The season 25 at BIRCA has gone, summer is just a memory now as the leaves have all fallen at BIRCA – silence and darkness has moved in and are creating more calm times that Niels and I enjoy together.
I have been working on accounts and reporting and are now happy to send you our annual report for 25. I hope you will open it and look at all those photos that safekeeps the wonderfull moments we had this year. Get it here
I want to thank you all for being a part of this years BIRCA, and I invite you to also linger on all the artistic research that has been created at BIRCA this season and archived right here.
Bellow you can read the recap and also some about plans for next year.
Here is the recap of the season
2025 has again been an exciting year for BIRCA with a very full program of artists almost every week. We have received 2-year funding of DKK 400,000 per year from the Danish Arts Foundation under the title Laboratory and archiving within new ecological performing arts. We hosted BIRCA Kids for the sixth year in a row, this year with 3 weeks dedicated to testing different constellations, and we have now entered a phase where the need for experience-gathering regarding learning and methods has arisen. This year, we chose to replace the past years’ BIRCA Women residencies with a new format, BIRCA eco MATTER, focusing on ecology and materiality with international outreach. We tested yet another new concept with BIRCA Senior, aimed at Danish performing artists aged 50+. We started the second year of our Creative Europe funding for the Island Connect project, which has received 3-year support with a total of 7 European island partners. We carried out the established Artistic Residency format and the developing Islander Focus at BIRCA and sent an artist to the Co-creation format in Mallorca. All residencies had open calls with many applications. BIRCA eco MATTER alone attracted 230.
In total, we have hosted 11 weeks of funded residencies at BIRCA and 2 weeks on a Turkish island. In addition, we have provided space for residencies for DDSKS/Laura Navndrup Black and 10 students from the Master’s programs Dance & Participation and Choreography, the Sea Stories project in the Nordic region, the iCoDaCo project with Cunts Collective as leader, Pipaluk with contact impro, and the Scáthach project with Tina Robinson.
Finally, this year we had a large program during the Bornholm Culture Week with 6 different performances and a premiere of a documentary film about fishing on Bornholm – with a total of 19 artists and 3 children in action and with 204 participants. One of the performances was part of the European project (M)others on tour with support from Perform Europe.
In total, 78 performing artists (of whom 42 are Danish), 18 children, and 10 other guests stayed at BIRCA in 2025. We have had 6 presentations at BIRCA with 46 audience members in the residency program, plus 13 presentations for 204 people during Culture Week. This year, we have also seen a diverse representation of artists, including children and seniors, gender diversity, and we have once again experienced great diversity in working fields and methods. We have increased our focus on curating and developing themed residencies, inspired by and in collaboration with some of the Danish artists closest to us. These artists have been invited in as consultants for individual residencies, and have also been given space for development.
We have continued the ecological perspective and expanded it by incorporating archiving as part of the practice, a perspective that will be included in future Island Connect projects. We remain aware of our CO2 footprint but must balance this with the desire to work internationally.
Plans for next year are evolving
We will continue our Island Connect projects, and calls for these will come out during December – for artists living in areas connected to us and our partners.
We will also do one week of BIRCA Kids but has decided to curate directly 2 Norwegean families for this as we want to expand into nordic countries with the project. We also have some ideas to work towards a publication on methods, tools, ideas to engage kids etc.
We will next year transform BIRCA Women into a residency on rituals in the performing arts. I collaborate with Alaya Riefensthal on this and we have already curated 6 nordic participants to join us for midsommer at BIRCA and work deeper into the energyfields on the island.
And then we will end the season – and present at the Culture week – with a format we call BIRCA Outreach, which is partly a follow up on the residency we made on the Turkish island, but will also include Ukrainian artists and research on the geopolitical situation of the Baltic Sea.
Well and then local photographer Anne Lass at the very end of the season took some photoes of me at BIRCA
Warm greetings
Susanne