riga performance festival starptelpa 2026 programme

About the Works

MANUEL DE MARCO (IT)– IMPULSO, 2023 [2:37]

Impulso is a video work inspired by Albert Einstein's theory of the curvature of space-time. Through the repeated action of jumping on a trampoline, the performer connects the body and gravity, reflecting on how mass can deform space, not only leaving imprints but generating a genuine tension between presence and absence in a specific space-time interval. The simple yet reiterated gesture becomes an experiment that highlights how human beings are constantly subjected to forces that pull them downward, while retaining the ability, through will and consciousness, to rise. The setting in an abandoned building reinforces the theme of the transience and transience of human existence.

Sound also plays a fundamental role: each jump produces vibrations, resonances, and reverberations that propagate throughout the architectural space, transforming the physical action into a perceptible acoustic wave. The trampoline thus becomes not only a bouncing surface, but a vibrating membrane that translates the weight of the body into sound frequency. The sound, amplified by the echo of the empty space, makes the invisible deformation of space tangible, physically communicating the tension between gravity and upward momentum.

MOVINGEEDIT STUDIO (MT) – BEINGS, 2025 [7:00]

This concept strongly aligns with the festival’s focus on sound and vibration as forces that carry memory, conflict, and connection across bodies and time. The internal struggle of a male victim shaped by disbelief, pride, shame, and social silence, can be understood as a field of suppressed vibration: emotion held in the body, unspoken yet resonant. Through digital performance, this muted interiority becomes audible and visible, transforming silence into a charged sonic space where breath, glitches, fragmented speech, ambient hum, and interruptions function as carriers of contested memory. Rather than presenting heritage as fixed, the work approaches male vulnerability as a living, embodied process—one shaped by inherited norms of masculinity and the ongoing negotiation between concealment and expression. The gradual movement from hidden turmoil to outward articulation mirrors the festival’s interest in resonance and dissonance: moments of rupture, echo, distortion, and fragile clarity re-perform histories of silenced male pain. In this unfolding, sound becomes both archive and activation—holding the weight of what has not been said while opening space for possible futures. The performance creates a reflective environment where vibration marks the transition from isolation to connection, allowing audiences to sense vulnerability not as weakness, but as an emergent force that unsettles silence and redefines strength.

DOMIZIANO CRISTOPHARO (ES) – SILENCIO (SILENCE), 2026 [3:47]

Silencio is a butoh videoperformance that explores memory, decay, and the body’s dialogue with time. Through slow, contorted movements and fragmented gestures, the dancer inhabits a landscape of loss and solitude, tracing echoes of past desires and fleeting moments of peace. The performance transforms silence into a visceral soundscape: the creak of floors, the whisper of breath, and the imagined roar of the sea resonate as extensions of the body’s emotional terrain. By attuning the viewer to subtle sonic vibrations within and around the self, Silencio embodies the festival theme, turning absence, pause, and decay into a profound auditory and corporeal experience.

ADAM W. GEORGE (US) – FALLING HAIR, GROWING FLOWERS, 2025 [1:00]

I like making art about the strange and beautiful things that make us human.

Falling Hair, Growing Flowers is the latest in my “films about going bald” series.

I asked 10 friends to send me a one minute voice note about their own hair journeys. The audio clips are layered and scrambled. The video is spliced and re arranged. It’s a distorted perspective of time, a hazy memory, a unified journey of hair, and a mosaic of sonic vibrations.

There’s been something healing about this process of merging the journeys of others with my own. As unique as each journey is, it reminds me that we are all only human.

CURRO RODRÍGUEZ (ES/IS) – SAETA. STONES DIALOGUE., 2022 [10:00]

Saeta is a video performance set within a volcanic landscape marked by oxidized red rock. A naked body appears alone in the frame, surrounded by stone. Through a slow and repetitive action, the performer gathers rocks from the surrounding terrain, accumulating them to construct an altar or tomb-like structure. The act is silent at first, guided by weight, friction, and physical effort. Once the structure is completed, the performer lies on top of it, offering the body to the stone as a final gesture.

The sound accompanying the video is entirely generated from rocks—percussion, impact, friction—combined with the live singing of a flamenco saeta. Voice and stone function as equal sonic agents, producing vibration through contact, breath, and resonance. Sound emerges directly from matter and bodily presence rather than from instrumentation.

The work explores sonic vibration as an embodied and ritual experience, where sound, body, and landscape merge. Saeta frames listening as a physical encounter, transforming the act of building, singing, and offering into a performative rite grounded in material sound.

JENNI-JUULIA WALLINHEIMO-HEIMONEN (FI) – A BLACKOUT, 2026 [1:58]

Provide cardiopulmonary resuscitation (CPR) to a radiator.

Resuscitation/CPR is a rhythm: compression–compression–compression–breath. The rhythm of life-saving is both medical and liturgical. Human breathing recalls steam pressure and the soul. In panic, the human voice changes; speech begins to break and vibrate, the pitch rises. Pressing another person’s chest is not a gentle act. It is controlled violence used to resist death. An electric radiator is metallic, rigid, lifeless. Heat is both a physiological and a political metaphor. In the winter, people try to survive in war without electricity. Resuscitation is an attempt to restore what is already gone. Who is resuscitated and who is left cold?

SIREL HEINLOO, EINAR LINTS (EE) – HAIR TRAILS (“JUUKSEPÕIMIK”), 2026 [7:41]

A great long braid becomes the guiding thread of this poetic short film. It begins on the edge of the world in Norway, where the mountains and the ocean awaken a voice hidden in the strands of hair. That voice leads the storyteller back to another edge of the world at home – the ancestral lands of South Estonia, a branch of roots only recently revealed.

When hair begins to speak, what will you dare to ask?

MARIA PYLYPENKO (UA/AT) – HUMAN TRASH, 2026 [1:52]

Human Trash is a public performance reflecting on social and global crises.

For three hours, performer Maria Pylypenko lay inside a closed black plastic bag on the staircase of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, like an embryo or a corpse, experiencing the vibrations of the surrounding world with a sense of vacuum and isolation. The work confronts humanity’s role in pollution, war, and ecological collapse.

The video documentation captures the vibrations of the street and includes an author’s text. The performance stands as a gesture in memory of the victims of war and genocide.

EUGENIA GRAMMENOU (GR) – EN-TO-MA, 2026 [8:13]

How do we actually resemble one another? How do we want to resemble one another? How do we understand the people around us? Is there truth in our image and in our behavior? To what extent are our image and behavior socially imposed, and where can we locate free expression and self-determination?

A hybrid creature reads an excerpt from a text by Judith Butler, which addresses the social enforcement of gender performativity. Disturbing insects intrude upon the reading, interrupting its flow. The sonic interventions of these digital insects disrupt the narration.

The work is built around a narrative voice that is interrupted not only by the interventions of the digital insects but also by a vocal onomatopoeia (bluh, bluh, bluh) in the creature’s speech. This disruption initially affects the linear progression of the narrative by creating gaps, while gradually it also leads to the fragmentation of the image. In doing so, it emphasizes the dynamics of sonic/narrative distortion which, as a rupture in linearity, influences the overall narrative development.

We live in an era striving to achieve freedom and respect for all beings. Yet, interruptions by centers of power within the historical continuum often produce setbacks, where conservative and illiberal worldviews reappear.

What we consider normality is undone — or at least challenged. Or is it? Have we perhaps lost the ability to understand the world through truth, as its image has been torn apart and fragmented? Are we participants and accomplices in a distorted reality? Has the clear gaze been exiled from this world?

Concept/narration: Eugenia Grammenou

Dramaturgy: Eugenia Grammenou, Eno Athanasiadou, Andreas B

Music in the first part : Dimitris Roidis remix of Piensa En Mi - Luz Casal

Music in the last part: I Broke the Vase –Sans toi jai peur

Drawings: Garlic Studios

Editing: Dimitra Kondylatou

Camera: Εμmanouel, Eno Athanasiadou

Text: Judith Butler – Performative Acts and Gender Constitution: An Essay in Phenomenology and Feminist Theory-Theater Journal 1988, p. 522

Translation: Margarita Miliori- «Φεμινιστική θεωρία και πολιτισμική κριτική» εκδ. Νήσος

PETRA DUBACH AND MARIO VAN HORRIK (NL) – WAVES INTERACTIVE, 2020 [3:43]

During a workperiod in the abandonned Church of the Holy Heart in Eindhoven, we stretched 2 strings, each 50 meters long. We experimented with all kinds of feedback sound systems, based on movement feedback, using exciters and shakers (hardware that reproduces sound frequencies in the form of vibrations). During the process we noticed that the system creates standing waves in the building and that slow movements influence the standing waves, causing changes in the parameters of the sounds. Especially acoustical significant positions in the church (Petra lies down where the altar used to be) worked very well. The church building became an instrument for Petra, enabling her to play, or manipulate the sounds created through the feedback frequencies within the architecture.

DIANA LELIS & ELĪZA EIKERTE (LV) – SAN! SĒJA, 2025 [9:15]

san! sēja / an audio-visual human–nature reflection – a poetic still life/lives, a phonetic play on the names of the place and the festival

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san – in Turkish: you are; in Japanese culture/language, san is part of keijo – the system of politeness; san is used after a personal name to show respect.

sēja – a seed, a thought/idea.

How?!

How do we see and feel, how do we perceive life and relationships through the human–nature frame?

The place and space are the same, but… each of our processes and experiences refer to different, diverging positions, directions, perspectives.

san! sēja is a non-existent place in space.

san! sēja is a state of presence, of awareness. Through deep listening and immersion — inclusive, engaging, all-encompassing, alive, generating presence, enveloping, sensorily rich, saturating with sensations, submerging — a path unfolds… a path toward relationship, which one is tempted to replace with the word being — both chaotic and utterly calm, both changing and flowing, moving up and down and outward in all other directions — x, y, z, toward multibeaming sides. There we encounter the essential core of existence: harmony — concord, balance, belonging.

As its foundation emerges

the process, the state of being, when the body intertwines with the heart, and you, almost involuntarily, detach from the mind and draw closer to your Self, as an approach toward spirit.

The triangle ∆

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created during Sansusī residency : https://sansusi.lv

DINA KELBERMAN (US) – FAILURE & AMBIENCE, 2025 [15:00]

Failure & Ambience is a live digital performance in which the artist opens and manipulates found YouTube videos of industrial sirens in a choreographed audiovisual routine. Videos are opened, played, and skipped through in real time as the audience watches, building an ever-changing collage out of found footage. The title comes from a video of an outdoor warning system test in La Porte, Texas—one of countless such recordings uploaded by an enthusiastic internet subculture of siren enthusiasts. These videos are often labeled as capturing local "ambience": suburban scenes with the sounds of daily life—thunderstorms rolling in, children talking, an interrupted piano recital—interrupted by the mechanical wail of warning systems.

The work engages directly with the festival's exploration of sonic vibrations as a medium of postmemory and agonistic heritage. These siren sounds, designed to alert communities to imminent disaster, become uncanny carriers of absence and presence. They evoke Cold War civil defense drills, hurricane seasons, and the ongoing normalization of crisis. For audiences today, they vibrate with postmemory's whisper—the felt but unfixed trauma of threats that preceded us and those that continue to accumulate.

Within the church venue, the sirens' mechanical wail, bouncing off stone and wood, becomes a contested sonic field. Multiple browser windows layer competing alerts, overlapping into illegible noise—a sonic representation of information overload as political strategy. This daily deluge of outrage is designed to overwhelm our capacity to process, to care, and to resist. It turns every crisis into ambient noise. The sirens blare so constantly, from so many directions, that we become numbed, exhausted, incapable of discerning which alarm requires immediate action. Heritage here is not static monument but the ongoing performance of alarm: the ritual of warning passed down through generations, now degraded into ambient background static. The work asks audiences to sit with vibration that unsettles, refusing closure in favor of reverberation. How do we deal with the sirens going off outside us and inside us all day long for days, weeks, years, decades, generations?

MANUEL DE MARCO (IT)– ECHOES, 2023 [3:16]

ECHOES was born from a suspended time spent in Bienno, in the heart of Val Camonica, where for centuries the breath of iron has marked the life of the village. Here, matter was tamed by fire and the strength of human hands, and the rhythmic sound of the hammer on the anvil was more than a gesture of work: it was a language, a memory, a collective heartbeat. The performance takes shape inside an abandoned forge, a place where silence has slowly replaced that ancient rhythm. In this space filled with traces and absences, my body becomes both matter and memory. The gesture of the hammer striking the iron is not just an action, but an echo that spans time.

Just as iron, under repeated blows, bends, transforms, takes shape, my body too allows itself to be shaped by sound. Each toll of the anvil passes through the space and returns to me, modifying my posture, guiding my movement, bending my presence. Sound becomes an invisible force, an immaterial hammer that sculpts the body.

In this dialogue between matter and memory, between iron and flesh, the gesture of ancient work reemerges like a sonorous shadow. The forge, once alive with fire and toil, comes alive for a moment in the echo of the blow: the iron recalls the hand that shaped it, the body recalls the sound that called it to change.

ECHOES is the encounter between two transformations: that of the iron taking shape under the hammer, and that of the body allowing itself to be forged by sound, as if the memory of past work continues to beat, invisibly, in the space of the forge.

BREAK

NORMAL BABYY (LV)– SCRATCHING THE SURFACE - EXCERPT, 2025 [7:56]

The video documents Scratching the surface, a performance based on Arctic climate data collected during the MOSAiC research expedition (2019–2020). The work uses KLIMATON ARCTIC≈2020, a custom sonification instrument developed by the Klimaton platform, which translates environmental data into sound. Through this process, shifting Arctic conditions become audible as vibrations, rhythms, and evolving sonic textures.

In the performance, sound, movement, and generative systems interact in a dialogue between human performers and a quasi-autonomous instrument. Rather than simply controlling the technology, the artists respond to it—allowing data-driven sound to influence composition, gesture, and structure.

Presented as a video documentation (excerpt), the work reflects on how scientific knowledge, environmental change, and human perception intersect. In relation to the festival theme Sonic Vibrations, the piece treats sound as a medium through which distant ecological processes resonate within the body and space, making planetary transformation perceptible through vibration.

ALE MONTIEL & NAHUEL SANCHEZ TOLOSA (AR) – ABLATION ZONE, 2026 [3:54]

Ablation Zone takes its name from the area of a glacier where mass loss exceeds accumulation. The action takes place at Laguna Torre. In this context, we hold a block of ice that has broken off from the glacier and pass it from hand to hand. The gesture is simple and repetitive: to carry, to receive, to hand over. The intense cold and the wind cut through the scene, inscribing the climatic condition of the territory onto our bodies.

Our bodies operate as a temporary support for a mass destined to disappear. When we finally place it on the ground, there is no restitution or repair; the emphasis falls on fragility.

Ablation Zone operates as a catalyst for the vibratory force of the wind that seeps in, acting as an echo of the memory of the Patagonian Andean forests. This link between human and non-human bodies becomes a resonant chamber activated by the force and sonority of the element of wind in space and time.

The work proposes a tension between human scale and planetary scale. Faced with the magnitude of the glacial landscape, the body appears vulnerable; however, it is also the human body (in its collective and political dimension)that influences the conditions accelerating its disappearance.

In Argentina, the Glacier Law was enacted to protect these strategic water reserves, yet ongoing attempts to modify and loosen its scope reveal its persistent vulnerability to extractive interests. In this context, holding a block of ice becomes an act traversed by an ongoing territorial, environmental, and legal dispute.

ARNALDO DRÉS GONZÁLEZ (VE/DE) – TROSCURPOS: FROM THE CROWN TO THE WIND, 2024 [4:48]

Troscurpos: From the Crown to the Wind is an experimental video that combines a performative action with digitally constructed landscapes and a composed soundscape. Through a restrained monochromatic visual language, the work approaches the body as a shifting terrain where memory, tension, and poetic gesture unfold.

The soundscape brings together ocean waves, metallic chains, whispers, nocturnal insects, distant drums, and reverberant tones. These sonic elements create a field of resonance where natural, material, and rhythmic vibrations interact with the moving image. Within this atmosphere, fragmented symbols—such as abandoned crowns, distant colonial ships, and industrial structures suspended in time—appear as traces of histories marked by power, displacement, and endurance.

In relation to the festival theme Sonic Vibrations, the work treats sound as a medium through which memory reverberates across bodies and landscapes, allowing the image to become a space where echoes of the past remain in motion.

CRAPHONE LIU (TW) – CARRYING FREEDOM, 2026 [7:38]

Carrying Freedom is a performance created for video in the Taijiang region of Taiwan, following the route of the Zengwen River toward its estuary and ending at Taiwan’s westernmost coastal point.

The work moves through farmland, temple space, steps, dunes, shoreline, and finally into the sea. Throughout this passage, a Bluetooth speaker emits a continuous high-frequency drone, while the word “freedom” is spoken repeatedly in Taiwanese and English.

In this work, sound is not treated as background, but as a moving force carried by the body across connected terrains. The word “freedom” travels with the river’s direction, passing through agricultural land, ritual space, wind, sand, and water before reaching the estuary. Spoken bilingually, it shifts between local utterance and outward transmission.

I deliberately chose conditions of strong wind and an exposed coastal environment. At the shoreline and in the sea, the drone and the spoken word are continuously challenged by environmental sound: wind, waves, traffic, and birds. These surrounding vibrations partially cover, interrupt, and disperse both the monotone frequency and the voice. What is heard is never pure or fully controlled.

This interference is central to the work. Rather than presenting sound as a stable signal, the piece reveals how utterance becomes fragile when exposed to the world. “Freedom” is spoken, but not always clearly received. The drone persists, but it is never isolated. Sound here is shaped by resistance, overlap, and loss.

Set along the Zengwen River and its outflow into the sea, the performance approaches the western edge of Taiwan not only as a destination, but as a threshold shaped by movement, atmosphere, and interruption. In the final close-up, the speaker is raised above the head, becoming at once an offering, an antenna, and a fragile declaration.

The work does not define freedom.

It carries freedom to the edge, where it is tested by wind, noise, and the world.

ELINA LASTIVKO, PERFORMER - HLAFIRA SOROKINA (UA) – SQUINT MY EYES, 2025 [2:16]

My video performance uses aerial silks as a method to convey the main theme - the cycles of love, hate, abandonment, self-destruction, crisis, tiredness and searching for hope through that. It is mostly an abstract form and I do that because I really would like to let the viewers search for their own situations, thoughts and symbols through this video performance. I use video as a main method of composing 'visual music' and sound. I understand the different scenes of the performance as parts of music composition which also leads to video composition and performance composition. This is also why I think the video could suit to the festival theme, "Sonic Vibrations", because sound and vibration in the video and of the video become probably the most important means of artistic language for me here.

TIMJUNE TIANJUN LI (CN/FI) – FREE AS BIRDS: IMAGINE, 2025 [7:06]

The artist performs as a grieving bird; their voice resonates with the gun emplacement and AI-trained bird choirs.

Wearing a found-feathered costume, the artist performs as a hybrid, bird-like figure atop the rusted structure of a coastal gun emplacement. The body occupies a liminal position between human, bird, and spirit, singing fragmented lines from Imagine by John Lennon. The familiar pacifist anthem is revoiced as a lament in response to ecological collapse and the site’s history of violence.

The voice resonates through the hollow metal architecture, turning the former fortress into an acoustic chamber where bodily presence encounters material and sonic memory. In the final section, an AI-generated choral sequence emerges. The original lyrics are algorithmically translated into the vocal patterns of local swans and re-synthesized as speculative birdsong, proposing a non-human horizon for human ideals.

RAN (UK) – TALKBOXER, 2026 [10:55]

Talkboxer is a live embodied sound work that is jarring and unpleasant. It invites consideration of the body and its sounds, the forces coursing through it, the permeability of boundaries in the face of systems of power, and the inherent negotiation between generator and filter. TalkBoxer mirrors the festival's theme "Sonic Vibrations” by embodying the idea that vibration is never neutral: its textures of scraped consonants, ruptured phonation, and metallic resonance enact the tension between what the voice permits and what it resists.

ALICE DE VISSCHER (BE) – MAIN (HAND), 2026 [2:15]

Main (Hand) is part of a serie I’m finalising now, from object collected by Jean Glibert, an artist who recently passed away.

Jean Glibert was a painter (also working in public space) with whom I was close from my childhood.

This hand is a sound object he used to play jokes with.

By dialoguing with this hand, I evoke his presence, his tenderness, his humor, and I let the silence of his absence resonate.

D.I.V.A. COLLECTIVE (PL) – DRILLING A HOLE IN THE BELLY, 2026 [5:00]

Our performance is one from the series where we use ambient, repetitiveness, organic-made sound and its real-time distortion as our medium. The soundscape we build is made of seemingly displeasing sound, but the use of it's recurrence transform it into more meditative, contemplating state. The highly engaging sounds such as cutlery against porcelain in one viewer causes the outrage for others it's minimal, unchanging melody and rhythm helps them relax. The theme of our performance series is to engage the audience and get their raw reaction and feelings by using sound and its distortion.

DĀNIELS ŠATALOVS (LV) – WOW HONEY FREEDOM, 2026 [4:31]

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ANNA MASKAVA (LV) – BARE LIFE, 2025 [2:28]

Bare Life is an audiovisual work based on the one-hour performance of the same name, combining selected fragments with an original soundscape. The work examines the body as a site of exposure, projection, and control. Inside a human-sized glass aquarium, the artist’s naked body, covered with living snails, becomes both a living organism and an object of exhibition for the viewer’s gaze. At the same time, it maintains its vital reality through breath, stillness, and the slow movement of the land snails.

The work confronts the mechanisms through which bodies are observed, categorized, aestheticized, and consumed within contemporary systems of spectatorship. The transparent terrarium evokes associations with museum display, medical surveillance, captivity, and observation, while the figure inside it simultaneously expresses vulnerability, slowness, and intimacy.

Created through coexistence between human and more-than-human life, this living exhibit reveals the impossibility of encountering “bare life” without the overlay of socially conditioned perception. The performance thus operates as an exercise in unlearning: it unsettles acquired visual clichés and opens perception to its own constructed nature. Within this experience, seeing itself is no longer neutral but becomes part of what is exposed.

Performance: Anna Maskava

Camera: Beatrise Helpeja

Soundscape: Anna Maskava