PERSPECTIVES ON: Sustainability and Equity in the Arts
Navigating Times of Crises
26.5.25
27.5.25
09:30-15:30
Day 1: Time: 9:30-15:00, Place: Foyer, Skuespilhuset
Day 2: Time: 9:30-15:30, Place: Scenen, Thoravej 29
about the seminar
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.
Programme
Sonya Lindfors
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.
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 PERSPECTIVES ON
PERSPECTIVES ON creates 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.