BIO:

Allja Petric and Januš Aleš Luznar collaborate in a convergence of musical streams, merging their individual artistic paths in shared ambient and meditative concerts.

Their collaboration is rooted in improvisation and intuitive listening; they interweave voices, handcrafted string instruments, flutes, percussion, and subtle electronic elements.

Their performance is conceived as an open musical dialogue that unfolds into a continuous soundscape, offering the listener a space for deep listening and relaxation.
Their musical flow moves between meditative sonic layers, ritualistic approaches, and immersive ambient art, and through the subtle interplay of two distinct expressions, it opens a space for introspection, connection, and an inner journey.

RESIDENCY: 

Januš Aleš Luznar and Allja Petric will develop and record new music which will be presented at their upcoming concerts. Their collaboration is rooted in improvisation and deep, intuitive listening, weaving together voices, handcrafted string instruments, flutes, percussion, and subtle electronic elements.

BIO:

Andreja Kranjec (1989) is a visual artist from
Slovenia, working mainly in the field of painting,
video and film. She finished her Masters degree
from Academy of Fine arts and design in Ljubljana in Video and New media in 2018. She received prestigious Prešeren students award
from the same university for recognition of her
work in 2018. Her work has been exhibited in many solo and group exhibitions and festivals in Slovenia and abroad. She also participated in
international residencies for artists (Italy, Czech
Republic), the latest residency was at Cité
internationale des arts in Paris, France. She
currently lives and works in Ilirska Bistrica, Slovenia. Beside her artistic production she leads  art workshops for kids and adults.

RESIDENCY: THE FLOW THAT CARRIES US FORWARD
I am interested in healing transformation through different mediums, and how they intertwine between each other. I would like to experiment with the
poetics of forms and expressions of emotions asking the unanswerable questions of life. How are we moving forward, how are we taking care of our bodies and ourselves? How are we processing emotions that are thousands and thousands years old? I would take this time and space at the residency to explore this questions, to embrace the silence and nature and experiment with first and unconscious moves that are organic and lead toward clarity and connection with self and other. I would use mediums like watercolor on paper and video, maybe a collaboration with the residents can happen as well..

BIO:

Flavia Barandun is a Swiss interdisciplinary artist working at the intersection of painting, movement, and embodied practice. She holds a Master's degree in Art Education (Magistra der Kuenste) from the University of Art and Design Linz and a Bachelor in Movement Studies & Performance.
Her work combines Visual Art and performance, informed by her background in dance, education, and design. She has exhibited and performed in Austria and Switzerland and brings a strong focus on perception, subconscious processes, and embodied experience into her Artistic practice.

RESIDENCY:  Painting and movement with dream imagery

BIO: 

Beth Dillon (1987, Sydney) is an artist and curator who lives and works in Biel/Bienne. She is the current director of espace libre (Visarte Biel/Bienne) in collaboration with Vera Trachsel. Dillon is also a founding member of Australian artist collective, 110% (2013 - present), with Lachlan Herd and Kieran Bryant. Her previous solo and collaborative projects include lucky clover hunts, fabricated family histories, experiments with breast milk bioplastics and baby poo bricks, cross-border walks, mobile training camps for collective mountain expeditions, synchronised swimming performances in public pools, email correspondence with long-distance lovers, monumental installations of clay, foam and steel, nursing stations for yeast organisms in a fermenting mass of dough, undercover investigations into the duty free art market, chromatic dietary experiments, public space interventions and queer clown club performances.

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Gregory Stauffer is a performer, choreographer and researcher. His work draws inspiration from the practices and ethics of ecological gardening. A graduate of the Accademia Dimitri, he founded the company Le cabinet de curiosités in Geneva in 2009 and creates site-specific works. He was an associate artist at Arsenic in Lausanne from 2018 to 2020, where he established the ongoing platform Tuesday is Danceday. Between 2021 and 2022, he led the forest-based research-creation project Sustainable Creative Processes in the Performing Arts, and from 2024 to 2026, Les 4 Jardins. He received the Liechti Foundation Arts Prize in 2022. In 2024, he founded Malvaux – a centre for ecosomatic exploration in the forest – with choreographer Eve Chariatte. Since January 2026, he has been head of the Master’s programme at La Manufacture, the University of the Arts in Lausanne.

RESIDENCY:  Creating music in family

BIO: 

Tomislav Feller (CRO) is a choreographer, performer and educator based in
Berlin. His artistic practice is focused on the notion of heightened listening, framing performativity by witnessing and re-imagining the body as a landscape of charged images. Tomislav is a certified Gyrokinesis trainer and practitioner, often sharing his experience in a form of classes and workshops.
Together with Manue Scheiwiller, Tomislav established “Contemporary Cruising”
a performance project that became an online magazine for contemporary
performance. He was also an active member and one of a co-founder of both
Young Boy Dancing Group and the artist run space and a performance collective
“Jacuzzi” based in Amsterdam.
With Hana van der Kolk he has been developing a practice exploring telepathic
connectivity in the state of dancing followed by reflective writing sessions. They have been collaborating since 2011 and their works have been presented at PAM
residency and Anatomy riot festival in Los Angeles.
Currently, Tomislav is involved in a project by Jefta van Dienther as a
rehearsal director and is working on his own new upcoming performance.

Marin Lemić was born in Zadar, Croatia, in 1986.
In 2011, he graduated from the Department of Contemporary Dance at the Hoge school for de Kunst.
From 2012 to 2016, he worked in the state national theatres in Oldenburg and Mainz, Germany, as a member of a contemporary dance company. During this period, he collaborated with various choreographers, including Ann Van den Broek, Sharon Eyal, Club
Guy & Roni, Alessandra Corti, Felix Berner, and Sungyop Hong.
He currently works as a performer and author on various dance projects in Croatia and
internationally, collaborating with choreographers such as Matija Ferlin, Adrienn Hod, Zrinka Lukčec-Kiko, Marjana Krajač, Jasna Čižmek-Tarbuk, Michael  Langeneckert, and Cocoon
Dance.
In 2019, his first authorial project “Transformers”, created together with dance artist Ida Jolić, received two awards from professional contemporary dance associations for the
2018/2019 season: Best Choreography (Ida Jolić and Marin Lemić)
Best Individual Performance (Ida Jolić)
In 2020, he received the Croatian Theatre Award (Nagrada hrvatskog glumišta) for Best
Male Performance for the production “Transformers”, which was also nominated for Best
Choreographic Achievement.

RESIDENCY:  Adriatic Epic is a dance project that merges Croatian folk heritage with queer perspectives and embodied research, and will premiere in Zagreb in June 2026. Developed in collaboration with a dancer Marin Lemić, the project explores themes of ageing, identity, ecstasy, and vulnerability through movement. As a part of the research process, we engaged with the traditional sword dance troupe Kumpanjija from the island of Korčula, Croatia, participating in their rehearsals to learn about the heritage, history, and embodied knowledge of that local tradition. This material will serve as the core inspiration for the work. The research phase at the Elias residency focuses on deconstructing and reworking elements of these traditional dances, transforming their formations, martial qualities, and rhythmic structures into a contemporary choreographic vocabulary. Besides working on deconstructing traditional sword dances we will be exploring ways of support in a state of collapse, contemplating on tradition in relation to our identity and creation of ritualistic dances. 

BIO:  artist, teacher and curator working with words and images, often from an autobiographical perspective. I hold degrees in cultural management (Bocconi university, Milan), anthropology (Bicocca university, Milan), thanatology (University of Padua) and a PhD in European studies (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens). I am the founder of the independent publishing project edizioni postali tigre and the art festival GalbiArte.

RESIDENCY:  work on the structure of the autobiographical workshop "WORDS IN MOTION" that I will conduct in Sarajevo from winter 2026 in collaboration with Kuma International

BIO: Writer, dramaturg, poet

RESIDENCY: focus on writing

BIO: 
freelance architect starting research on how to integrate dreaming into spacial design

RESIDENCY: 
dreaming the space

BIO: 
dance, choreography, performance
(Vienna, Low Austria, Salzburg-AUSTRIA)

RESIDENCY: 
The research revolves around the idea of a garden, the garden as a refuge, as wild order, ordered wilderness, a place that requires care and attentiveness. The garden as an expression of humanity, that is co-created with nature consciousness. In this definition a garden is a place, that we give a certain direction, but it also has a life. My body is a garden, the space I live in is a garden, a project is a garden, the studio is a garden, paradise is a garden. How does the garden appear in our night dreams, what stories and creatures appear around the notion of the garden? How can these dreams manifest in specific places? This is an exploration of the possibility of how can we, alone and together create through our night dreams a paradisical place.

BIO: 
Alexa Solveig Mardon is devoted to practices of gathering, collaborations with the dream realm, and collective sensing. Alexa studies movement through dancing, bodywork, political actions, and poetry. Alexa is a queer second generation settler of Finnish/Karelian/British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. As a teacher/facilitator, Alexa is committed to anti-oppressive frameworks, unlearning unhealthy relationships to obedience and power, and creating spaces where agency, rigorous play, and selfhood can flourish. Alexa is currently completing their masters at DAS Choreography, University of the Arts. Amsterdam, where their research focuses on dreaming, writing + movement practices that seek anti-colonial mythical, queer + speculative relations with ancestors of all species.

RESIDENCY: 
Earth’s prophecies – writing project on dreams of the Earth.

BIO: 
ERIKA MITSUSASHI is an interdisciplinary artist and performer living and working on the unceded, ancestral, and occupied, traditional lands of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm (Musqueam), Səl̓ílwətaɬ (Tsleil-Waututh), and Skwxwú7mesh (Squamish) Nations of the Coast Salish peoples, known as Vancouver, British Columbia. She studied at Simon Fraser University School for the Contemporary Arts receiving a BFA (hons) in dance. Erika’s work has taken the form of performance for stage, installation, experimental film, site specific/responsive performance, scenography and projection design. Most recently she has been experimenting with live-stream video and digital spaces as sites for intimacy and choreography of attention. Her work and collaborative projects have been presented locally and internationally by PAUL Studios Berlin, Powell Street Festival, Toronto Love-In’s PS:We are All Here series, Surrey Art Gallery’s InFlux, Kinetic Studio’s Open Studio Series, Shooting Gallery Performance Series, Upintheair Theatre’s rEvolver Festival and La Serre's OFFTA festival of live art. She has been supported by organizations including New Works, Toronto’s SummerWorks, VIVO Media Arts, plastic orchid factory, Made in BC and Boca De Lupo in the creation and development of her works to date.
ALEXA SOLVEIG MARDON is a dancer, performance maker and facilitator co-creating and seeking spaces for playful ruination, queer fantastical myth-making, and multi-sensorial learning/experiencing across difference. Alexa is a first generation settler of Finnish/Karelian/British Isles descent living as an uninvited guest on the illegally occupied, unceded Coast Salish territories of the xʷməθkʷəy̓əm, Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, and səl̓ílwətaʔɬ peoples. Alexa’s work takes forms including installation, performance, print objects, rituals for touch and alchemy, movement workshops for frontline support workers, dreamwork + prophecy practices, traditional Karelian lament singing, and teaching professional and non-professional dance classes worldwide. Alexa is currently completing their masters at DAS Choreography, University of the Arts. Amsterdam, where their research focuses on dreaming, writing + movement practices that seek anti-colonial mythical, queer + speculative relations with ancestors of all species. Alexa’s work has been presented by OFFTA (Montreal,) Boombox Vancouver, PS: We are All Here (Toronto), Kinetic Studios (Halifax), Dance In Vancouver, 12 Minutes Max (Vancouver), Surrey Art Gallery, and VIVO Media Arts Centre.
ALYSHA SERIANY is an interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of production, pedagogy, film, media art and community projects. Her practice revolves around horizontal styles of collaboration and learning and is informed by embodying intersectional feminism, intergenerational learning and queer joy. In 2019, she was a recipient of Telefilm Canada’s Talent to Watch program, and her first short film SOAK (2014) is distributed by the CFMDC. She developed a youth mentorship program and associate produced THE BODY REMEMBERS WHEN THE WORLD BROKE OPEN (2019) and has been a collaborator for many media artworks and films that have exhibited at film festivals and galleries around the world.

RESIDENCY: 
Across a sixteen-minute video and forty-minute dance performance without intermission, whereverever playfully traces possible beginnings and belonging by following the question “how did we get here?” Recorded on location in Mardon + Mitsuhashi’s respective ancestral homelands, Finland and Japan, the video intertwines visits with relatives, folk and contemporary dancing, and observational images of the built and natural environments with a focus on gesture, movement, and impulse. As the video cuts rhythmically between each place, it oscillates between a sense of distance and presence, past and present, as Mardon + Mitsuhashi orientate themselves as visitors to their hereditary homes and construct a postcard for their future kin. A sampled glitch in the soundtrack, anaglyph effect on images, and a doubling in framing across the two places, disrupts a sense of linear time to unfold a vastness of relations. 

First phase of filming new interdisciplinary work All at Once which is a playful fabulation of ancestral stories and absences. Our first phase will be filming in Finland, my matrilinial homeland. During our time at ELIAS they visited the river, do some experiments with our cameras, rest, and move in the studio. 

BIO: 
ALEXANDROS is a dance artist raised in Greece and operating in Belgium. After studying in the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance, he has been working as a performer for Ultima Vez/Wim Vandekeybus as well as Alexander Vanturnhout and Julyen Hamilton. As a maker, he has created the solo "the fall in between" and the group piece "A Small World". He is a passionate teacher of dance. 
MARGHERITA is a dance artist raised in Italy. After training as an actress, she studied dance in the University of Music and Dance in Cologne. She has received national grants for her artistic research on themes of collective grief and on the relation between architecture and dance, as well as her creation "Shatters". She is currently living and creating in Brussels. As a performer she has worked for companies in Cologne and Brussels such as El Cuco Project, Nyash, Mira performing arts a.o.

RESIDENCY: 
Developing a dance duet.

Like a river is a contemporary dance duet, a call to joy and pleasure, to wild grace, to a dance that comes like a river.
From the perception, the experience and the study of rivers we create a physical, esthetic and poetic language to talk about Love.
Love is for us landscape, body, nature, community, passion, kinship.

BIO: 
A composer and performance maker from the United States. Horvitz studied composition with Alvin Lucier and Anthony Braxton, and later spent seven years studying psychoanalysis and various ways of working with dreams. He has performed and toured as a musician in many contexts. Was supported by Standplaats Midden Utrecht among many others funds.
Performance A DREAM THAT BELONGS TO NO ONE premiered at Het HEM Amsterdam in 2022. It draws on experimental music and choreography to create an extended field of attention in which spectators are invited to experience something like imagination but not quite. Another consistent thread in his work is non-human presences (dreams and images, AI systems, animals).

RESIDENCY: 
#1 Practical research on a performance that will be the follow up to 2022's A DREAM THAT BELONGS TO NO ONE (Premiere Het HEM/SPRING Festival). DREAM was built out of two types of material. First, formally constructed choreography and sound, specifically the bowing of long wires tuned to the resonant frequencies of the performance space, and enigmatic gestures and dance phrases. This material was designed to give the spectators time to drift, dream, and sink down into a deep zone during the long hours of the performance. (3+ hours, timed to the fade of sunset, from light to dark). The second type of material was songs and solo dances created by working with the performers dream material, drawing on my own long-term work with and on dreams in both therapeutic and artistic settings. This material stirred spectators associations and gave them something to hang onto at periodic moments in the work. These two types of material combined together to create an experience in which spectators might have a strong experience of their own inner images, and possibly start to think/experience this territory of reality differently. 
#2 Spending two weeks at ELIAS in March 2025, gathering materials from the last year and preparing for upcoming projects in 2025-2026. 
Residency provided a crucial environment to drop down, sink into the field around, and allow what work needed to be done to come up in a very organic and seemingly effortless way, afterwards feeling refreshed and rejuvenated.

BIO: 
A freelance dancer and choreographer. Born in Spain and based in Salzburg, she studied dance at SEAD, Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance and at the Real Conservatorio de Danza Mariemma in Madrid.
She dances and collaborates with CieLAROQUE/ Helene Weinzierl (AT) since 2019 until nowadays. She has also danced for Ceren Oran (DE), b-m.w dance company (AT), Opera productions at the Salzburger Festpielle (AT), La Fura dels Baus (ES).
Since 2020 she works as a choreographer for theater plays like “Amsterdam” am Oldenburgischen Staatstheater, “Knechte” at Kosmos Theater Wien, “Fiesta” at Parkaue Theater Berlin, “Oma Monika” at Mainz Staatstheater and others.
In 2022 she created and performed “Emotional creatures”, her own choreographic work.

RESIDENCY: 
Exploring a creative process inspired on Michael Chekhov, based on pinning real sensations and feelings through the creation of images which emerge by the channel of our imagination, aiming to create an internal event that becomes a real experience.

BIO: 
Bambi van Balen - visual & performance artist

RESIDENCY: 
DREAM MACHINES is a series of inflatable light sculptures. Participants lay with their eyes closed, undergoing a trance induced light meditation with a variation of light pulsations. The Dream Machines references the kinetic sculptures and experiments of Brion Gysin and Ian Sommerville from the 1960’s. Dream machine calms down the brain activity to the frequency of so-called “alpha waves” which is experienced as a state of wakeful relaxation or dreaming. Dreaming is a moment of introspection, healing and connectedness. It allows for gathering together together to envision another way of being. 

TEAM: 
Bambi van Balen - visual & performance artist
Christy Westhovens - visual artist & programmer
Conrad Hornung - musician & composer
Tomi Hilsee - architect
Ferry Chrispijn - visual artist & architect

RESIDENCY: 
Creating floating comfortable sleeping structures in the forest and each morning sharing dreams. Experimenting with audio visual light performance at night as a performative dream ritual initiation. Can we create an intimate entangled experience between the living and technology?

BIO: 
Betta Eichner (*1991) is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of visual art, dance and text. In her works she combines somatic practices with techniques of automatic writing, drawing and speaking. Based on this, she explores the body as a gateway to inner and collective stories, images and dreams, as well as the political potential therein. 
Her work is grounded by a B.A. in Sociology from the University of Bremen, a Diploma in Visual Communication from the Kunsthochschule Kassel and is further supported by a wide range of visual vocabulary and practical work with inner images and dreams in groups through her certified training at the International Institute for Dreaming and Imagery. Since 2017 she has continuously attended dance classes in Contact Improvisation, Free Improvisation, Instant Composition and Butoh. In addition, she has regularly attended further training courses on somatic work with the voice at “The World is Sound” (TWIS) Berlin since 2023. In recent years, she has been a guest artist in residency at Kulturpark Stolpe, Ponderosa Dance and Stechlininstitut. As a performer, she has worked with the Motimaru Dance Company, the choreographer Rosalind Holgate Smith and, supported by the Fonds Darstellende Künste, together with the dancer and choreographer Kai Evans, on several occasions in Berlin, as well as in the context of performative research at the Kulturforum Fürth and in Warsaw under Jess Curtis. Among others, her works have been exhibited and sold in the Gängeviertel Hamburg, the Documentahalle Kassel, Raum 404 Bremen, during the Wohnzimmerfestspiele in Göttingen and at the Leipzig Book Fair. Since 2021, she has also been sharing the results of her work in the form of interdisciplinary workshops. In the field of dance, she is active, as a performer as well as a teacher and trainee in the independent scene nationwide for several years.

RESIDENCY: 
We live in times of big changes all over the world, facing loss, transitions and conflicts on various levels – from very personal levels, to changes in society orders and values, being confronted with war as well as loosing certainty for the future as we are facing climate change and with it bigger global political shifts. How can we deal with those challenges as a community, finding peace in stepping into the unknown together and supporting each other in the face of change and letting go of the old, instead of splitting and disconnect from each other? Within my project I seek to create an interactive performance piece, dealing with this question and the individual and communal stories linked to it.

BIO: 
The artist-duo Suzan Boogaerdt and Bianca van der Schoot have been working together ever since they graduated from the Mime Department of the Amsterdam University of the Arts in 1999. Despite their work being deeply embedded in the anarchistic tradition of the Dutch Mime, they have now built a practice that combines several art disciplines.*
Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot’s work has often been described as physical performance and video installation in one—denoting a synergy between the performing arts and the visual arts. Their work lends itself to the grey space, a zone between the black box and the white cube, stretching both theatrical- and museal rules and conventions. The artist-duo creates liminal spaces in which the homo digitalis can train its bodily perception so as to engage with new (virtual) worlds coming into existence. Through a gender-conscious lens they explore how various realities, be it virtual- or dreamworlds, interface with the human user. Their work questions who or what governs the apparatus of the (human) body, how that affects the nature of consciousness, and, consequently, the worlding of multiple realities. They explore corporeality in all its manifestations and play with the idea of a body as an object, a thing amongst things. At this juncture, the presence of the human performer is not necessarily at the core of a piece. Their work often includes masked figures, cyborgs, dolls, avatars, and semi-mechanized characters. It is a form of alienation that makes wonder about ‘What makes us human?’ and reconnect with the creative power of Life itself.

RESIDENCY: 
Based on the ancient story of Inanna, artist duo Boogaerdt/VanderSchoot (NL), together with dream expert Mala Kline (SL), developed the sound- and video installation ‘Into the Great Below’. As the old world is dying and a new one struggles to be born, we make a visionary journey through the hidden dream realms of the subconscious to visit the sanctuary of Inanna, the Great Mother of all. Here we can call on the new world to appear for us.  Inspired by the ancient Sumerian cycle of hymns to Inanna, this visionary journey transport us by a slow, almost hypnotic repetition, into another realm. As if we are falling out of all the frameworks into a deeper, more eternal soul-place, a place the mind does not wish to forget. A place in which we suddenly remember source again

BIO: 
DRAGANA AFIREVIĆ is a cultural worker in the field of contemporary performing arts. Born in Belgrade in 1976, where she studied Art History at the Faculty of Philosophy, Belgrade, and following that finished specialist studies in the program BODY UNLIMITED at the Academy of Arts in Novi Sad, Serbia. She is co-founder of the Balkan Dance Network and Nomad Dance Academy, a regional tool for communication, education and artistic exchange. She is a member of the Managing Board of Slovene Association of Contemporary Dance. She received the Award of Ksenija Hribar for her work in production in 2019.
BENO NOVAK graduated from the Salzburg Experimental Dance Academy (SEAD) in 2016 and upgraded his knowledge at the Tisch Dance Department (New York University) and The Place (London). He currently works as a freelancer across Europe, especially in England, Belgium, Portugal in Slovenia, where he mainly creates his own work through his organizations KUD Qulenium Ljubljana.

RESIDENCY: 
*NATURE* is the project that considers the possibilities of the dance practice to be the environment for our common thinking processes, rather than representation of stories, characters and drama borrowed from the theatre. We intend to observe if and how we can enter dance in the same way we enter the nature, when nature does not want anything from us.

BIO: 
acrobat.

RESIDENCY: 
Saphire trainee.

BIO: 
A Dutch-Mexican artist, activist, researcher, curator, system dynamics constellator and collective dreamer moving mostly between Belgium, Mexico and the Netherlands.
As curator-in-chief of the Studium Generale of the The Royal Academy of the Arts, Erika was responsible for the concept and development of expanded educational programs, such as The Parasite, the acclaimed four cycles of Wxtch Craft, and more recently, Earth Craft. The Word for World is Soil and Kindred Soils. Dream Craft is the last installment of this trilogy that aims to rewrite eurocentric colonial histories, epistemologies and ontologies and recuperate suppressed knowledges such as witchcraft, ancestral and indigenous forms of earth care and collective dream practices within different cosmovisions.
Erika regularly collaborates with artist, filmmaker, sexological bodyworker and activist melanie bonajo, who represented The Netherlands in the Venice Biennale 2022 with the work When the Body Says Yes.
She has also been one of the curators of the three 'Conjurings" that softly opened the Center of Art Research and Alliances (CARA) with an extended multidisciplinary program revolving around the question: How to dream not only about ourselves? In summer '23 She has researched for Maniesta Biennale 15 postindustrial (eco)feminist anarchist communitarian collectivities and webs of care in Catalunya.
She is currently fellow researcher and dramaturgue of Palestinian-Jordanian artist Samah Hijawi, with whom she will research cosmic kinship between people, planet and plants under the title "The Moon in My Mouth". Under the name "Dream Craft" she is inquiring into collective dreaming as a mode of communicating with a kindred, more-than-human world and composting planetary crisis.

RESIDENCY: 
Writing a new piece on DREAMCRAFT - one of the forms of cosmopolitical diplomacy that try to bridge continents, knowledge systems, and ways of being.
'Dream Craft is a tentacular inquiry into living and reclaimed dream practices as transformative knowledge-making in these times of collective soul loss and wetiko. Initiated by Erika Sprey, it explores how a thriving ecology of dream practices across different ancestral and contemporary lineages, can catalyze a shift in consciousness in the face of polycrisis.'
Participating also in the winterschool, clearing the channels and mirror ever more rigorously to receive what should be a new life cycle, beyond 'the art world'.

BIO: 
A freelance dramaturge, artist and curator. She completed her Bachelor of German Studies/Pedagogy in Bochum and a Master in Cultural Poetics at the Wilhelms-Universität in Münster. Since 2020 she published a series of radio features about personal topics such as her divorce, the dementia of her father or her non-motherhood - to change the public discourse around them.

RESIDENCY: 
#1 Developing an artistic practice around the theme of MOTHERHOOD/NON-MOTHERHOOD, finding own voice woven into many patriarchal structures. Working on a text titled "The Catechism for Divorced Feminists." As a dramaturg and mostly a conversation partner in all artistic processes, it is at the same time an important step for me to find my own practice of writing and being with myself. For this I would love to join you and use the place ELIAS. 
#2 The residency at ELIAS 2069 enhanced artist's dream energy and sparkled up inspiration, offered ground to work deeply and productively on project Radio Feature About Siblings. 
Connecting with the forest and its inhabitants and uniting power of the voice with co-resident Sati Veyrunes added an important value.

Rivers speak. Always have. Very loudly and incessantly. With the current and also gladly against it. Only we have forgotten to listen to them and to pick all the traces, stories and wisdom from the banks. It is so simple. And it is more important than ever. Let's make a start: listen carefully!

BIO: 
Italian duo Raffaella Menchetti & Francesca Marcelli were selected performers, taking part in EDREP 2024, founded by Culture Moves Europe.

RESIDENCY: 
Follow me is a container of dreams and a performance, a fragmented journey through various realities, waking life, dreams the intermediate zone (twilight) and the digital world. The succession of scenes is inspired by the journeys we make in dreams, the free association of realities and images that compose a journey outside rationality. In the journey between dream and reality, the body becomes a geography trapped between reality and fiction.

BIO: 
After graduating from the London Contemporary Dance School, Francesco became a full-time dancer for Scottish Dance Theatre, where he worked with internationally renowned choreographers, he also collaborates with the company as Project Rehearsal Director. As a freelancer, he takes part in projects such as 'ANIMA', Netflix production. He is currently part of the casts of 'Planet [wanderer]' and 'Vessel' and 'Inlet', his collaboration with Fleur Darkin continues, co-authoring 'Ithaca', presented as a work-in-progress in Milan, London, St Andrews, and Glasgow.In 2024, Francesco becomes an associated artist of Perypezye Urbane and presents his unpublished work 'Hide and Reveal' in the context of the 'Venere in Teatro' festival.

RESIDENCY: 
After a 10 year long career as a performer around Europe and UK, I have embarked on a new path as author. After presenting Hide and Reveal in September 2024, this project would be my second solo work. The residency at ELIAS would be the initial creative period, exploring a live performative state that would develop towards a loss of self and transendence into an unconscious flow of movement. I wouldn't need much technical support, as the research would focus, at this stage, on the bare bones of the physicality itself. The title of this contemporary dance piece will be Selfless/The Sad Passions.

BIO: 
GREGOR LUŠTEK (1973) is an internationally renowned dancer, choreographer and teacher, as well as an actor and assistant director. He regularly collaborates with the most important creators and institutions in the field of performing arts both in Slovenia and abroad. He received many awards for his original work, M.Sc. award of the Prešeren Fund. Since 2016, he has been working as an author and mentor with the Exodos Institute, where he is involved in many international projects (Share, One Space, etc.).
KRISTINA PELDOVA (1994) is a dancer, performer, choreographer and teacher, active in the fields of contemporary performing arts in the Czech Republic and Slovenia. She is a member of many international dance collectives and a co-founder of the Nest platform.
KRISTIJAN KRAJNČAN (1986) percussionist, cellist, composer and filmmaker, one of the most prominent and prolific European artists of his generation. In addition to his solo project DrummingCellist, he has worked on more than 50 albums and performed in more than 25 countries in Europe, USA, Asia, Indonesia, Middle East and Africa and created music for several film, theater, interdisciplinary and dance projects.
EDUARDO RAON is a Portuguese harpist, composer and sound designer living in Ljubljana, who intertwines various musical genres in his work: ethnic, noise, pop, retro, rock, ambient, electronic music, etc.

RESIDENCY: 
Performance project Lace: 1st try: The Bow
The performance Lace is being developed at the crossroads of the memories and biographies of the dancers and their current consciousness. The present exists independently of the past, and it is only when we liberate ourselves from the confines of our memories that we can reestablish a connection with reality. At this level, the project challenges everything that socially constructs our identities, questioning all the elements that make us appear as part of a nation, a state, or a political system. It also questions everything that legitimizes modern global inequality, aggression, and violence, revealing them as constructs that lose their validity within the realm of art, where language loses its semantic significance. What endures as real is the living moment, a moment in which genuine relationships are formed through body language, movement, intuition, and our unconscious. What truly defines us is our response to reality and our sensitivity to others, exemplified by openness and compassion toward the common and the community.

RESIDENCY: 
Dream incubation research: through the practice of intentional dreaming, lucid dreaming, and express images and feelings from the dream. These are expressed in movement, quasi choreographies, sounds, stories, songs and sculpture of natural Materials.

BIO: 
Signpainter and muralist with a dream of creating expressive art with a message outside of my professional projects. Longing for space to dream, invision and be inspired. I come from a festival background and love playing with elements of graphic design combined with fine art.

RESIDENCY: 
Sign painting alchemist in residency helped making a new entrance of ELIAS into a shrine. The time was devoted to painting practice: upskilling and diving into a process of inspiration.

BIO: 
Born 1993 in Tübingen started in early age with his training in Caporira Parkour and rock-climbing. He studied contemporary circus at “Die Etage - Schule für darstellende und bildende Künste”, continued his studies, with the focus on Danceacrobatics, at “Fontys Hogeschool voor de Kunst” in Holland, a bachelor program for circus and performance arts. Triggered by the curiosity towards another art form and to re-shift his practice, he enrolled in “SEAD Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance”. From where he graduated in 2018 with a major in Choreography and Dance.
Since graduating, he is working amongst others with various choreographers, with a  high focus on the development of his own and collective productions. He is co-funder of “PACT Performing Arts Collective Tübingen” a society founded to improve the working conditions of freelancing artist and the cultural improvement of Tübingen and its surroundings. Furthermore, he is active in the field of environmental protection and trained as arborist / tree surgeon.

RESIDENCY: 
A performative walk in and with a forest traces, leads the audience into a story which not only questions the connection between people and the land but actively places the audience within. It invites to stroll along interactive, installatory and performative stations through a landscape of wonder. Tracing the landscape, the performance intertwines with the forest. Using tree-climbing techniques, dance and circus, the forest and the trees become embodied parts of the choreography. In a narrative full of connectivity, subtle fragility, humour and care the flora, fauna and the climate all equally creators, stage, scenography and the play itself. Researching, playing, developing and showcasing a project.

BIO: 
A dancer, choreographer, teacher and de-armouring practitioner holds a BA in Dance (Hons) from London Contemporary Dance School (2009) and has worked as a freelance dancer and choreographer in the UK, Europe, Asia, and Australia. Her work explores the intersection of dance, spirituality, and healing. She is currently in the final year of her MDance in Choreography at the Jerusalem Academy of Music and Dance.

RESIDENCY: 
The residency time and space enabled author to further develop a solo performance as part of her masters in choreography. Alongside this practical project she was also writing a dissertation on the intersection of dance and Kabbalah, particularly in the movement practice THE KEY developed by Yaara Dolev.

My inspiration was creation itself, from immaterial to material, from non-physical to physical, the almost tangible realm of the almost manifested. What does it mean to come into the body? The process of formation, also as found in Kabbalah. question I carry in my life and also seeps into the creative process is around my relationship with Israel. I have been using texts and images from night time dreams and daytime visions that I intuitively sense might carry pieces of answers.

BIO: 
Dancer/performer since 2011, dance researcher since 2017, dramaturge/writer.

RESIDENCY: 
Writing project on womanhood.

BIO: 
Visionary craniosacral therapist.
8HEARTS - label for healing and arts and nature and bodywork. 

RESIDENCY: 
Building a wooden special swing and work on swing-project. Being in nature as much as possible and recharge.

RESIDENCY: 
Final act is a monodrama, which from the perspective of death as the last final act, questions all the fine threads of life that precede it. It deals with an intimate narrative about the act of dying and opens up questions that arise in terms of society and the collective fear of death. The play unfolds memory maps, places of postponement and waiting for the final act. It contrasts life and death, reality and imagination, a theatrical performance and a funeral ceremony, serene silence and a concert celebrating life. What happens at the moment of departure? What is life from the perspective of death? How do people imagine death? How would you like to die? Why do people build high fences and small tables around which they gather during their lifetime?

BIO: 
LANA HOSNI (1989) is a rewarded dance artist who lives in Zagreb. After the completion of the National she received her artistic dance education at the contemporary dance school "Ana Maletić" in Zagreb is at the Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance (SEAD), where she graduated in 2013. As a performer, she collaborates with numerous artists.
LUKA ŠVAJDA (1995) It started with dancing practice in the dance studio "Ilijana Lončar". He later moved to Zagreb to continue his dance education. He studied at the Salzburg Academy of Dance (SEAD). He is currently studying at to the Institute of Philosophy in Leuven (Belgium) and began his psychoanalytic formation in 2024. Participates as an author and performer in various projects.
STEFA GOVAART work at the intersection of dance, performance and text. They have a master's degree in studies performance at NYU, and previously studied at P.A.R.T.S. As dancers/performers they worked with choreographers and visual artists across Europe.

RESIDENCY:
Their artistic practice is fueled by the tension which arises from the contradictory
and/or conciliatory relationship between language and the body. The source of our practice consists of long hours spend reading, writing, and moving together with words and without them. All this work is guided by the desire to undo the idea of language as “organ of separation” -- that which divides, splits and cuts what is mixed together – in order to transform it into immediate act of living body. What we are looking for is the “language of mixing”. Our role model, in this regard is French artist Pierre Guyotat, whose entire work could be seen as waging an open and solitary battle against the myths of ideality and separateness of language. In what he calls matèrie ecrite (written matter) words become an organ of mixing.

BIO: 
Born 1992 in Korneuburg, Austria. Working mostly in performance and music, she studied theatre and film studies in Vienna and a Masters in performing arts practice and visual culture in Madrid. Since 2016, she creates scenic works solo and in collaborations as a performer and choreographer that have been shown in Vienna, Linz, Madrid and Bilbao. Since 2020 she also creates music and has since played concerts in different contexts. Her artistic interest focuses on the exploration of imaginative worlds as potential for personal and collective transformation.

RESIDENCY: 
Writing and composing music from an intuitive approach, as well as creating a sound installation based on a song for an upcoming project. 

BIO: 
Dance, Movement, Martial arts and Meditation.
Trained at Goldsmiths College, University of London, in Dance Movement Psychotherapy; practice is continuously developing through research in trauma informed therapy and further training.
Co-Artistic Director of thisPlace, a trauma-informed dance theatre company based in Wales.

RESIDENCY: 
Performance Project on Welsh folkloric tradition - Y Fari Lwyd.

BIO: 
Matilde is a social designer and researcher. Her work explores reality perception, social constructs, and human interaction. Under the lens of care and mental health, she looks at the fields of psychology incorporating larp (live action role play) and fictional storytelling as a narrative and experiential tool for co-creation. Inspired by realities inbetween realities, she is now exploring dreams as ambiguous spaces for "wyrding the self" (Jonaya Kemper).

RESIDENCY: 
a site-specific experiment. Central to our exploration will be the investigation of monsters and hybrid creatures, drawing inspiration from the surrounding territory and cultural context as well as from the methodologies and knowledge on dreams offered by the space and its inhabitants. Can the figure of the monster serve as a system to glimpse the disrupted and exhausted environment we inhabit, challenging conventional boundaries and inviting exploration into alternative narratives through embracing complexity and hybridity? 

BIO: 
Meryem Bayram lives and works in Antwerp/Belgium. She’s a visual artist, scenographer and curator. 
Bayram was member of the theater collective OnderHetvel from 2006 – 2018.
She worked as an artistic advisor for Platform 0090 since 2016. From 2020 onwards she is artistic leader. Bayram also is an associated artist of Platform 0090 since 2013. 
In the work of Meryem Bayram the unfolding relation between human behavior and a constructed spatial environment is the central driving force. With wood, cardboard and elastics, she creates installations that trace and reshape the outlines of physical space and in a same gesture, are challenging living bodies to inhabit and transform that space.
By proposing specific encounters between body and material, she shapes and organizes tensions between the visible and invisible, the composed and improvised, proliferating connection points while constantly reinventing new obstacles.

RESIDENCY: 
A few years ago Meryem Bayram became intrigued by an object she found on the beach in Tekirova/Turkey. No one could tell her what it was. She kept looking and recently came across a similar object on an etching from the Ottoman era where a ritual object – the Nahil – had the same shape in a procession. The industrial materials of the found object make the resemblance impossible. She realized that objects do not have a self-evident content, and that for her, coming from a diverse cultural background, “translatability of objects” is a basic issue. What meanings are given to the object, is there such a thing as a universal, utilitarian basic form and meaning? Bayram shares her fascination with how meanings can shift, are filled in differently and sometimes also create new forms.

BIO: 
Neža Jamnikar (SLO / 1991) is a freelance movement artist creating at the intersection of live performance and film.
She holds a BA in Dance, Choreography from Dance Academy Ljubljana (Slovenia), and a MA in Contemporary Dance Performance from IWAMD, University of Limerick (Ireland).
Since 2009 she has (co)created, performed in, and collaborated on several full-length dance projects, dance films and short works with artists and companies in Slovenia, around Europe, HK and New Zealand, and was an artist in residence around the world, perrforming and showing her own work.
In 2021 she created her first short experimental movement film ‘Love, instantly!’ that was screened at international dance and film festivals, with several honorable mentions. 
While living in Aotearoa she facilitated an ongoing ‘Movement Exchange Sessions’ at the Old Folks Association Hall (Tāmaki Makaurau) that provided space for sharing movement practices and creative ideas within the dance community; taught somatic- and improvisation-based dance classes at diverse organisations. 
Neža is deeply invested in creating an embodied archive of knowledge from different (eco)somatic practices and combining that with improvisation to build her movement praxis. Improvisation and instant composition are in the focus of her performance. Her work is research-based and highly collaborative, currently exploring ideas that are derived from socio-political spheres and psychological states.

RESIDENCY: 
Dance trilogy in which we explore Slovenian identity through dance and film. In this creative process we are working toward unravelling certain Slovenian traditions and folklore, re-question their meaning, purpose, and value they hold in my thinking body and greater personal artistic meaning-making and identity;  the ideas and research will result in a short dance, experimental film.

BIO: 
A freelance artist (graduated in psychology and contemporary dance&choreography), based in Slovenia, interested in vocal-movement artistic expression and its effect on human well-being. As a dancer she participated in dance and theater performances and performed in projects with musicians. She featured in the film The Curse of Valburga directed by Tomaž Gorkič and is a member of the cabaret group called Kokblok Kabaret (before Katzen Kabaret) and etno choir Ljelje. As an independent artist, she has produced and performed four original works, with an emphasis on the interplay of vocal and
movement expression: Laliá (2019), Inner Voice (2020), Ritual: Iz glasine (2021) and Valovanje (2023).
She facilitates workshops called Intuitive singing, where she leads participants through the process of collaborative vocal and movement improvisation and instant composition, with the aim of raising awareness of our life patterns, beliefs, conditioning, behaviors, relationships.

RESIDENCY: 
The project is about tuning into our nature environment through our bodies and voices in order to move towards a more thriving and symbiotic human/non-human relationship. In this context we will be exploring the phenomena of natural self-organizing systems, such as the ant colony system or the so-called "murmurations”, which can be observed in flocks of certain birds or fish. The phenomenon of natural self-organizing systems of animals raises the question for scientists whether all living things on Earth could be a single organism animated by a single consciousness that pervades the universe.

RESIDENCY: 
Zolfo Rosso is an experimental historical poem about a fragment of the Mediterranean past. In 12th-century Sicily, geographer Muhammad al-Idrisi is composing a chart of the 'known world', commissioned by Norman King Roger II. The map is famously known as ‘Kitab nuzhat al-mushtāq fī ikhtirāq al-āfāq’ (The Pleasure of the One Who Longs to Cross the Horizons), or Latinised 'Tabula Rogeriana' (Book or Roger). Rooted in a syncretic and multicultural Mediterranean tradition, the making of the map blossoms in a dream, and the knowledge of the world gets transmitted through sensorial magic.

BIO: 
Nienke Scholts (Utrecht, NL) practices dramaturgy in manyfold collaborations with (inter)national performance artists; at Veem House for Performance (2013-2019); as a fellow of THIRD/DASresearch, Amsterdam University of the Arts (2018-2022); as ARIAS’ programme coordinator (since 2019) and through her research practice. Currently, her ongoing research project Poetics of Pausing (working title) focuses on dramaturgies of work within ongoing crises of exhaustion and searches to move from individual to collective pausing practices that (re)generate life energy, while exploring her particular interest in darkness as a potential mode of thinking and doing (work) differently. The audio piece This Walk is A Pause, developed in collaboration with sound designer Femke Dekker in 2022, is her most recent work. In 2018 she curated the publication series Words for the Future, and in 2019 she was a Saari Residency (Finland) grant receiver and resident. In the fall of 2020 she got burned out, an experience she is growing from and moving with. Currently, she is developing Pausing Partners (working title) a performative toolset for bringing pausing practices into individual and collaborative ways of working. Nienke is often invited as a guest tutor, assessor, or lecturer within art schools and universities. She loves to draw and to walk.

RESIDENCY: 
INTERDEPENDENT FATIGUE Sata Taas a collective of three female indigenous artists from Sahka (Yakutia) told me in an encounter, that they see the earth and their own bodies as part of the same whole. We are the earth. That means that if the earth is sick, we are also sick. If the earth is exhausted, we are also exhausted. This made me realise on an embodied level that burn-out, and other physical and mental illnesses, that I and increasing number of people suffer from, aren’t isolated individual problems or failures, but the diseases of a system that separates itself from the earth, from nature, from its own body and from the knowing that life only exists in relation. Modernity is extractive and exhaustive in essence and does not believe in such interdependent way of being, How do we deal with this growing fatigue of our and other living bodies? How can we become aware of and tap into different sources of energy in ways that speak to and nourish life (instead of depleting and destructing life energy)? How do we find the pause button? For I do believe that there is one. And that within the pause an awareness can grow of how we want to live. I think of the pause as both a space and a practice from where we can find ways back to being in interdependent relation. In my research, I look at these questions within the context of work, and I am specifically interested in the movement from individual to collective ways of working that incorporate pausing as practice.

PAUSING PARTNERS With Pausing Partners, I aim to create an interactive dramaturgical tool in the form of a performative card set, audio piece and workshop that facilitates conversations, creates awareness, and stimulates action regarding the handling of (different forms of) energy in individual and collective work situations - and the relationship between them. Pausing Partners is part of my larger practice-based artistic research project into dramaturgies of work within ongoing crises of exhaustion, that searches to move from individual to collective pausing practices that (re)generate life energy. (= movement).

BIO: 
A senior researcher at RISE-Research Institutes of Sweden, where she leads the research area of Sustainable Future Work. In her work, she uses various artistic practices (from contemporary dance and other somatic practices, poetry, photography and visual arts) to enable processes of exploring present and future, enabling transformation in the context of work. Currently, she is researching topics, such new ways of working in the hybrid and distributed work model, including practices for self-leadership, distributed leadership and development of organisational models based on emergence and self-organisation. She is also exploring future scenarios and speculative fictions around the future of work, questioning what work will mean in the future, how smart technologies (like AI) will affect humans and their work, transforming their jobs, competences, and the context of work. She has a PhD degree in Innovation and design, exploring how contemporary dance and choreography can be used as extended practice to enable innovation in organisations. Over a span of 20 years, she has worked as a consultant, researcher, and entrepreneur, in a variety of public sector institutions and private companies in Sweden and in the Balkan region to support innovation and transformation in society.

RESIDENCY: 
#1 DREAMING TOGETHER is a co-creation residency between 7 women from different countries (Slovenia, Italy, Sweden and Norway). These women are researchers and practitioners who each in their own ways work with prototyping future societies, engaging with different complex societal challenges like climate change, equality and inclusion, future of work, and more. One of the shared point of encounter is that all of them are using artistic and design practices to support transformation processes in society. The purpose of this residency was to create a safe and trusting space to support participating women with an explorative, caring, emergent and co-created process and space, where they can share their creative practices and support each other on their own personal journeys of transformation. Practices, such as contemporary dance, poetry writing, voice work and improvisation, imagery work, personal manifestations through collage making, portrait drawing, nature and body exploration, breath work and Korean kaligrafy were explored. 

#2 This team residency would be part of two research projects that are exploring in what ways can artistic practices support people working in the Swedish public sector to go through personal, team and organizational transformation, moving from traditional hierarchical management models and ways of working towards future work that is based on emergence, self-organised teams, cross-border collaboration within the larger ecosystem/community, distributed power and leadership, strengthened autonomy of workers through self-leaderhip and higher engagement of citizens in co-creation and decision-making processes. We will develop new methods based on embodied artistic practices, poetry, and photography that will engages and support participants in the research projects in their transformation journeys on the individual, team, organisational and ecosystem levels. 

BIO: 
A visual artist and also a cultural artist.

RESIDENCY: 
Drawing and painting.

BIO: 
Oneka von Schrader (1987) works as a choreographer, performer, singer and advisor, mostly in Austria, the Netherlands and Belgium. She studied choreography at SNDO in Amsterdam and Shiatsu in Vienna.
She has worked with artists like Tino Sehgal, Jija Sohn, Asa Horvitz, Kroot Juurak, and Oleg Soulimenko. Her work has been featured at festivals such as Bâtard Festival Brussels, Les Urbaines Lausanne, and 8:tension/ImPulsTanz. She received the danceweb scholarship in 2013 and was part of the PARASOL dance group at Tanzquartier Wien in 2023. After spending 11 years abroad, she moved back to Vienna in 2024.
She’s currently touring with Gosia Wdowik’s piece “She was a friend of someone else,” doing sound experiments with her sister Daphne von Schrader and Lens Kühleitner, and researches the intersections of art, illness, anatomy and feminism at her studio in Semmelweisklinik, with support from the BMKOES research grant for performance.

RESIDENCY: 
Researching on bladder infections, and from there, wom*n's health, gender medicine, and the lower belly. Reading and experiment with writing. Practice moving own lower belly, developing movement sequences during the stay.
Heat – performance and writing project on dreams.

RESIDENCY: 
Özlem Altın came to ELIAS to undo what was in the way of her sources, so she could deepen her practice of assembling her multi-layered collages and site-specific installations.
Working with a vast archive of self-made and found images, including texts, replicas and prints from books and magazines or the Internet, artistic material from museum collections, and her own photographs and paintings, through working with dreaming tecniques she would also gain access to collective imagery and dreamscapes, that would furter expand her work.

In the narratives weaved through referencing visual strategies of appropriation and recombination of mass media images and texts, the (dreaming) body is made central, presented, as the artist has said, “as means for the diffusion of knowledge, experience, communication, and exchange.” 

BIO: 
Born in the U.S., Rob was a nationally competitive gymnast for 13 years. In 1991, he enrolled in the Bachelor of Fine Arts program for theatre and contemporary dance at the University of New Mexico. 
He joined Ultima Vez in 2002 and since 2009, has collaborated as a director, choreographer, performer, dramaturgical assistant, and sound composer with several local and international artists and organizations throughout Europe and abroad. 
His own creative and pedagogic work combines 30 years of research and experience in performance, dance, theatre, sound composition, martial arts, therapeutic massage, meditation, and most recently Saphire® Imagery at the School of Images based in New York.
&
LOLA SAINT GILLES was born in France, and is an artist specializing in voice and contemporary performance with extensive training in dance, classical and contemporary singing, and theatre making. She has participated in various stage performances and holds a Bachelor's degree in Sociology.

RESIDENCY: 
Developing the seeds for a performance and vocal/rhythmic score based on the Eleusinian Mysteries. These ancient rites centered around the worship of Demeter and Persephone, intricately weaving together themes of nature, motherhood, and the cycles of life and death.
Celebrating the rhythm of the seasons, these mysteries highlighted the transformative power of nature's processes, symbolizing the eternal movement between growth and decay, hope and despair, mirroring the agricultural cycle that sustains human life. Through sacred rituals, initiates experienced profound insights into existence, understanding that death is not an endpoint but a necessary part of the life continuum, echoing the deep connections between humanity and the natural world.

BIO: 
Samara Hersch is an artist and theatre director. Her practice investigates the encounter between performance and community engagement and her research explores intimacy as a public act, imagining modalities that can be inhabited by non-professional performers and the public together. She completed her Master at DAS Theatre in Amsterdam in 2019. Her recent body of work focuses on critical trans-generational dialogue with an enquiry into conversation as performance. These works include: Body of Knowledge, a work that invites teenagers to remotely host conversations with adults regarding questions they have about the body and body politic; Sex and Death an intimate encounter led by performers in their Seventies and Eighties; Dybbuk(s)– a feminist conversation with the dead; For the Time Being a remote inter-generational encounter created during the pandemic. Samara received the Caroline Neuber Scholarship in 2023 and is currently part of the EU Network; ACT; Art Climate Transition.

RESIDENCY: 
Life practice to find a way home.

BIO: 
Sati Veyrunes (1995*) is a Marseille based dancer. She graduated from SEAD (Salzburg Experimental Academy of Dance) in 2019. In 2021, Oona Doherty gave her her solo Hope Hunt and the ascension into Lazarus, which Sati has since toured internationally. They continue to work together on several film and choreographic projects. Her encounter with Benjamin Kahn gave rise to the solo “Bless the sound that saved a witch like”, selected for Aerowaves in 2024. She also works with Nach and Nina Santes.
Sati is a prizewinner in the Nouveau Grand Tour 2023, a research program designed by the French Institute in Italy.

RESIDENCY: 
Came to ELIAS to deepen, specify, open up improvisation practice in contemporary dance in relation to tides in the body. These lines offered a starting point for the research: "There are tides in the body" writes Virginia Woolf. "We ebb and flow across time and space - body, to body, to body" These "tides", as History, are about physical sensations, affects, imagery, feelings, thoughts.
During two-week residency at ELIAS a dance practice was developed with focus and calm. It was a time of growth, inspiration and rest, all within the serene embrace of beautiful forests and wildlife.

RESIDENCY: 
Songwriter and musician came to Elias to explore her Gottschee's "homeland" and retrace the life and steps of her ancestry during her stay.

"Residency at ELIAS gave me time to reflect, write, edit field recordings and compose music as an attempt to try to understand the past in order to dream my new future."

BIO: 
Coming from Poland she lives in Amsterdam. Studies Masters in Consciousness, Spirituality and Transpersonal Psychology and I feel called to work with dreams through art and workshops.

RESIDENCY: 
Dreamwork for own practice and to share with others through sessions, dream circles and workshops.

BIO: 
A dance artist and author based in Berlin since 2020, and is one of the founding members of nein9 kollektiv Berlin.
As a dancer, she has worked with various choreographers and has been an active member in TRAK Dance Ensemble (AU) since 2018.
As a choreographer she works interdisciplinary and site-specific, with musicians and visual artists.
As an author, she has been published by Tanzfabrik Berlin, Apricot Productions Berlin, magazine Care Where Zine, and in the book Are you here? Zine. She has been a member of Stream. Live Art Writing group since 2020.
She is a recipient of DISTANZEN-SOLO and TAIKE – Arts Promotion Center Finland funds in 2020/2021/2022 for her research in Empathy in Movement, Empathy in Movement: Worldview, and Empathy in Writing.

RESIDENCY: 
Un-naming Gaze and perceptional inclusion: How can we remain open to, and how do we move by the abundantly multiple sensorial information that we are constantly engulfed and made by?
I focus on the gaze and the role of eyes in movement. In the research residency I want to look at water. For me, water is inclusive, indifferent, and yielding as it has no form of its own, it has no self: no inside nor outside. Yet, it always has a shape as it takes the form of the other. Water both contains and is contained. Its absence of having its own shape is a state of emptiness. But because of this emptiness, water can carry, move, and animate everything without exclusion. This is the base of my motivation to carry on with my research. I do not want to be water, but rather like water be a container and be contained. I desire to find ways and practice skills that with my body I can reflect like water does, on the mundane beauty of otherness that comes forth from a positioning of multiple perspectives.

BIO: 
A dancer & performer from the french Alps. After graduating from SEAD and performing for Iceland Dance Company and Carte Blanche among others, she has developed interest for the works of zen activist & buddhist Thich Nhat Hanh, and dream practices by the School of Images. She now conducts her own contemporary dance improvisation sessions, 'Dancing From the Heart' and 'Dance & the Art of Listening' in Brussels, while supporting pre-professional makers in their creations. She enjoys spending time around children, nature and creative projects.

RESIDENCY: 
Returning to nature and calm, and work on DreamBirth studies. Eventually continue growing the seeds of ideas around a dance solo project (on decolonisation of the body & initiation to a new world).
Alongside helping with Wild Youth Camp.

BIO: 
Interactive designer, movement practice.

RESIDENCY: 
Writing project on intimacy, parenting and cosmology.

BIO: 
A freelance art worker based in Europe with a background in architecture and filmmaking. I am working on documentary films in different corners of the world - now mainly with a small Hungarian collective - with the intention of showing them in cinemas, community houses, and other, inappropriate locations. As a space/idea/filmmaker I am collaborating with the Moha performance group in diverse projects which are engaging with different groups of people, neighborhoods on the peripheries, and public spaces mainly in the Netherlands, and in Germany. I am interested in boundaries, how to connect to people, and reduce harm.

RESIDENCY: 
Film project Incubus of Budapest: based in the peripheries of Budapest. We are meeting with a series of essential workers who are running the city. As we are getting to know them closer we discover their injuries caused by their works and lifestyles, and parallel to that also their joys and fears that bind them to the city, and that is growing into a shadow being, to the Incubus of Budapest.