Gifts from the Sentient Forest Cohort (2024-26)
Our distinguished two-year cohort of artists, performers, writers, activists, biologists, and researchers explores the possibilities of creative practice as a means to engage with forest sentience in Northern Finland. In 2024, thirteen cohort members, along with the project coordinators, bring their expertise, skill, and imagination to Äkäslompolo, Lapland, during two residential retreats. The village of Äkäslompolo is close to Pallas-Yllästunturi National Park, the third largest of its kind in Finland and popular for its extensive hiking trail network.
Cohort Member
Dr Annette Arlander
Annette Arlander, DA, is an artist, researcher and a pedagogue, former professor in performance art and theory at University of the Arts Helsinki and at Stockholm University of the Arts. Currently she is visiting researcher at Academy of Fine Arts, University of the Arts Helsinki with the artistic research project 'Pondering with Pines'. Her research interests include artistic research, performance-as-research and the environment. Her artwork moves in the border zone between performance art, media art and environmental art. Her most recent book is Performing and Thinking with Trees (2022).
For more information, see https://annettearlander.com
Cohort Member
Evgenia Emets
Evgenia Emets is an international artist poet, and the Founder of Eternal Forest Global. She works with forest ecology and community creating visual art, films, artist’s books, performances, forest art trails and large-scale ecological artworks in the form of forest sanctuaries. Eternal Forest (launched in 2018), an ongoing multidisciplinary project, marks an integration of ecological thinking into her art. Eternal Forest is creating a network of 1,000 forest sanctuaries to be protected for 1,000 years through art and community. Recent solo shows: Eternal Forest, MUHNAC (2022); Forest Time, Estufa Fria de Lisboa and Monsanto Forest Park (2023); Rewilding Time, Biodiversity Gallery (2024), Portugal. Evgenia’s visual works and artists’ books are in museums (Stella Art Foundation and MOMA, Russia), libraries (National Poetry Library, London, British Library and Gulbenkian Art Library) and private collections in the UK, Europe, Japan and Russia. For more information, see http://www.evgeniaemets.vision/ and https://eternalforest.earth/
Cohort Member
Mara Maslowska
Dagmara ‘Mara’ MasÅ‚owska (b.1992 in PoznaÅ„, Poland) is a dancer, somatic guide and mother. She has been following teachers internationally for the past ten years, learning about the intersection of life and art. She performed with a Norwegian street theater called Stella Polaris, joined the DUENDE School for Ensemble Physical Theatre in Greece, Carte Blanche sensorial theater in Denmark and JINEN Butoh School by sensei Takenouchi Atsushi in Italy. Moving to Finland in 2020 marked a new chapter of slow-paced work with focus on sustainability and community life. After graduating from ISLO’s program for Dance and Somatics (Joensuu) in 2022 she started a project called Luomu Koreo / Organic Choreographies.
Cohort Member
Isabella Clarke
Issy Clarke is an independent researcher, broadcast journalist and conservation volunteer based in the UK. She writes on non-human animal cultures and relationships with the more-than-human, particularly free-living Animals and Plants. She enjoys sitting with Trees (and other non-human beings), and being receptive to their wisdom. Her work embraces the factual and scientific, the theoretical and ethical, and the speculative and imaginal.
Cohort Member
Milja Laine
Milja Laine is a Helsinki based illustrator and visual artist with degrees in contemporary arts and ecology. She has a background in environmental education, and nature connection is at the core of her artistic practices. Since 2012 Laine's illustrations have been published in education materials, magazines and children's books, and her artwork has been exhibited in Helsinki, Koli, Oulu and Madrid. Currently Laine is working on a book about urban plants. For more information about her work, see www.miljalaine.com
Cohort Member
Dr Mykyta Peregrym
Mykyta Peregrym is from Luhansk, Ukraine, but he left his native city in 2001 after his graduation from Luhansk Taras Shevchenko National Pedagogical University. Mykyta spent seventeen years working for M.M. Gryshko National Botanical Garden of the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine and O.V. Fomin Botanical Garden of the Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Ukraine. He defended his PhD thesis "Rare and Endangered Species of the Flora of the Donetsk Upland" in 2006 and acted as a researcher in botany and as an herbarium keeper. In 2018, Mykyta moved to Eger, Hungary, where as a postdoc researcher at Eszterházy Károly University he studied the impact of artificial light at night on biodiversity and ecosystems. At the end of 2020, Mykyta returned to Ukraine and later started working as a Senior Lecturer in Ecology for his alma mater in Starobilsk after its evacuation from Luhansk in 2014 because of the first stage of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. The outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian War in February 2022 found Mykyta in Slovakia where he had a ten-month internship at Matej Bel University in Banska Bystrica. He then received a scholarship at the University of Oulu to continue his research and moved to Finland in December 2022. He presently has a two-year grant from the Academy of Finland to research citizen science in biodiversity conservation. For more information about his research, please visit: https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Mykyta-Peregrym
Cohort Member
Dr Lydia Kokkola Reuhkala
Lydia Kokkola Reuhkala is a scholar who has been working at the University of Oulu, Finland since 2019. Prior to that, she worked at Luleå University of Technology, Sweden. She holds Docentships at the University of Turku and at her alma mater, Åbo Akademi University. As a scholar, Lydia has two main lines of research: Second language acquisition and Children’s literature. The connecting thread that runs throughout her research is an exploration of the power of narrative to promote deep learning. Within the Gifts from a Sentient Forest framework, Lydia intends to both work as a scholar studying how literature taps into the collective human understanding of plant intelligences and to work as novelist creating a novel in which humans engage with vegetal, animal and fungal intelligences.
Cohort Member
Marjo-Riikka Stenius
Marjo-Riikka Stenius is a visual artist and nature enthusiast based in Oulu. Her work has been exhibited in Helsinki, Oulu, Kemi and Haparanda (2024). She works for the Wild Zone NGO nature conservation organization as a field worker in Northern Finland. Most of the work is about creating new meadows; finding and harvesting native seeds from the wild, drying and processing them, sowing and growing seedlings. Wild Zone is a pioneering organization in Finland when it comes to research and action-based urban biodiversity, brownfield management, ecological restoration, participatory conservation, and experimental methods in fostering biodiversity, for example, through environmental art. As an artist she approaches field working and seed collecting as an ongoing art project she documents (working title "Seed Collector's Log"). Her aim is to create art in a way that acknowledges the inherent wisdom of the other, being it a seed, a forest or memory she uses as an inspiration for a painting. She believes that cultivating a sense of childlike wonder is essential for human survival. She has a background in humanities with a Master's degree in literature from University of Oulu. For more information, see www.marjoriikkastenius.com and https://villivyohyke.net/