collective healing.

WORKSHOP

Sunday, June 14, 12.00 - 13.30, with Anja Perl

What would change in you if you truly understood the plants you eat? This workshop immerses you in the world of a specific edible plant through three ways of knowing - connecting with its ecosystem, stepping into the plant's own perspective, and exploring with your senses. An invitation to move beyond the visible and into a deeper relationship with the living world that feeds us.

SOUND INSTALLATION

Saturday, June 13, 16.00 - 20.00 & Sunday, June 14, 11.00 - 15.00 (drop-in), with Clare Archibald

if trees were lone women is a sound installation built from the voices of almost 170 people from around the world — an expansive, collective listening to what trees might sound like if they were lone women. Come and immerse yourself in hours of audio gathered across continents, and let the question resonate.

SOUND INSTALLATION, Saturday, June 13, 12.00 - 18.30 & Sunday, June 14, 10.00 - 15.30 (drop-in), with Agnieszka Bułacik, Hanna Grześkiewicz & Liene Jurgelāne.

In the Hollow We Remember is a sound installation rooted in the forests and mountains of the Sudetenland - the Czech-Polish borderlands - exploring queered relationality with land marked by displacement and migration, mourning ecological devastation, and imagining new forms of kinship across species and borders. Wooden hollows representing linden trees hold a soundscape grounded in Eastern European singing traditions, field recordings and storytelling.

FILM SCREENING

Saturday, June 13, 12.00 - 13.30, directed by Jesse McLean

Light Needs is an experimental documentary about the surprisingly intimate and complex relationships that develop between houseplants and the people they live with. Filmed across many different homes and spaces over several years, it considers what is gained and lost through the social contracts between plant and animal - and what responsibility for care toward other living beings might truly mean.

PERFORMANCE

Saturday, June 13, 15.30 - 16.30, with Mina Đorđević & Ola Zielińska

Maple Songs follows Maple as a living thread through songs stretching from the Baltics to the Balkans. Often called the youth of the forest, the maple carries tenderness and resilience - sacred and enduring, jawor, javor, платан, symbolising strength and the life-death-life cycle in Slavic traditions. Sound artist Mina Đorđević and vocal artist Ola Zielińska - both rooted in the deep collective singing traditions of Eastern Europe - invite you to gather in the shade of the tree for shared songs and stories. To remember, to listen, and to root.

DJ & VJ set

Saturday, June 13, 22.30 - 00.00, with JAQUITA:QT

Mná Ceoil Bláthanna - Irish for Women of Floral Music - is an Irish duo rooted in the Aarhus underground, weaving electronic folk, botanical visuals and Irish folklore into an untamed, flourishing ecosystem of sound. Where mossy rhythms meet wildflower folklore, feminine spirit meets deeply rooted earth, and banshees and faeries surface through immersive botanical projections. End the first festival day with collective dancing and immersion in magical visual landscapes.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 12.00 - 15.00, with Nat Skoczylas

The Nettle Bar is an invitation to encounter nettles in all their forms - liquid, solid, glutinous, stewy. Come recall getting stung as a child while hunting for wild raspberries, the goosebumps on your teenage calves. Nat invites us to laugh, make new memories, bite it, spit it, chew it, take silly selfies, flagellate, massage, intentionally sting and get stung by each other - especially where it hurts, so it hurts a little less. How are we with nettles these days? Let's find out together.

PERFORMANCE

Saturday, June 13, 11.00-12.00, with Christine Fentz

We begin the festival with a pause to arrive - together, and in relation to the place that hosts us. Performing artist Christine Fentz opens the space with a ceremony that acknowledges the plants, other living beings, and layered histories already present at Institut for (X). Christine works with the living world from an animist worldview, creating participatory performing arts through Secret Hotel and hosting at Earthwise Residency in Mols Bjerge - her practice rooted in care and reconnection with the more-than-human. A portal to open what is to come.

PERFORMANCE-WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 20.00 - 22.00, with Dorota Michalak & Borys Slowikowski

Phytosomatic Dance Party is a collective sensory exploration into life and communication at cellular scale - part guided practice, part party, part laboratory, part celebration. Driven by live electronic music crafted from field recordings, it traces the currents of self-organisation that move through particles, tissues, gestures, folk dances and chants, bringing out the tangibility of the invisible. Following the question "What is inside of us?", we groove, sweat and co-regulate together until the cellular and cosmic continuously intertwine.

WORKSHOP

Sunday, June 14, 11.00 - 12.00, with Louise Kirkegaard

In this workshop you will get inspired to make your own ink from natural plant colours — from avocado pits to black walnut ink to slow-growing Japanese indigo — and explore how to work with it artistically. Louise shares two years of experimentation and invites you to have a go yourself.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 13.00 - 15.00, with Andrea Momme

Plant Prayers is a workshop where you print prayer flags with plant motives using a heatpress - a simple, endlessly creative process with an element of surprise in every print. Add your creation to the living scenography of ROOTED. Guided by Andrea Momme, a scenographer and maker who has spent years crafting for theatre and performance.

PARTICIPATORY-PERFORMANCE

Sunday, June 14, 12:00 - 15:00 (drop-in), with Linnea Slipsager

Plant Tempo is an interactive paint session where you explore and connect with a plant - one found nearby or through displayed books - and transform that connection into a decorative painting on your skin, face or body. Carry the connection inside and out throughout the day, guided by Linnea Slipsager, whose practice grows from deep listening to the stories and ecologies of each place.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 12.00 - 13.30, with Rikke Otte

Remembering Place, Remembering Me is an embodied plant meditation that explores memory, embodied knowledge and time - facilitating a space for reconnecting with inner and outer worlds through re-membering your individual connections with places and the living beings that make up your life: plants, rivers, birds and more.

MARKET

Sunday, June 14, 10.00. - 16.00

The ROOTED Market brings together makers, artists, and growers whose work is rooted in the living world. Browse natural dye and ecoprint clothing, hand carved spoons, crystal talismans and Baltic amber, organic skincare, handblended herbal teas, upcycled textiles, screen-prints, collaged notebooks, stone sculptures, and a curated selection of books and zines on nature and ecology from Kunsthal Aarhus Shop. (Market is open to everyone and does not require a festival ticket)

INSTALLATION

Saturday, June 13, 14.00-17.30 & Sunday, June 14, 10.00-15.00 (drop-in), with Christine Fentz

Sink in – Rest(ing) Soil invites you to lie down in a heap of earth - outdoors, in the shade - to rest and remember what you are made of.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 14.00 - 17.00, with Dominika Szelążek

Soil Punk is a workshop that invites you to listen to the soil - and respond to it with your voice. Through deep listening exercises, vocal improvisation and body-based practices, you explore the sounds and energies of the living earth beneath us: its fungi, its microbial life, its cycles of decay and growth. A space to slow down, tune in, and feel your connection to the ground. Guided by Dominika Szelążek, a musician and cultural anthropologist whose practice treats sound as a way of communicating across species.

INSTALLATION

Saturday & Sunday (drop-by), with Carolina Marcos.

This year's festival scenography includes a site-specific moveable mural by Carolina Marcos - a collage inspired by seasonal changes and the experience of moving places, placing fragmented pieces of life together. An attempt at feeling whole, even on the move.

WORKSHOP

Sunday, June 14, 13.00 - 14.30, with Sarafina McPherson Kimø

Story Kitchen connects you to the aliveness of foods through a ritual of fermenting flowerkraut - sauerkraut with edible flowers - while listening to and sharing flower-inspired stories. An invitation to feel a sense of wonder and play while having your hands planted in the physical world of food. Leave with stories, fermentation skills, and your own jar of flowerkraut to take home.

FILM SCREENING

Saturday, June 13, 20.00 - 21.30, director Salomé Jashi

A Georgian documentary of rare atmospheric power, following an unusual and unsettling story: a powerful and anonymous man buys century-old trees from communities along the Georgian coast - some as tall as 15-story buildings - and transplants them to his private garden. To move them, the surrounding landscape is torn apart and the people living nearby are forced to adapt. A portrait of Georgian society today, and a meditation on forced migration, where uprooting is more than a metaphor.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 15:30 - 16:30, with Collective Fabula

Tending Towards Relational Landscapes invites you into guided practices from Fabula's first self-published work - a collection of eight exercises that translate contemporary eco-social ideas into embodied experiences, exploring perspectives beyond the human and new forms of relational awareness with the living world. A taste of the full self-guided publication, experienced together.

PERFORMATIVE READING

Saturday, June 13, 17.00 - 18.00, with Alaa Abu Asad

In this performative reading, Alaa Abu Asad poses a question: in the absence of the invasive, can we finally look at the Japanese knotweed as a green future companion? Examining how natural and national histories intertwine through the language - both verbal and visual - used to discuss invasive species, the reading envisions alternative ways of coexisting with them, raising questions about mass production ethics, exploitative economies, and a shared future.

PERFORMANCE

Sunday, June 14, 13.00 - 15.30, with Andrea Momme

The Oaklings invites you to adopt a tree - reflecting on your role as shepherd to the more-than-human world and becoming part of a long-term artwork. A question at its heart: how can we relate more deeply to the earth we live on, and understand our capacity to care for non-human existences?

PERFORMANCE

Saturday, June 13, 14.00 - 15.30, with Yeong Ran Suh

We/Re Confess Our Faith is a participatory ritual rooted in ethnographic research about Korean village shamanic traditions. While cooking rice cake together, we listen to the stories of the last village communities who have struggled to continue their rituals amid rapid social change - and join in remembering by repeating their words. Guided by Rice as our host, the ritual moves through remembrance and reciprocity, hoping to repair the universal experience of losing community culture and to regenerate something new.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 14.00 - 15.00, with Silje Erøy Sollien

What is Soil? is a sensory exploration of soil - from an apartment in Copenhagen and from the compost of Institut for (X). Soil is always a collective, a relation, a collaboration. Always breaking down and building up at the same time. Blurring death is life is death. Always transforming. Together we will create Soil Stories - guided by Silje Erøy Sollien, architectural researcher, compost coach and explorer of regenerative worldings, in close partnership with soil.

PERFORMANCE

Saturday, June 13, 18.30 - 19.30 with Siegmar Zacharias

An invitation to enter grief as a collective portal. Together we prepare a healing salve drawing on ancestral Romanian herbal knowledge, while sharing stories of plants as allies and guides in transformation. Through singing, storytelling and shared listening, we gather with grief - for personal losses, for wars, displacements, ecological destruction and extinction - and explore how it can be metabolised together into regeneration and repair.

VIDEO ESSAY

Saturday, June 13, 14.00 - 19.30 & Sunday, June 14, 10.00 - 15.00 (drop-in, duration 10 min), with Alaa Abu Asad

Wild Plants of Palestine (2018) is a video essay following botanical expeditions documenting Palestinian flora in the West Bank - interrogating the territorial dimensions of Palestinian identity in a (post)colonial landscape, through the language of plants.

WORKSHOP

Saturday, June 13, 12.00-13.30, with Wendy Wuyts

Writing (with) Plants about Homecoming in Times of Ecological Exile is a workshop where creative writing meets ecological listening - writing with plants rather than just about them. We gather around a guest plant at Institut for (X), sharing memories, stories, recipes and associations, before asking together: what does home mean in times of ecological change? You will spend time in quiet observation and write a short piece imagining yourself as the plant, then share in a closing circle. Guided by Wendy Wuyts, an ecofeminist writer and researcher who describes herself as a serial rooter.