film screening with sensory anchoring, seed sharing, and seed stories.

Artists: film by Jumana Manna, sensory anchoring ritual by Linda Lapiņa and Liene Jurgelāne

Deep in the earth beneath the Arctic permafrost, seeds from all over the world are stored in the Svalbard Global Seed Vault to provide a backup should disaster strike. Wild Relatives starts from an event that has sparked media interest worldwide: in 2012 an international agricultural research center was forced to relocate from Aleppo to Lebanon due to the Syrian Revolution turned war, and began a laborious process of planting their seed collection from the Svalbard back-ups. Following the path of this transaction of seeds between the Arctic and Lebanon, a series of encounters unfold a matrix of human and non-human lives between these two distant spots of the earth. The film patiently teases out tensions between state and individual, industrial and organic approaches to seed saving, climate change and biodiversity, witnessed through the journey of these seeds.

performance walk 

Artist: Katrine Faber

Songs From Our Bodies is an interactive performance walk that invites you to listen to and sing with living growths in the urban landscape around the Institute for (X) and Godsbanen in Aarhus. An urban landscape in strong change, where gentrification and new buildings quickly eradicate and remove growth and wild places. The walk is a tribute to the wild, the fragile and the lost; what we have lost and what we are about to lose. A tribute to the hope and the wild in ourselves and our own bodies.

Songs From Our Bodies examines the resonance between humans and our living environment. The performance sings of the living world and examines the voices that inhabit our personal bodies and the voices that inhabit the bodies of landscapes and places. We go on a singing, sensing, listening, playful walk in the area and investigate whether we can create a dialogue with the more than human through listening and singing from the landscapes in our bodies.

sound ceremony - performance 

Artists: Agnieszka Bułacik, Vivian Vesterager, Edda Karólína, Liene Jurgelāne

What if we could get guidance from the mycelial beings on how to move beyond our human-made boundaries and become more present with the living world through listening, breathing and sounding together? 

murmuring through is a participatory performance ceremony that invites you into an intimate encounter with the more-than-human world. Rooted in sound, silence, and deep listening, this work gently opens a space of connection, grief, dreaming, and transformation. Echoes of Eastern European folksongs, murmurs, and spoken word weave together with the subtle presences of plants and landscape to form a sensory journey—a co-created ritual of reconnection.

This is a space to feel and to be felt; to listen with your body and spirit; to honour the wintering times and the unseen life stirring within. It is an invitation to sit with the pain of ecological loss, while holding onto the possibility of collective healing and imagining other, more livable worlds in kinship with the land.

collective tarot reading performance

Artist: Lotta Petronella

A collaboration between Lotta Petronella and artist Cecilia Westerberg on the island of Själö (Seili) in the Turku archipelago. 25 plant cards are inspired by tarot. The cards were made by Cecilia with plants that grow on the island, a concept written and performed by Lotta Petronella. Reading with Plants is part of an ongoing body of work and investigation, SjälöPoiesis - a critical study of power structures through plants, especially common plants – the weeds, the vulgaris.

The readings are done for 5 people at a time and last 30 min. There will be 4 slots in total. 

concert

a live performance of Wild Anima’s project Phytosynthesis — a poetic term that invites us to receive the spiritual messages of plants through a sonic ritual, and to explore our own inner photosynthesis. The music is created in collaboration with plants, using their bio-electric signals, interwoven with livelooping polyphonies, lyre, and semi-modular synth. 

sound journey, concert, auditory meditation

Artist: Josephin Bovién

A poetic sound journey following a one-eyed frog with five long eyelashes as it travels through nature and meets a young, singing woman. A performance blending intuitive singing, ambient sound, and storytelling to guide us all into a collective auditory meditation.

performance 

Artist: Ida Lod

Owl Woman – performance ritual is an interactive, poetic performance that moves in the borderland between music-theatre and ritual.

It’s a suggestive journey through Baroque laments, poetic texts, and improvised music. The Owl Woman is a mystical archetype and a poetic oracle. She invites you into her intimate space, a kind of waiting room between worlds, where the audience gets the chance to let go of the old to make room for the new.

Owl Woman – performance ritual premiered at the Stockholm Fringe Festival 2024, where it was nominated for ”Best Dance and Physical Theatre Award” and has since been selected for Konstepidemiens spring program 2025 in Gothenburg. 

”𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙘𝙖𝙥𝙩𝙞𝙫𝙖𝙩𝙚𝙙. 𝘿𝙚𝙚𝙥. 𝘽𝙚𝙖𝙪𝙩𝙞𝙛𝙪𝙡. 𝙄𝙣𝙩𝙚𝙧𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙞𝙣𝙜. 𝙄𝙩 𝙜𝙖𝙫𝙚 𝙢𝙚 𝙨𝙥𝙖𝙘𝙚 𝙛𝙤𝙧 𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜𝙨 𝙩𝙤 𝙚𝙢𝙚𝙧𝙜𝙚 𝙬𝙞𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣 𝙢𝙚 𝙬𝙝𝙞𝙡𝙚 𝙖𝙩 𝙩𝙝𝙚 𝙨𝙖𝙢𝙚 𝙩𝙞𝙢𝙚 𝙄 𝙛𝙚𝙡𝙩 𝙡𝙞𝙠𝙚 𝙄 𝙬𝙖𝙨 𝙥𝙖𝙧𝙩 𝙤𝙛 𝙨𝙤𝙢𝙚𝙩𝙝𝙞𝙣𝙜 𝙗𝙞𝙜𝙜𝙚𝙧” – audience member

concert 

Artist: Katrine Faber

Katrine Faber creates wordless songs and sound images inspired by the landscape of the body and the bodies of the landscapes, the songs of the Earth.  In her music there are dancing breaths and secret rhythms that waves, knocks, tells and calls. The music dances around small stories about body and life, death and memory, grief and joy, transformations that happen again and again.          She uses the human voice in all possible ways and sings about forgotten connections between people, plants, animals and the nature around and inside us. It is a meeting of composed songs, improvisations, storytelling and peculiar dances; it is soft and wild and beautiful and sad and above all: very alive!

a cleansing ritual

Artist: Lærke Lyhne

A sensuous ritual with herbs and water to celebrate and to let go of the day’s impressions. In this workshop, you are invited to cleanse both your physical and etheric body using fragrant plants – a practice rooted in ancient Nordic cultures. For centuries, herbs have been used to wash away the unseen: sorrow, restlessness, heaviness – making space for renewal.

Together, we will create a ritual herbal bath, giving thanks for the day and letting go of what no longer serves us. We will meet the magical herbs and learn how to use them for cleansing and self-care.

Throughout the day, there will be a small wellness station where you can support yourself with refreshing herbs – for the skin and as hydrating herbal drinks rich in electrolytes.

speculative plant poetry workshop

Artist: Anika Spindelmann

This writing workshop is an invitation to enter into intimate encounters with the plants of the summer-abundant neighborhood of the festival grounds. Together, we’ll conspire, speculate, and dream about eutopian futures. Through little writing exercises, we’ll tune into the plantscape of the urban garden around us - listening, observing, and responding - to co-create our own poems. In the second part we experiment with weaving / entangling the visions into speculative vision tapestry, letting a collective eco-poem emerge. Ecopoetry intertwines aesthetic beauty and ecological message, inviting us to reimagine human-nature relationships beyond the illusion of a binary. As stories and language shape the way we see and are, writing poetry is potent magic and has not only the power to root us, but to plant seeds for change. 

No prior writing experience is needed. Just bring joyful curiosity to play and explore with words and connect with the plants and people. 

eco-social engagement workshop

Artists: Tīna Alise Drupa and Collective Fabula

Semi-natural grasslands, including meadows and pastures, are among the most biodiverse ecosystems, yet they now exist only in small, fragmented patches due to changes in land use. As meadows continue to shrink, preserving their rich biodiversity becomes increasingly vital.

Meadow Quilt is an eco-social engagement workshop that invites participants to symbolically take stewardship of a meadow plant through a series of guided activities. Together, we craft a collective quilt using an innovative biotextile made from cereal roots, interwoven with wild plant seeds collected by the Latvian Nature Foundation. This living textile will then be placed in Institut for (X) landscape, allowing it to naturally integrate and transform into a meadow.

The workshop is suitable for all ages, but we ask adults to accompany their children in the process. You can come and stay for the whole duration or just join for a while. 

Co-creative cooking

Artist: Sarafina Kimø @Skovlyste

Sarafina will help you use all your senses to engage with the diversity of nourishing plants on this land which humans have cultivated with love and grown together with. All curious people are invited to help them make a soup which will be offered as a gift to the artists and volunteers organising the festival. Through this act of reciprocal care, we acknowledge and honour the seeds of ideas which ROOTED festival plants within us.

The cauldron will be open for offerings from 14-16, while the ingredients will be on display most of the day. 

a performance, a lecture, a prayer, a poem, a cry

Artist: Lotta Petronella

Själö Herbarium embodies hundreds of years of institutional violence and hauntings on the island of Seili. Calling in the seals, the rocks, the ticks, the missing bodies, the plants to guide us. Drawing from three herbariums collected and created on the island from 1673 to now.

all power is vulnerable - 

they told us 

as we dissolved into water, 

as we became wind.

Lotta says about this work:

For the last nine years, I have been working on Själö, a small island in the Baltic Sea, shaped like a bird, named after seals & souls

An island embodying hundreds of years of institutional violence and hauntings.

The first institution was the church, in 1619, to store away the Lepers & those without a holy spirit later it became a mental institution, transformed into a women’s asylum those deported here were brought across the waters by force forced to stay

forced out of life

In 1962 the Archipelago Research Institute was set up in the old hospital buildings.  The researchers work in rooms that used to be patient cells, they collect samples to create a time series

reading the land

reading the waters

The haunting is everywhere, it’s in the structure of the buildings & the blueprints, the way spaces are created & arranged. The laboratory of aquariums to study invasive crabs resembles the old cells

I keep returning to this place during different seasons, moon phases

I keep coming back

To the island

The wreck

The myth

The plants

Digging gently for the roots

the botanical evidence

creating seedlings,

small libraries of care.

The islands ask back

What are you looking for?

Why are you looking?

an artist, filmmaker and writer based in Finland. She has worked with and on islands for over two decades. She is co- founder of CAA Contemporary Art Archipelago, a curatorial collective supporting site-sensitive work. She has been leading a multidisciplinary collaborative research project Själö Poeisis on the island of Seili for almost a decade. The works include a feature length film, a radio essay, lecture performances, a choir work, an apothecary and visual texts. She is currently writing a larger body of work - Själö Herbarium, a critical study of power structures through plants as a performance, a lecture, a prayer, a poem, a cry. Petronella is also  a devoted medicine and flower essence maker and a tarot scholar.

https://lottapetronella.com/

At ROOTED Lotta will offer a performance, lecture, a poem, a cry “Själö Herbarium”  and collective tarot reading performance.

as an independent music artist, singer, songwriter, electronic composer, spoken word artist, music producer, and bandleader, Josephin has contributed to productions and critically acclaimed concert experiences of a particularly vulnerable, experimental and ethereal nerve.

Today, her musical service centers on ceremonial performance art and improvisation of what she humbly defines as universal folk music. With electronic nature soundscapes, organic percussion instruments, and improvised songs, she lets her passion for embodying the playful and vulnerable authenticity of the present propagate itself in our collective body. Josephin Bovién invites us to merge with the pulsating soil of Mother Earth, where the biodiverse life around and above can be inhaled, time spirals, and where spiritual surrender equals collective liberation.

At ROOTED Josephin will hold the opening ceremony and offer a musical storytelling performance

a multidisciplinary artist from Denmark. A singer, composer, storyteller, actress, physical performer, theatre director, and psychotherapist. She is artistic director of Teater Viva, expanding the perception of theatre into an artistic space, where we can meet our selves, each other and our living environment in an extended resonance. Since 2015 with Singing Our Place: a cross art project exploring the voices of human beings, the voices of our living surroundings and our common future. Singing Our Place has created performances, concerts, workshops, talks, sound installations and festivals in Denmark, England, Iceland, Germany, Finland Norway, Sweden and Greenland. 

www.teaterviva.dk

At ROOTED Katrine will offer performance walk “Songs From Our Bodies” and concert “Songs From My Body”

An artist, activist, space holder, and facilitator whose practice interweaves transdisciplinary and intersectional approaches. Her work centers on sensing, feeling, and deepening connections - to oneself, to others, and to the wider metabolism of planet Earth. Though initially educated in visual arts, she has evolved to work primarily with sound and performance, exploring voice as a medium for expression and healing.

Her performance portfolio includes projects such as "Who would have thought that the snow falls," "Treehumana," "Wandering Voices," and "Murmuring through." She previously contributed to Dear Home Collective, examining the concept of home in our migrating world through participatory performances, workshops, and exhibitions.

At ROOTED Agnieszka is part of the collective sound ceremony / performance “murmuring through”.

a Stockholm-based artist, explores the connection between inner and outer worlds through interdisciplinary and site-specific performances. Utilizing song, spoken word, violin, and movement, her solo projects, such as “Owl Woman,” “Dream of the dream,” “Ofelia Reversed,” and “Dadaistic Diva,” delve into transformative power via feminine archetypes.  She frequently collaborates with artist Valeria Montti Colque and musician David Heikkinen, and has recently been seen at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm, and the Venice Biennale, among other venues.  Separately, as an educator and holistic voice therapist, Ida Lod guides individuals to connect with their creative voice through embodied practices. Educated at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg, her work blends artistic exploration with holistic and healing guidance.

https://idalod.com/

At ROOTED Ida will offer a performance-ritual “Owl Woman”.

Wild Anima (Alex Alexopoulos) is a French-Greek sound artist who fuses ancient melodies reminiscent of mermaid-like choirs through live looping tapestries to create tender and organic ethereal music. Her work, imbued with mysticism and eco-feminism, is also embodied in artistic and therapeutic experiments, such as the Supernatural project, blending plant music, ecology of emotions and collective re-enchantment. 

On her latest album “Phytosynthesis,” Wild Anima has harnessed the essence of plants, capturing their secret symphonies through bio electric signal and translating them into music. “Phytosynthesis” is a sensory exploration of the interconnectedness between humans and nature. It’s a reminder that the world around us is alive with its own unique rhythms and melodies, waiting to be discovered through music.

https://www.wildanimamusic.com/

At ROOTED Wild Anima will offer a concert.

I would describe myself as an alchemist (and mother), as it embraces all aspects of my work. My approach to the sensory universe of the medicinal plant queendom is based on smells, flavours, touch, cultivation, preparation and treatment as medicine. I use various methods to extract, ferment, distil and transform plants, with the aim of helping people rediscover their inherent power.

I have established my own herbal farm, where I teach plant medicine and human health, and harvest herbs for products. My life follows a seasonal rhythm. In spring, I plant seeds. In summer, I harvest and teach. In autumn, I make extracts and products from the harvest. In winter, I sell all the herbal gifts to you at markets.

https://www.laerkelyhne.com/

At ROOTED festival Lærke will offer a herbal wellness station and a ritual, as well as a station with her herbal products.

A relational designer, researcher, and educator. At the festival, Tīna is representing Fabula, a Latvia-based creative collective she co-founded. Rooted in creativity, Fabula explores regenerative and relational approaches to change, fostering new ways of thinking, making, and connecting with more-than-human. Their practice includes publishing, organizing educational & transformative workshops, conducting ecology-oriented research, and more.

https://www.instagram.com/collective_fabula/

At ROOTED festival Tīna will hold a meadow quilt workshop

With a deep-rooted curiosity about what it means to be alive,Vivian Vesterager works with the experience both of the vibrancy of life and the stillness of numbness. Vivian explores the pendulum between these states in a way that invites audiences to question their own perceptions of the world; lately through immersive theatre, naturvejledning and ritualistic practices

Drawing inspiration from a various beautiful mentors, projects, and collaborative experiences, Vivian’s artistic journey has been shaped by encounters with Roy Hart Theatre, Sisters Hope, Metropolis, as well as by her own self-taught exploration. 

Based in Djursland, Denmark, she draws inspiration from nature and the intricate systems that sustain life.

At ROOTED Vivian is part of the collective sound ceremony / performance “murmuring through”.

a poet, writer, researcher, translator and communication consultant from the north of Germany (the land between the seas) based in Aarhus, Denmark. 

Her work invites a space of curiosity, intimate encounters and conspiratorial visioning with the land and beings through writings based on experimental text and visual formats, stream-of-consciousness, carrier-bag-like foraging and assembling, multispecies perspectives and observations. She explores the inner and outer landscapes in the current state of planetary collapse, connecting themes of solastalgia, (un)seasonality, ritual, wilderness, and the possibilities and pains of love in the Capitalocene and late modernity.

Her writing is inspired by Ursula le Guin, Mary Oliver and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, and the seemingly small encounters of everyday life.

At ROOTED festival Anika will hold a speculative plant poetry workshop “Entangled Visioning”

I work with the body and senses, movement, and relational knowledges. One of my most important collaborations is my movement practice by Utterslev marsh, an ecology in Copenhagen close to where I live: polluted and protected, a site of liveliness and slow death, great beauty and ongoing violence. Dancing with these paradoxes (in a literal way!) teaches me a lot about the dilemmas, frictions and inequalities in more-than-human relationships- and about love. This movement practice also (re-)connects me to my Baltic lineage and the heritage I carry, such as time spent with plants in Latvia when I was a child, and the cosmologies and intergenerational knowledges underlying these experiences.

https://forskning.ruc.dk/en/persons/llapina

At ROOTED Linda will offer a sensory anchoring ritual as part of the screening of “Wild Relatives”

A social artist facilitating co-creative workshops where people can engage in sensuous, intuitive, collaborative practices with each other – and thereby learn and share skills needed to grow a more just and sustainable world. They are a member of the collective Useful Art for Communities and founder of the group Fermentorskab. In this work, they have been growing a community of people and microbes teaching each other nourishing fermentation practices. They love to bridge worlds, and their workshops have for example combined fermentation with practices such as storytelling and foraging.

At ROOTED Sarafina will hold co-creative soup workshop to feed the artists of the festival.

a Palestinian visual artist and filmmaker. Her work explores how power is articulated through relationships, often focusing on the body and materiality in relation to narratives of nationalism, and histories of place.  Through sculpture, filmmaking, and occasional writing, Manna deals with the paradoxes of preservation practices, particularly within the fields of architecture, agriculture and law. Her practice considers the tension between the modernist traditions of categorisation and conservation and the unruliness of ruination, life and its regeneration. 

https://www.jumanamanna.com/

ROOTED festival will screen Manna’s documentary “Wild Relatives”

A muralist, designer and interdisciplinary artist. Edda uses her art to influence social debate and works across mediums to create art that dives into contemporary issues, exploring and explaining as she takes the viewer on a journey through her mind. 

Edda work is based on extensive research and explaining complex processes in a fun and accessible way. She applies the same approach when she does design or wall work, every mural has to fit into its environment and please those who live in its vicinity.

At ROOTED Edda is part of the collective sound ceremony / performance “murmuring through”.

a French documentary photographer and filmmaker. After growing up in Luxembourg, she studied communication and journalism in Brussels before her passion for photography led her to follow a program in photojournalism and visual storytelling at the Danish school of Media and Journalism (DMJX). Her graduation short documentary film “Take me as I am” received an award of excellence at Pictures of the Year International (POYi). For her documentary photography project “Biophilia, a natural life” she lived in immersion with the family she photographed, and used analogue cameras to observe and work at a slow pace. Inspired by her travels and encounters, her projects recount stories of freedom, feminism, creative expression and (re)connection with the natural world.

ROOTED festival will exhibit some of Capucine’s photography from “Biophilia” series.

I am photographer, videographer and web developer. I love anything analogue and being a fly on the wall at beautiful events like Rooted Festival and sharing my work from it. Whenever I’m not working with film and photos, I’m either trying to learn French at night school or trying to find the cute kittens at (X) to cuddle with.

https://moodycreatives.com/

Inge will be capturing ROOTED festival in still and moving images. 

What brings me the biggest joy is creating spaces that gather people and open a space for connection. With oneself, others, Earth, music, art. Life. This is my work of love for this world.

This work has taken many shapes. Festivals, workshops, courses, sensory walks, performances, rituals, gardens, herbal tea library, dj sets, and more. And there have been many more shapes before this.

For some years now creating these spaces has been in close collaboration with plants and trees and ROOTED is one such collaboration. While I am doing the human work of curating and producing this beautiful festival, it is the plants bringing us all together and I am so humbled and excited.

Apart from curating and producing the festival, Liene will also be part of a pop-up concert with the singing collective, a sound ceremony and journey “murmuring through”,, and the sensory movie screening of “Wild Relatives”.

“singing circle” is an informal group of female and non-binary people that gather once a week in a circle at Institut for (X) to collectively learn and sing folksongs in various languages. It started in 2024 with the intention to create a safe space for singing as a joyful and collective practice, for exploring and using our voices in an authentic and non-perfectionist way, for expanding both our song library and ability to improvise.

At ROOTED festival the singing circle will offer a pop-up concert singing plant-related folksongs from various places in Europe.