Eric Barco & Sara Paasikoski (FIN)
We are Eric Barco and Sara Paasikoski. In 2020 we graduated from the University of the Arts Helsinki’s Theater Academy program in acting (MA). Our collaboration began in 2014 at an amateur theater, after which we have refined our practice together and dreamed of joint projects.
Together, we enjoy dancing, club culture, carnivalisation, critical thinking, daydreaming, and dismantling old practices. Sara’s recent work as a performer was in Espoo City Theater’s ”Armageddon” (chor. / dir. Sonya Lindfors, Sara Melleri, Elina Pirinen). Eric is working with Geoffrey Erista in Baltic Circle’s “Future Stage” project in ”Undertone” production in autumn 2022. In the autumn of 2021, we directed our joint debut piece ”how to synchronize and decompose in this world” for Helsingin Kellariteatteri.
The most important values in our work are honesty, equality, listening, negotiation, encouragement, and courage. We are interested in a soft and fragile feminist approach to the stage and the body. In addition to body practices and content subjects, our approach to performing arts is strongly visual and explores a variety of different senses. The relationship between body and space and contact with ourselves, each other, and the audience are strongly intertwined on both a physical and philosophical level. We ask why and how, without assuming a complete or unambiguous answer.
At Eskus’ residency, we study, among other things, the body that changes over time in relation to gender and sexuality. We also examine the expectations and demands placed on our bodies in relation to gender, sexuality and the environment. We aim to expand our understanding of rehearsal and performance modes and situations by asking: where do the boundaries of a performance, the stage, and performing go.
IG: @lejjona & @sara.paasikoski
Metafloora = Martta Jylhä, Minna Lund ja Mimi Kantola (FIN)
Metafloora is a performance band. We are a gentle attention seeking project. We are prom bitches with bad taste. We are a pack of crying wolves. We are worms eating our way out of our brutal reality. We arise from the ruins of severely broken hearts. We invite you to crying sessions, to our garden of rotten aggressions. Some of us play instruments, some of us don’t. Our songs can be anything and we dedicate them to the things that bloom, for those who dream, cry and die.
Metafloora is a performance band collective founded in 2020 which consists of director-lyricist Minna Lund, sound designer-musician Mimi Kantola, dramaturg Martta Jylhä, scenographer-lighting designer Saana Volanen and costume designer Ella Snellman.
Metafloora is liquid: constantly questioning its form and content. We steal from popstars, borrow from classics and combine poetry with autotune.
Metafloora has been invited to create a new performance piece to Oksasenkatu 11 gallery space in October 2022. Eskus Summer Residency provides a place for the band’s jamming sessions where we work with new material for the upcoming show.
IG: @metafloora
Website: https://metafloora.wixsite.com/portfolio
Vili Nissinen (FIN)
_Vili von Nissinen_ (b.1987) is a Helsinki-based brave and unapologetic queer artist working in fields of liveand visual art, theatre, and immersive, participatory games. During the Eskus’ Summer Residence, I’ll be working on my upcoming solo performance, “Hyena”. The core of “Hyena” is the collision between binary and nonbinary worlds; Otherness, and gender and sexuality that refuses to fit in norms. Joy and enjoyment. “Hyena” is one idea and possibility for a non-binary body and life. The performance mixes live art, video art, spoken word, rituals, lecture, and stand-up comedy.
IG: @von_nissinen_artpage
Aurora del Rio (IT, ES)
Aurora Del Rio is a multidisciplinary artist and Ph.D. candidate at Aalto University, based in Helsinki. She holds a BA in Painting from the Academyof Fine Arts Bologna, and an MFA in Creative Practice from Transart Institute Berlin/New York. Her artistic practice investigates the relationship between humans and nature and how the perception of contaminated spaces influences the creation of reality. She is interested in the space of potentiality that originates when definition is avoided or misplaced, and the liminal space of failure.
Brief description of the work: Aurora will work on the development of the performance project _Tree of Dawn, _which focuses on a parallel between radioactive contamination and the image of the Sun-Tree from the Latvian mythology. Starting from a _daina_, an ancient form of poetry-singing, the sound for this work has been generated using a decoding formula taken from radioactive decay. Furthermore, she collected a soil sample from the former nuclear missile base of Zeltiņi, and processed it into a soil chromatography: a chemical procedure where a circular image is produced from a soil sample. The movement-based research will depart from both the sound piece and the soil.
IG: @aurora_delrio
Emīlija Berga & Jurģis Lūsis (LV)
Jurģis Lūsis is a young theatre director. So far he has been involved in different kinds of performances as an actor, director, musician and movement artist. At this point his main focus is to discover himself as an artist and to cross borders between various disciplines of art.
Emīlija Berga is a contemporary dance dancer and choreographer from Latvia. In 2021 she received herbachelor’s degree in contemporary dance choreography in Latvian Academy of Culture. Since then she has been working both as a choreographer and dancer in Latvia and abroad. In her works she is interested in learning about other forms of art and mixing them together with movement. Right now, her work is focused on noticing small details, and searching for vulnerability both with oneself on stage, as well as with the audience.
IG: @emilijaberga
About our work in Eskus residency.
Jurģis Lūsis and Emīlija Berga will be working on a performance ”Wind blows, water moves”. This piece was first created during a study time in 4bid Gallery, Amsterdam. During the Eskus Summer residency the artists will continue developing this movement piece, experimenting further with their relationship on stage and the duration of the piece. ”Wind blows, water moves” is a piece that started as an experiment with different states of presence and as a searching for an authentic human state. Inspiration to do this work came from Nicolas Poussin’s painting ”Spring on The Earthly Paradise”
