Open Studio: Rita Marcalo (IE/PT)

Name: Open Studio: Rita Marcalo (IE/PT)
Start: 2025-08-21T13:00:00+03:00
End: 2025-08-21T14:00:00+03:00
Location: Suomenlinna B28

Schedule

Thu Aug 21 2025 at 01:00 pm to 02:00 pm

UTC+03:00

Location

Suomenlinna B28 | Helsinki, ES

Welcome to an Open Studio with choreographer Rita Marcalo (IRL), where she offers the audience an insight into her current research titled Slow Tides: Embodied Journeys and Island Narratives.
SlowTides: Embodied Journeys and Island Narratives builds on Instant Dissidence's previous project, SlowMo, which explored decarbonized touring through land and sea travel. This new project deepens that commitment by focusing on insularity, islander identities, and socio-political realities through embodied movement.
Taking place across the European islands of Ireland, Tenerife (Spain), Madeira (Portugal), and Suomenlinna (Finland), SlowTides continues the ethos of sustainable, community-driven artistic practice. It integrates slow travel and local engagement as core creative methodologies. By utilizing site-specific choreography, oral history collection, and delving into local folk dance traditions, along with collaborations with island communities, SlowTides expands the vision of SlowMo. It connects not just places, but the lived experiences of those shaped by their island environments.
The project culminates in informal sharings in Madeira and Suomenlinna, weaving together movement, memory, storytelling, and sustainability. It reflects on how geography shapes identity and artistic expression within a wider European context.
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.
Photo: George Swattridge
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