In Helsinki, Riga, and Amsterdam
Helsinki 00550
Finland
Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult’s autumn programme unfolds through performances, collective walks with melting features, lectures, and discussions on socially engaged art and media culture. The programme invites audiences in Helsinki, Riga, and Amsterdam, as well as online.
Protocols for melting
Joonas Hyvönen & Līga Spunde in collaboration
September 25, 2025 Maunula House & Helsinki Central Park, Helsinki / September 27, 2025 Great Cemetery, Riga. Language both cities: English.
Created by artists Līga Spunde (LV) and Joonas Hyvönen (FI), Protocols for Melting is a site-responsive augmented reality (AR) walk that takes place in two cities, Helsinki and Riga. Guided by a custom-built animated avatar, walkers follow a looping path punctuated by geolocated digital interventions—AR trail signs that come alive in a darkly comedic tragedy of wayfinding under the late-capitalist attention economy.
The focus of Protocols for Melting lies within park areas in the midst of gradual or rapid social and ecological alterations and in the importance of those areas to local communities. The artwork can be experienced as part of guided collective walks during the launch events in both cities, and afterwards independently via the project website which will launch alongside the work, until the end of September 2026.
Produced by M-Cult and the Latvian Centre for Contemporary Art, Protocols for Melting launches in Helsinki on September 25 in collaboration with Maunula House, and continues in Riga on September 27.
Everyday Priorities—Art, Technology, and Accommodations
Performances by Flis Holland and Joy Mariama Smith
November 1, 2025, Metro54, Amsterdam / November 26, 2025, Baltic Circle, Kanneltalo, Helsinki. Language: English & Multi-lingual.
In November we will enjoy evenings of two performative works by artists Flis Holland (FI/UK) and Joy Mariama Smith (NL/US).
Unansible by Flis Holland
The Ansible network [1] offers instantaneous interstellar communication. No delays. No static. Seamless exchanges, said to dissolve the distances between us and foster understanding. Yet the signal, for all its perfection, feels alien.
In this small group performance, we will push the Ansible beyond its intended limits, trying to undo the network’s polished fluency. Alt texts for astronomical images from James Webb Space Telescope are seeds of a dialogue that slows, thickens and splinters, opening up space for more voices.
[1] Ansible (derived from “answerable”) coined by Ursula K. Le Guin, a concept developed in “The Dispossessed: an ambiguous utopia”, 1974.
Credit for original alt texts (adapted in this work): STScI Space Telescope Science Institute.
Untitled [-S-c-e-n-t-s- Sense] by Joy Mariama Smith
Untitled [-S-c-e-n-t-s- Sense] is a performative intervention that uses access intimacy and seemingly supportive technologies to consider the implications of Anosmia (aka “smell blindness”) in relation to colonial histories, diasporic identities and the hierarchy of the senses. In this intervention, assistive technologies in conjunction with audio and video, accompany selected smells in which the viewer is invited to consider, borders, boundaries, access, power, policing, stigmatization as well as collectivity, liberation, intimacy, care, migration, and resistance through the lens of the olfactory.
Unansible and Untitled [-S-c-e-n-t-s- Sense] November 1 in Amsterdam at Metro54 and in Helsinki November 26 in collaboration with Baltic Circle – International Theatre Festival.
These performances are part of the broader Everyday Priorities programme, which is realised in collaboration with M-Cult, Metro54, and the Finnish Benelux Institute.
Minna Tarkka Lectures
Starting from December 2, 2025 Helsinki. Language: English.
December brings the second edition of the Minna Tarkka Lectures. Launched in 2024 to celebrate the legacy of media art pioneer and founder of M-Cult Minna Tarkka, this annual programme gathers voices to reflect on socially engaged art and critical media culture. This year’s edition begins December 2 in Helsinki, in collaboration with Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma and Aalto Media Lab.
The lectures build from the Open Advisory Session held last spring, where participants highlighted current urgencies for media art and culture. Continuing this process, the series opens collective dialogue for the present and the future. Registration will open later in autumn.
About M-Cult
Art & Media Culture Agency M-Cult develops and presents art and media culture, with a focus on the social and political dimensions of media and technology. We connect artists and local communities to global concerns through art commissions, residencies and learning programmes.
