2024 has again been an exciting year for BIRCA. It was the year, where we took a breather after the large Metropolis Landscapes year as well as reduced the number of residencies in order to be able to keep up. We once again received support from the Danish Arts Foundation for this year’s residencies under the title Laboratory for the new ecological performance art. We were granted 300,000 DKK. We carried out the two known formats BIRCA Women and BIRCA Kids. With support from the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture, we completed part 2 of BIRCA Baltic Sea, where we had artists from Sweden, Finland, Estonia, and Lithuania on a residency to investigate ecological performance art. And then we speeded up due to our new grant from Creative Europe for the Island Connect project, which has received support for three years with a total of seven island partners. Island Connect including the new partners, also had new formats to be tested: We ran the well known Artistic Residency format, the developing Islander Focus (where we were also on Saaremaa) and the new Co-creation format.
In total, we have had 10 weeks of supported residencies. In addition to this, we have made room for a number of RØSK artists in the latter part of the season – Andrea Deres & Carolina Bäckman, My Gönholdt, Karolina Pietrzykowska, Linh Le, zden brungot svíteková and finally Sustainable Cultural Life NOW.
In total, 50 performance artists (22 of whom were Danish) plus 6 children visited us in 2024. We have had four external showings at BIRCA with approx. 70 people in the audience plus an audience of 47 people for the Culture Week. We are moving towards bringing together some of the Danish artists working in our field, partly by inviting them in as consultants on individual residencies and partly by giving them room for development. We are also interested in seeing how we can make room for older Danish performance artists in the future.
This year, we have focused even more on ecological performance art; the ecological perspective has been included in all open calls. By delving deeper into this field, we have addressed many exciting new methods and topics. But 2024 will especially stand out as the year we engaged with the sea. Many of this year’s projects have dealt with the state of the sea, and during the year we have established an exciting collaboration with the organization “In the Water” in Tejn and marine biologist Miller.
Read full report with details and photos here