Artist Talk: Activist Art or Artistic Activism? Does it Matter?

Name: Artist Talk: Activist Art or Artistic Activism? Does it Matter?
Start: 2025-08-19T15:00:00+03:00
End: 2025-08-19T16:30:00+03:00
Location: Nordisk kulturkontakt

Schedule

Tue Aug 19 2025 at 03:00 pm to 04:30 pm

UTC+03:00

Location

Nordisk kulturkontakt | Helsinki, ES

Welcome to the first Artist Talk of the Autumn Season at our Nordic Library in Kaisaniemi. In this talk, choreographer Rita Marcalo (IRL) discusses the creative practices between art and activism that she is exploring during her stay at Residency B28 in Suomenlinna.
Drawing on the work she is currently researching in Suomenlinna (the ecologically engaged work SlowTides) and the work she is currently touring worldwide (the anti-apartheid work Dancing With Strangers: From Palestine To Ireland), choreographer Rita Marcalo will present an exposition of her practice. She will focus on the fluid slippage between art and activism in her personal and professional life. A screening of the award-winning film Dancing With Strangers: From Palestine To Ireland will take place as part of the event. University Researcher Dr. Kai Lehikoinen from Uniarts Helsinki will moderate the talk.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Choreographer Rita Marcalo is the Artistic Director of Instant Dissidence (www.instantdissidence.org), a socially and ecologically engaged dance company based in Cloughjordan Ecovillage. The company foregrounds the role of dance as a social catalyst. Instant Dissidence resists the idea of art as an object produced by a special kind of person called the ‘artist’. Their work is often co-created in dialogue with (and performed by) non-professional artists, focusing on issues that matter to them. The people whom Rita assembles for each Instant Dissidence project become ‘artivists’, enacting the power of connecting art and social consciousness.
Instant Dissidence believes in the ecological necessity of shifting art-making away from its current egocentric paradigm (art about humans, for humans) to an ecocentric paradigm (a post-humanist epistemology where humans are conceived as intertwined with, and dependent upon, non-human life).
Rita Marcalo’s stay at Residency B28 is co-funded by the European Union through the Creative Europe programme as part of the project Island Connect II.
Picture: Dylan Kendle
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