Biotoopia’23 Art day invites the audience on a guided journey through a Loopealse wasteland

On May 13th, Biotoopia’s art program invites the audience on a guided journey through a Loopealse wasteland. Drifting through the landscape, the event connects pagan oral tradition to experimental music and contemporary performance art. The headliner is the internationally acclaimed collective Young Boy Dancing Group.

This year’s Biotoopia conference at the Tallinn Botanic Garden will dig into the mystical and edifying world of hidden underground networks. Two days of discussions and talks will come to a conceptual conclusion with the art program on May 13. During the ritually charged walk amid Tallinn’s urban nature, oral tradition and experimental performance practices will meet. Similar to the underground networks formed by mycelium, the performances will entwine human voices and bodies with nature and connect the individual to the whole. A kind of social self-organisation will become possible, in which the binary distinctions between you and me, human and nonhuman, disappear.

The tricksterish performative guides for the event are Inge Ivaste, Hildegard Reimann and Anette Pärn. The event will begin with a group of traditional singers made up of Janika Oras, Leanne Barbo, Minni Oras and Marion Selgall. Then, experimental musician Vaim Sarv will present a ritualistic performance that combines free improvisation, live electronics, and noise music. The event will culminate at sunset with a site-specific performance by the headliner Young Boy Dancing Group, during which the human body will merge with the post-apocalyptic landscape.

Vaim Sarv and Anette Pärn, the curators of the art program remarked that ‘wastelands have always been close to our hearts—they are mysterious places where plants and animals find refuge and underground lifestyles flourish. Biotoopia’s art program is a bridge to places and sensations characterized by wildness and indeterminacy. We invite the audience to discover themselves anew as part of an unnameable and self-organizing ecological sociality.’

The art program is a part of the Biotoopia conference (www.biotoopia.ee), whose aim is to bring together ecology, art, and science. The theme of this year’s conference is Underground Networks.

Members of the Biotoopia conference advisory board are biologist and semiotician Kalevi Kull (University of Tartu), art historian Sirje Helme (Art Museum of Estonia) and cultural historian Marek Tamm (Tallinn University). The roots of the Biotoopia conference date back to 1995, when Sirje Helme, Eha Komissarov and Ando Keskküla curated the exhibition Biotoopia. Biology. Technology. Utopia. The conference is organised by the Estonian Anthropocene Center NPO.

Sponsors: Liivalill, Kuuldeaparaadid, Medivar.

Supporters:  Tallinn – European Green Capital 2023, Tallinn Botanic Garden, Estonian Cultural Endowment, Republic of Estonia Ministry of Culture, Republic of Estonia Ministry of Environment, Civil Society Foundation, Muulin, JANKEN WISESPACE.

Partners: Tallinn University, Tartu University, Event Media, Nagel Consulting, Citizen OS, Postimees, Krisostomus, Hop gallery, Hobusepea gallery, Kopli 93.

Biotoopia is organized by the Estonian Anthropocene Center NPO.