Animalariums’ Constellations Perform Europe 2025
The project utilises the innovative Choreo-Constellating practice to talk about climate change through an embodied lens, and in connection to its locality. Animalarium joins forces with Elle Sofe Company, Ställbergs mine and WUK Performing Arts in underrepresented areas and communities that situate themselves between city and rural periphery. Including the arctic surrounding of Guovdageaidnu/ Sápmi and its indigenous community, Ställberg, an abandoned iron ore mine and Future Farm, on the far outskirts of the city of Vienna.
A concern for, and active engagement with, the topic of land rights, ecology and communal practices connect all our partners. What voices are not heard? How can they be given a voice? Meaning people, other animals, other living organisms and the land itself. The goal is to create performances that focus on these relevant local issues.
Having more time in each place to create deeper connections, sustainable networks and relationship building are crucial elements for us. Fairness and working with green production methods are the foundation which this is built upon.
Animalariums’ Constellations is an artistic concept to enact some of our times’ burning issues – Extinction, Countdowns and Future Dreaming – in an embodied and collective way. The idea that embodiment might be a fundamental feature of thinking and relating to our world is central for us here. Beyond the implementation of the performances, the practice itself is a resource-oriented, embodied, communal practice that builds our collective capacity to deal with the challenges of our generation.
The project will create a series of performances, Constellation #1-4, where each site will shape the energy and focus of each performance through their unique social and ecological contexts.
Currently it is Liv Schellander and Alexandra Wingate who work with the Animalariums´ Constellations project. The idea was developed together with Lena Kimming (the third Animalarium member), but since fall of 2024 Kimming is on a break from her artist’s work.
The project has support from Perform Europe, Swedish Arts Grants Committee, Davvi – Center for Performing Arts and Dáiddadállu.
Perform Europe Partners
Elle Sofe Company, Guovdageaidnu / Norwegian Sápmi
Elle Sofe Company expands on the groundbreaking work of indigenous choreographer, director and film-maker Elle Sofe Sara. A full-time artist since 2007, Sara founded the company in 2022 to make the work—her own and her collaborating partners’—accessible to the wider world. We strive to be innovative, kindhearted and unifying. The company draws strongly from Sámi culture, which is indigenous to the Northern parts of nations now known as Sweden, Norway, Finland, and Russia’s Murmansk Oblast. A culture born of a fierce climate of ice, the animal world, and quiet intimacy. Elle Sofe Company reaches beyond borders to encounter and co-create with a diversity of people, cultures and lifestyles.
Ställbergs mine, Ljusnarsberg / Sweden
Ställbergs mine aims to be a place where the big questions become personal – and the personal becomes part of the big questions. A place for learning, doubt, and the living. Collective and individual. Existential and political. A place where outer space and world markets lean in together with the soil and worms and roots, and the echoes of human voices in an old machine room. Ställbers mine is based in an abandoned iron ore mine in Ställberg, in the municipality of Ljusnarsberg, Örebro county.
WUK performing arts in cooperation with Zukunftshof, Vienna / Austria
WUK performing arts is part of a socio-political atelier and cultural center and co-production partner for an independent dance and performance scene in Vienna. We focus on interdisciplinary formats at the intersection of dance, performance, concert, party and activism. We question the sustainability of cultural institutions on the level of content creation, production methods, touring or institutional structures. Our goal is to establish an open space for exchange, experiment and new encounters.