Get to know our NoMad artists!
We're excited to introduce the artists that will bring NoMad House Helsinki to life! Between April and September, we will host 9 projects involving 22 artists. Each piece will engage a specific audience, fostering new encounters throughout Helsinki. We're confident there's a NoMad House performance waiting for you: stay tuned, we will publish our programme at the end of March!
Wild Thing
Wild Thing is a multi-faceted performance project sketching manifestations of wildness and thingness. It is a place for practicing ecological sensitivity in a research-like process. The working group consists of dance artists Heli Keskikallio, Taru Meri Koski, Lotta Suomi and photographer Emiliano Verrocchio. They have been working since 2020, arranging performative events in Helsinki and Turku.
Heli Keskikallio is a choreographer, performer and pedagogue based in Helsinki. She is interested in the processes and different registers of bodily thinking. Making art is for Heli a way of practicing ecological sensitivity that she approaches through sensuousness, flesh and the extra linguistic expressivity and sensibility of bodily beings.
Taru Meri Koski is a dancer and performance maker based in Helsinki. In her work Taru is interested in materiality of human voice, liminal spaces, practices related to divided attention and concept of devotion (to name but a few). Taru is taking part in various freelance-based artistic collectives such as Toisinajattelijat, Prekaarit Praktiikat and Gabriela Ariana kollektiivi.
Lotta Suomi is a dancer and performer who works variously in the field of dance, contemporary theater and performing arts. Currently Lotta’s work focuses on the practice of sensitizing to sensuousness and porosity of the body. For her this is an important way of being in the world that is a bodily and experiential understanding.
Emiliano Verrocchio is a photographer and videomaker who feels comfortable in Helsinki.
His work keeps analyzing the relationship between humans and modern urban environments with an empathic and poetic eye. He silently watches people and wonders about the way we live and how we feel, living. Often finding all answers - and great inspiration - by simply watching other animals, just being.
Susanne Montag-Wärnå
Photo ©Maria Åsvik
Susanne Montag-Wärnå is a Performance Artist, Dance Pedagog. She is holding a Master of Education as well as a Certification in Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies (CLMA).
Born and grown up in Germany, she moved to Finland in 2003 and has settled on Parainen, an island City in the Archipelago of South-West Finland.
Susanne is most interested in growing knowledge in encountering with local communities and going into relationship with bodies of different interests. Her approach towards experiencing connectivity in collaborative working groups is coloured by curiosity and interest in “the other”.
“In movement observation we are re-patterning the known and growing new dimensions.”
In her works she is applying Laban/Bartenieff Movement Studies as well in the performative as in the learning and teaching work-shop situation.
Susanne is part of the executive committee of EUROLAB e.V., the European Association for Laban/ Bartenieff Movement Studies (Berlin). She is recently collaborating within a big group of representatives of the Central European Modern Dance to transmit the heritage and develop a vision for the applied and organic contemporary Modern Dance.
Julius Elo & Olga Spyropoulou
Photo by Laura Tolvanen
Julius Elo is a Helsinki-based performance artist who creates performance concepts and participatory performances where the audience is set at the core of the piece in different ways. Elo is one of the founders and the current artistic director of Reality Research Center.
Olga Spyropoulou is a Finland-based performance artist. In her work, she experiments with various modalities of spect-actorship and non-hierarchical methodologies. She is interested in how we relate to one another in different contexts.
Elo and Spyropoulou started working together in Bodies of Pleasure, a platform that brings together performing artists to explore the intersection of sexuality and performance.
Mandarina Collective
MANDARINA collective was founded in 2020, when Helsinki-based Ana Álvarez Piedehierro (ES), Ina Fiebig (DE) and Ines Montalvao (PT), were selected to perform in a multilingual Children’s Festival.
We are passionate about different but also common fields and, in our work together, we combine our knowledge in Science, Illustration and Experience Design with our passion for communication and a cross-disciplinary approach.
Since Mandarina Collective was created, we have been performing and giving workshops at Kolibrí Festivaali, Pixelache Festival, Bokvillan (in Helsinki, Espoo, Vantaa)and Näkkäri (in Salo), and we also had a residency and participatory exhibition in October 2021 at Kääntöpaikka Gallery.
MANDARINA collective is an enthusiastic group filled with juicy bits, wanting to bring science engagement and artistic views of the world in an accessible way for everyone.
Karoliina Loimaala
I am Karoliina Loimaala, a choreographer based in Helsinki. In my artistic work I focus on diving into non-human material world in its different forms. I delve into encounters of a hypersensitive body and a roar of the inhuman world. Latest works in this interest are ÖLJEKT (2021) at Kera Halls, Espoo, and the one-on-one piece Flower Bath as part of this NoMadHouse program Spring 2022, previously presented in Kehä -festival and FINFRINGE -festival in 2021. I work also with ‘Flesh poetry’ and its bodily manifestations, latest work of this being “Moi-femme, je-femme” presented at Stockholm Fringe Festival in 2021. The work following je-femme is a work in progress GARNNN, that will be premiered in the later part of 2022. I work as performer at the moment with Catarina Neves Ricci and Maya Oliva.
Venla Ilona Blom
Photo by Katariina Salmi
Venla Ilona Blom is multi-award-winning vocalist, composer and beatboxer from Finland. For the last decade she has been touring the world with an all-female vocal performance group Tuuletar. Tuuletar is one of the most internationally acclaimed groups from Finnish folk music scene today and has won several music awards in recent years (f.e. Finnish Music Award EMMA for best Ethno album, 2016 and The Border Breaking Act of the Year, 2019). Their compositions have been playlisted in radio shows all over the world and used in TV-series such as Game of Thrones (HBO), Wentworth (FOX), The Rain and Monarca (Netflix). Tuuletar has performed in festivals and concert halls in four continents and 28 countries.
Aside from Tuuletar, Ms. Blom has worked as a soloist, composer and musician in several projects in Finland and abroad (Piirainen Blom Company, Aito Collective, Global Orchestra, Aarhus Jazz Festival, Savonlinna Opera Festival). She has participated in several multicultural art and research projects as a musician and performing artist.
Ms. Blom also works as an educator and studio producer in Finland and abroad. She is two-time awardee of the Finnish Cultural Foundation.
Amanda Hunt & Onur Tayranoglu
Photo by Laura Tolvanen
Amanda Hunt: I am a Helsinki, FI based performance artist that has also lived and made work previously in Dublin, IE, and NYC, USA, where I lived and worked as an artist for 10 years. I have performed at spaces such as Judson Church (NYC), The Queens Museum (NYC), various festivals around the U.S, and places like the DRFI Conference in Ireland, as well as Perform Istanbul (online).I have worked as a sculptor’s assistant, and also renovated, co-organized, and lived inside of Para\\el Performance Space in NYC from 2018-2020. I was the recipient of the Franklin Furnace Fund for 2019/2020. My work concerns themes of labor, uselessness, and the body as object/material, to examine Western/Ccapitalist ideas of efficiency and failure. I like to make objects to perform with that get destroyed or transformed throughout a performance, and am currently interested in making multi-functional sculptural wearables to perform in.
We enjoyed collaborating on a group performance project at The Vantaa Art Museum this past Fall, and look forward to making our first duo collaboration with the NoMadHouse program this Spring, 2022
S2 Work Group
The group is working together in this composition for the first time. Our focus is to celebrate multicultural queer presence deriving from individual and collective experiences of joy, sorrow, desire, dreaming and power; and we inivite our community to join us. S2 is an autofictional storyline guided forward by individual and group effort through elements of movement, theatre and audiovisual components. S2 is an abbreviation of the words “suomi toisena kielenä”, Finnish as a second language.
Anneli Kanninen (she/they) is a dance artist, actor and one of the trailblazers of the Finnish ballroom scene. For the past fifteen years they have been performing and teaching in Finland and internationally, working with artists, dance and theatre companies, art institutions and local queer communities.
Jay-Chelle Jimeno (they/them) is a queer Cuban-Finnish performer whose roots are in music and dance and lately they have expanded to modeling as well. They are currently studying Performing Arts and are active in the Finnish Ballroom scene.
Gréta Kristín Ómarsdóttir (she/they) is a queer Icelandic theatre director, dramaturg and queer & feminist theory lecturer at Uniarts Iceland. Currently Gréta is completing her MA in directing at The Theatre Academy at Uniarts Helsinki. Gréta has been a freelance director and has directed 12 professional productions in all 5 professional theatres in the small Atlantic Island.
Gréta has also freelanced as a project-based dramaturg and advisor in over 10 performance productions of all shapes and scales, and as a tenured dramaturg and advisor for artistic committees at The National Theatre of Iceland (NTI) since 2019. In the years 2020-2022 Gréta was artistic director of two stages at NTI, Kjallarinn and Loftið, programming mostly queer, BIPOC and generally marginalized artists that have never before been celebrated and given access to the state funded institution.
Vera Boitcova (she/her) is a Russian theatre director, playwright, queer performance\video artist and political activist, currently studying Dramaturgy at Theatre Academy, Helsinki. Coordinator and programmer at Russian feminist art organization ‘Eve’s Ribs’ and a member of ‘Coming Out’ LGBT+ initiative in St-Petersburg.
Eero Yli-Vakkuri
Eero Yli-Vakkuri (b.1981) is a recovering survivalist. In the past he made annoying street interventions which made people uncomfortable, presently he is trying to advance sustainable design through campaigns, workshops and artistic presentations. He prefers to work in groups and to develop antidisciplinary collaborations with specialists from different fields.
Jaa: