PERSPECTIVES ON: SUSTAINABILITY AND EQUITY IN THE ARTS DAY 2
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)
10:15–11:00 From words to action: rethinkingequity in cultural institutions
Keynote and interactive reflection by LeaHedeskov (In futurum)
How might we move from statements of intent tostructural change when it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion in the arts?In this keynote, Lea Hedeskov draws from their experience advising and workingstrategically with a wide range of cultural institutions to share insights intohow equity work can be embedded in organisational practices. How to rootchange? The session offers reflections on current developments andgaps—particularly within the performing arts—and opens space for concreteapproaches, questions and perspectives that can help bridge the distancebetween institutional structures and the independent field.
11:00–11:15 Mini break
11:15–12:00 Three perspectives on futures
In this short session, three artists andcultural workers share personal reflections on their hopes, visions, andquestions about the futures of the arts. What kinds of practices, structures,or values do they imagine in a more just and sustainable future? Eachperspective offers a unique lens into what “possible” could mean—rooted inlived experience, artistic thinking, and collective longing.
Speakers: Cath Borch, Celine Szabó and others
12:00–13:00 Lunch
13:00 –13:50 A short conversation betweenthe future dreamers
Following the session Three Perspectives onFutures, the participating artists and cultural workers come together for abrief conversation—an open moment to reflect on each other’s visions and toexplore the act of imagining futures in times of polycrisis. How do their ideasresonate or diverge? What new questions emerge when different perspectivesmeet?
This informal exchange invites us into ashared space of curiosity, connection, and radical imagination—where dreamingof possible futures is not just a luxury, but a necessity. Together, thespeakers consider how we might imagine more just, diverse, and equitablefutures in the arts. What kinds of structures, practices, or values are neededto truly support multiplicity and inclusion? How can we build cultural futuresthat hold space for many ways of being, knowing, and creating?
Speakers: Cath Borch, Celine Szabó and others
Facilitator: Alex Blum
13:50 – 14:00 Mini break
14:00 –15:00 Possible and impossible futures– reimagining the horizons of the Danish art field
Roundtable conversation
This roundtable invites participants to dream of the possible and impossiblefutures of the Danish art field. What kinds of artistic ecosystems could existbeyond current funding models, hierarchies, and institutional logics? Whatfutures feel unreachable—and what holds them back? Through collectivereflection and dreaming, we will explore how equity might be radicallyredefined, how contradiction and imagination can be tools for transformation,and how art can act as a testing ground for alternative ways of being,organising, and creating.
Facilitator: Sonya Lindfors
15:00–15:30 Closing remarks and thank you
Andre forestillinger
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