FRESH START: Nordic/Baltic Development Programme for Emerging Performance Artists
FRESH START is a joint initiative by three leading performance art festivals – New Performance Turku Biennale (Finland), Riga Performance Festival Starptelpa (Latvia), and Live Art Denmark Festival (Denmark) to support emerging performance artists in 2025.
The programme is designed for artists who have been working in performance art for less than 10 years. Its aim is to develop their artistic processes, introduce new talent to the professional field, and provide mentorship and resources for career growth. FRESH START also welcomes artists transitioning into performance from other art disciplines, offering them a platform to explore new forms of artistic expression.
Selected artists engage in independent work and the creation of a performance piece to be showcased across two festivals, participate in a residency hosted by one of the partner festivals, and receive mentoring and artistic sparring. Each artist works closely with a festival curator, a local collaborator, and a personal mentor. The mentorship pool includes artistic directors of the partner festivals and artist-curators from their extensive international networks. In addition, peer support and sparring sessions among participating artists foster a collaborative and inspiring environment.
FRESH START is supported by Nordic Culture Point.
Performances of FRESH START artists at Riga Performance Festival STARPTELPA:
Anna Maskava (LV)
Performance “Ancestral Body II”
K. K. fon Stricka villa
30 May 2025 at 19:20
The performance “Ancestral Body” (Senču ķermenis) is a storytelling-based work is which Anna Maskava weaves together personal family history and ritual to reflect on the inheritance of experience and to offer an insight into the body as a vessel of memory. However, in this work, bodily memory is viewed not only in the context of human experience, but also in close connection with the constant presence and coexistence of other forms of life. The performance expands the understanding of ancestral heritage by presenting it as a rhizomatic and interconnected network, in which various species become an essential part of the narrative. It invites the audience to reflect on their own connections with history, identity, and the surrounding environment, while fostering a deeper dialogue between personal and collective memory.
Anna Maskava is a transdisciplinary artist whose work spans visual arts, with a particular focus on photography and performance, often blending the two. Maskava’s works explore themes of kinship, particularly women’s experiences and the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans. With gathering and storytelling as core elements of her artistic practice, she weaves together actual and imagined narratives, intertwining them with a deep interest in Latvia's socio-political forces and collective memory.
Hanna Ijäs (FI)
Performance “The Body Harvest” // 18+
K. K. fon Stricka villa
30 May 2025 at 20:40
“The Body Harvest “dips into the abstraction of physicality, bodies and tangible worlds in the face of digitalisation. It depicts a wavy motion of coming to surface, plugging in and fading out – essentially a trundle of time in the division of the physical and digital body. Through voice and text the work explores the lines between reality and the imagined, searching for ways to return to the neglected body. The Performance is a moment of delirium, friendship and self-destruction through toxic fibres.
“The Body Harvest” is a new solo performance by Hanna Ijäs commissioned by New Performance Turku Biennale in 2025.
Hanna Ijäs (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer based in Helsinki. In times where technology moulds and forms interactions, Ijäs aims to grasp this through performance, ways of communication and methods of understanding. Writing and performing are the tools to reveal, discover and frame the value systems, power structures and conditions of humans. At the very core Ijäs re/de/constructs identity and the question of what it is to be a human within expanding and contracting borders and boundaries in a vast fluid changing world. The core of her research is the mapping of the modern human at large in digital and physical realities.
Maria Lepisto (SE)
Performance “The Mermaid’s Bargain”
K. K. fon Stricka villa
31 May 2025 at 19:00
In her performance “The Mermaid’s Bargain”, artist Maria Lepistö stages a scene from Disney's The Little Mermaid, where a teenage mermaid sells her voice to an octopus in exchange for a human body and a pair of legs. In this animated scene, the voice leaves one body and enters another. She will re-create this moment, exploring disembodiment, imitation, and voice reproduction, using a prosthetic leg and a loop pedal as props.
Maria Lepistö is a Swedish artist based in Denmark, working with sound, storytelling, and performance. Since 2013, her research engages the bioacoustics Animal Sound Archive in Berlin, experimenting with animal sounds and human identity. She studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, and her work has been shown internationally at venues such as Arti et Amicitiae, Roskilde Museum of Contemporary Art, and Cashmere Radio Berlin. She is currently teaching 6th graders at a Danish public school how to howl like wolves and is working on a commission for a permanent sound installation in a public park in Esbjerg.
Mailo Mēness & Grieta Butjankova (LV)
Performance “The Cost of Convenience”
K. K. fon Stricka villa
31 May at 17:00
Today, microplastics are found not only in the environment, but already inside the human body. The increasing presence of microplastics in nature raises concerns about their potential impact on human health. It is suspected that microplastics could cause various health issues, such as inflammation and immune system reactions, as they can physically and chemically affect tissues. Research is ongoing. What kind of future do we face? And—plastic is truly everywhere.
Artist Mailo Mēness plans to take a step ahead and leave an indelible symbol of microplastics on their body, in a way, preempting the accumulation of microplastics in their own body. In the performance, the irreversible changes will be made by artist Grieta Butjankova.
Mailo Mēness is a Latvian-born multidisciplinary artist currently based in Riga. They combine art and activism to talk about issues important to them, such as queer rights and queer/trans visibility, the vulnerability of the artist and the precarious worker, animal welfare and ecology. Drawing on their own experience, they merge the lived and actual with some shades of humour. In their art practice, they use the medium of performance, video, text, illustration and installation.
Grieta Butjankova, artist, creator of 22.22 tattoo studio.
Additional performance by Leena Kela (FI)
Leena Kela (FI)
Performance “End of Days”
ZUZEUM Art Centre
29 May at 20:20
“End of Days” is a performance by Leena Kela that explores survival through the themes of survivalism and artificial intelligence. In the performance, Kela interacts with various objects, materials, and ideas related to these questions, gradually building spatial and conceptual tensions. The work unfolds through a score-based method, where each letter serves as an instruction for action. The piece culminates with the arrival of the ultimate survivor — the tardigrade.
Leena Kela is a performance artist, a doctoral candidate at the Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki, and the artistic director of the New Performance Turku Biennale. In her artistic work and research, she explores the dialogue between corporeality and materiality within performance art. Kela creates performances that play with and twist our relationship to everyday objects, perceptions, and phenomena. Her works have been presented internationally at performance art festivals, events, and exhibitions across all continents — except Antarctica.
FRESH START is supported by Nordic Culture Point.
