PERSPECTIVES ON: Sustainability and Equity in the Arts Day 1
BESKRIVELSE
Description
We are living through times of uncertainty, crisis, and transformation. As the world faces intersecting social, political, and environmental challenges, the arts sector must come together to address these wicked problems. How do we build more equitable, sustainable, and resilient structures for the future? What is the role of artists, institutions, and cultural workers in fostering systemic change?
With this two-day seminar we invite arts professionals from across the Nordic region to engage in urgent and necessary conversations about equity, sustainability, diversity and fair practices in the arts. Through keynotes, panels, and workshops, we will explore strategies for cross-sector solidarity, redistribution of resources, and how to create real, lasting change.
Now is the time to act. Join us in reimagining the future of the arts and building sustainable, intersectional, and anti-racist practices that will shape the Nordic cultural landscape for years to come.
The seminar is organized by HAUT in collaboration with the Helsinki-based UrbanApa and presented as part of CPH Stage 2025.
The collaboration between HAUT and UrbanApa is part of BRIDGES – project, a Nordic initiative that aims to strengthen long-term and sustainable Nordic collaborations and foster critical discourse around anti-racist and intersectionally feminist practices in the performing arts. The current BRIDGES partners are UrbanApa (FI), MDT (SWE), HAUT (DEN), Reykjavik Dance Festival (IS) and Dansens Hus Oslo (NOR). BRIDGES is supported by Nordic Culture Point and Nordic Culture Fund.
About HAUT
HAUT is a performing arts organization focusing on artistic development and knowledge sharing. With a wide offer of residency formats HAUT creates space for performing artists to develop and immerse themselves in their artistic practice under sustainable working conditions.
With PERSPECTIVES ON they make space for thoughts and knowledge that drive the performing arts forward. It is a knowledge-sharing format that focuses on the insights we need right now for the arts, artists, and the field to evolve. By inviting new ideas and discourses into the Danish performing arts landscape, it serves as inspiration, provocation, and a catalyst for artistic development. The format functions as a platform for knowledge exchange, conversation, and learning.
HAUT works with a co-curatorial practice as an integrated part of their work to invite other perspectives into the curatorial process.
About UrbanApa
Founded in 2009, UrbanApa is an anti-racist and feminist art community that acts as a platform for art events, new ways of doing, and discourses that centre on art. The community has been managed by the UTT ry association since 2011. UrbanApa organizes events, performances, arts incubators, clubs, music festivals, site specific works and workshops. The community’s goal is to employ artists and to create a platform for new artistic events and meetings.
UrbanApa’s values include communality, intersectional feminism, decolonialism, inclusivity, equality, softness, play and joy. The community strives to look into the future, to re-think the kind of art that could and should be done.
About Sonya Lindfors
The programme for PERSPECTIVES ON: Sustainability and Equity in the Arts has been curated in collaboration with Sonya Lindfors, Artistic and Managing director of UrbanAPA.
Sonya Lindfors is an awardwinning Cameroonian/Finnish choreographer and artistic director who also works in facilitation, community organizing, and education. Lindfors’ recent works - One Drop (2023), common moves (2023), We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), and Soft Variations Online (2020) - focus on questions of Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurities, and decolonial dreaming practices.
On a broader scale, Lindfors divides her time between her own artistic work, educational initiatives, and her role as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions, she is dedicated to creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, performance, publication, or workshop can serve as a site for empowerment and radical collective dreaming.
The seminar is free but registration is required.
Spillested
Venue
AKTUELLE SPILLETIDSPUNKTER
Current Showtimes
Kreditering
Credit
Tilgængelighed
09:30–10:00 Registration andcoffee/tea/snacks
10:00–10:15 Welcome and opening remarks
by Sonya Lindfors (UrbanApa) and Naja Lee Jensen(HAUT)
10:15–10:50 Navigating times of polycrises– next steps in equity and social sustainability in the arts
Keynote by Kelly Parish (Arts Council England)
In a world shaped by overlapping crises—ecological, economic, political—artsorganisations and artists face urgent questions about their role in buildingmore just and sustainable futures. This keynote explores what equity andsustainability mean in practice, with a focus on social sustainability: whosevoices are heard, whose labour is valued, and how resources are shared. Whymust every cultural organisation engage with these issues—not as add-ons, butas essential conditions for relevance and responsibility in our time?
10:50–11:00 Mini break
11:00–12:30 How to create cross-sectorsolidarity and fairer working conditions
Panel Discussion and Q&A
This panel explores how solidarity within thearts sector—across institutions of different sizes, independent groups, andindividual artists—can contribute to fairer and more sustainable workingconditions. What responsibilities do funders, institutions, and artists hold,and how can they act in alignment? And what structural changes are needed tomove from statements of intent to real, lasting change?
Panelists: Marie Lydie Nokouda (Black toNormal), Firat Jacob Tas (Mungo Park), Mary Tesfay (C:NTACT), Annemette Friis(Nordic Culture Fund)
Facilitator: Tess Skadegård Thorsen
12:30–13:30 Lunch break
13:30–14:30 How to change things – practicaltools for equity and sustainability in the arts
Roundtable Workshop
This roundtable workshop focuses on sharingand developing concrete tools for redistributing power and resources within thearts. Together, we explore practical approaches to equity andsustainability—what can we change, and how do we start?
Facilitator: Sonya Lindfors
14:30–15:00 Wrap-up for the day
Andre forestillinger
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