speculative plant poetry workshop

Artist: Anika Spindelmann

This writing workshop is an invitation to enter into intimate encounters with the plants of the summer-abundant neighborhood of the festival grounds. Together, we’ll conspire, speculate, and dream about eutopian futures. Through little writing exercises, we’ll tune into the plantscape of the urban garden around us - listening, observing, and responding - to co-create our own poems. In the second part we experiment with weaving / entangling the visions into speculative vision tapestry, letting a collective eco-poem emerge. Ecopoetry intertwines aesthetic beauty and ecological message, inviting us to reimagine human-nature relationships beyond the illusion of a binary. As stories and language shape the way we see and are, writing poetry is potent magic and has not only the power to root us, but to plant seeds for change. 

No prior writing experience is needed. Just bring joyful curiosity to play and explore with words and connect with the plants and people. 

a cleansing ritual

Artist: Lærke Lyhne

A sensuous ritual with herbs and water to celebrate and to let go of the day’s impressions. In this workshop, you are invited to cleanse both your physical and etheric body using fragrant plants – a practice rooted in ancient Nordic cultures. For centuries, herbs have been used to wash away the unseen: sorrow, restlessness, heaviness – making space for renewal.

Together, we will create a ritual herbal bath, giving thanks for the day and letting go of what no longer serves us. We will meet the magical herbs and learn how to use them for cleansing and self-care.

Throughout the day, there will be a small wellness station where you can support yourself with refreshing herbs – for the skin and as hydrating herbal drinks rich in electrolytes.

eco-social engagement workshop

Artists: Tīna Alise Drupa and Collective Fabula

Semi-natural grasslands, including meadows and pastures, are among the most biodiverse ecosystems, yet they now exist only in small, fragmented patches due to changes in land use. As meadows continue to shrink, preserving their rich biodiversity becomes increasingly vital.

Meadow Quilt is an eco-social engagement workshop that invites participants to symbolically take stewardship of a meadow plant through a series of guided activities. Together, we craft a collective quilt using an innovative biotextile made from cereal roots, interwoven with wild plant seeds collected by the Latvian Nature Foundation. This living textile will then be placed in Institut for (X) landscape, allowing it to naturally integrate and transform into a meadow.

The workshop is suitable for all ages, but we ask adults to accompany their children in the process. You can come and stay for the whole duration or just join for a while. 

sound ceremony - performance 

Artists: Agnieszka Bułacik, Vivian Vesterager, Edda Karólína, Liene Jurgelāne

What if we could get guidance from the mycelial beings on how to move beyond our human-made boundaries and become more present with the living world through listening, breathing and sounding together? 

murmuring through is a participatory performance ceremony that invites you into an intimate encounter with the more-than-human world. Rooted in sound, silence, and deep listening, this work gently opens a space of connection, grief, dreaming, and transformation. Echoes of Eastern European folksongs, murmurs, and spoken word weave together with the subtle presences of plants and landscape to form a sensory journey—a co-created ritual of reconnection.

This is a space to feel and to be felt; to listen with your body and spirit; to honour the wintering times and the unseen life stirring within. It is an invitation to sit with the pain of ecological loss, while holding onto the possibility of collective healing and imagining other, more livable worlds in kinship with the land.

sound journey, concert, auditory meditation

Artist: Josephin Bovién

A poetic sound journey following a one-eyed frog with five long eyelashes as it travels through nature and meets a young, singing woman. A performance blending intuitive singing, ambient sound, and storytelling to guide us all into a collective auditory meditation.

performance 

Artist: Ida Lod

Owl Woman – performance ritual is an interactive, poetic performance that moves in the borderland between music-theatre and ritual.

It’s a suggestive journey through Baroque laments, poetic texts, and improvised music. The Owl Woman is a mystical archetype and a poetic oracle. She invites you into her intimate space, a kind of waiting room between worlds, where the audience gets the chance to let go of the old to make room for the new.

Owl Woman – performance ritual premiered at the Stockholm Fringe Festival 2024, where it was nominated for ”Best Dance and Physical Theatre Award” and has since been selected for Konstepidemiens spring program 2025 in Gothenburg. 

”𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙. 𝘿𝙚𝙚𝙥. 𝘽𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡. 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜. 𝙄𝙩 𝙜𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙢𝙚 𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙜𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣 𝙢𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙖𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙄 𝙛𝙚𝙡𝙩 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙞𝙜𝙜𝙚𝙧” – audience member

co-creative cooking

Artist: Sarafina Kimø @Skovlyste

Sarafina will help you use all your senses to engage with the diversity of nourishing plants on this land which humans have cultivated with love and grown together with. All curious people are invited to help them make a soup which will be offered as a gift to the artists and volunteers organising the festival. Through this act of reciprocal care, we acknowledge and honour the seeds of ideas which ROOTED festival plants within us.

The cauldron will be open for offerings from 14-16, while the ingredients will be on display most of the day. 

a performance, a lecture, a prayer, a poem, a cry

Artist: Lotta Petronella

Själö Herbarium embodies hundreds of years of institutional violence and hauntings on the island of Seili. Calling in the seals, the rocks, the ticks, the missing bodies, the plants to guide us. Drawing from three herbariums collected and created on the island from 1673 to now.

all power is vulnerable - 

they told us 

as we dissolved into water, 

as we became wind.

Lotta says about this work:

For the last nine years, I have been working on Själö, a small island in the Baltic Sea, shaped like a bird, named after seals & souls

An island embodying hundreds of years of institutional violence and hauntings.

The first institution was the church, in 1619, to store away the Lepers & those without a holy spirit later it became a mental institution, transformed into a women’s asylum those deported here were brought across the waters by force forced to stay

forced out of life

In 1962 the Archipelago Research Institute was set up in the old hospital buildings.  The researchers work in rooms that used to be patient cells, they collect samples to create a time series

reading the land

reading the waters

The haunting is everywhere, it’s in the structure of the buildings & the blueprints, the way spaces are created & arranged. The laboratory of aquariums to study invasive crabs resembles the old cells

I keep returning to this place during different seasons, moon phases

I keep coming back

To the island

The wreck

The myth

The plants

Digging gently for the roots

the botanical evidence

creating seedlings,

small libraries of care.

The islands ask back

What are you looking for?

Why are you looking?

collective tarot reading performance

Artist: Lotta Petronella

A collaboration between Lotta Petronella and artist Cecilia Westerberg on the island of Själö (Seili) in the Turku archipelago. 25 plant cards are inspired by tarot. The cards were made by Cecilia with plants that grow on the island, a concept written and performed by Lotta Petronella. Reading with Plants is part of an ongoing body of work and investigation, SjälöPoiesis - a critical study of power structures through plants, especially common plants – the weeds, the vulgaris.

The readings are done for 5 people at a time and last 30 min. There will be 4 slots in total. 

concert 

Artist: Katrine Faber

Katrine Faber creates wordless songs and sound images inspired by the landscape of the body and the bodies of the landscapes, the songs of the Earth.  In her music there are dancing breaths and secret rhythms that waves, knocks, tells and calls. The music dances around small stories about body and life, death and memory, grief and joy, transformations that happen again and again.          She uses the human voice in all possible ways and sings about forgotten connections between people, plants, animals and the nature around and inside us. It is a meeting of composed songs, improvisations, storytelling and peculiar dances; it is soft and wild and beautiful and sad and above all: very alive!

performance walk 

Artist: Katrine Faber

Songs From Our Bodies is an interactive performance walk that invites you to listen to and sing with living growths in the urban landscape around the Institute for (X) and Godsbanen in Aarhus. An urban landscape in strong change, where gentrification and new buildings quickly eradicate and remove growth and wild places. The walk is a tribute to the wild, the fragile and the lost; what we have lost and what we are about to lose. A tribute to the hope and the wild in ourselves and our own bodies.

Songs From Our Bodies examines the resonance between humans and our living environment. The performance sings of the living world and examines the voices that inhabit our personal bodies and the voices that inhabit the bodies of landscapes and places. We go on a singing, sensing, listening, playful walk in the area and investigate whether we can create a dialogue with the more than human through listening and singing from the landscapes in our bodies.

concert

A live performance of Wild Anima’s project Phytosynthesis — a poetic term that invites us to receive the spiritual messages of plants through a sonic ritual, and to explore our own inner photosynthesis. The music is created in collaboration with plants, using their bio-electric signals, interwoven with livelooping polyphonies, lyre, and semi-modular synth. 

film screening with sensory anchoring, seed sharing, and seed stories.

Artists: film by Jumana Manna, sensory anchoring ritual by Linda Lapiņa and Liene Jurgelāne

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. The film patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.