H A U T

PERSPECTIVES ON: Sustainability and Equity in the Arts

– Navigating Times of Crises

Format: PERSPECTIVES ON
Genre: Knowledge-sharing

Date: 26th and 27th May

Day 1
Time: 9:30-15:00
Place: Foyer, Skuespilhuset

Day 2
Time: 9:30-15:30
Place: Scenen, Thoravej 29

Photo from PERSPECTIVES ON: Complex complicitites, which took place in 2022
Photographer Morten Arnfred

Photographer: Elias Rasch, Aura Media

We are living through times of uncertainty, crisis, and transformation. As the world faces intersecting social, political, and environmental challenges, the arts sector must come together to address these wicked problems. How do we build more equitable, sustainable, and resilient structures for the future? What is the role of artists, institutions, and cultural workers in fostering systemic change?

With this two-day seminar we invite arts professionals from across the Nordic region to engage in urgent and necessary conversations about equity, sustainability, diversity and fair practices in the arts. Through keynotes, panels, and workshops, we will explore strategies for cross-sector solidarity, redistribution of resources, and how to create real, lasting change.

Now is the time to act. Join us in reimagining the future of the arts and building sustainable, intersectional, and anti-racist practices that will shape the Nordic cultural landscape for years to come.

The seminar is organized by HAUT in collaboration with the Helsinki-based UrbanApa, and presented as part of CPH Stage 2025. 

The collaboration between HAUT and UrbanApa is part of BRIDGES – project, a Nordic initiative  that aims to strengthen long-term and sustainable Nordic collaborations and foster critical discourse around anti-racist and intersectionally feminist practices in the performing arts. The current BRIDGES partners are UrbanApa (FI), MDT (SWE), HAUT (DEN), Reykjavik Dance Festival (IS) and Dansens Hus Oslo (NOR). BRIDGES is supported by Nordic Culture Point and Nordic Culture Fund.  

DAY 1 –Foundations for Change

09:30–10:00 Registration and coffee/tea/snacks

10:00–10:15 Welcome and opening remarks
by Sonya Lindfors (UrbanApa) and Naja Lee Jensen (HAUT)

10:15–10:50 Navigating times of polycrises – next steps in equity and social sustainability in the arts
Keynote by Kelly Parish (Arts Council England)

In a world shaped by overlapping crises—ecological, economic, political—arts organisations and artists face urgent questions about their role in building more just and sustainable futures. This keynote explores what equity and sustainability mean in practice, with a focus on social sustainability: whose voices are heard, whose labour is valued, and how resources are shared. Why must every cultural organisation engage with these issues—not as add-ons, but as essential conditions for relevance and responsibility in our time?

10:50–11:00 Mini break

11:00–12:30 How to create cross-sector solidarity and fairer working conditions
Panel Discussion and Q&A 

This panel explores how solidarity within the arts sector—across institutions of different sizes, independent groups, and individual artists—can contribute to fairer and more sustainable working conditions. What responsibilities do funders, institutions, and artists hold, and how can they act in alignment? And what structural changes are needed to move from statements of intent to real, lasting change?

Panelists: Marie-Lydie Nokouda (Black to Normal), Firat Jacob Tas (Mungo Park), Mary Tesfay (C:NTACT), Annemette Friis (Nordic Culture Fund) 
Facilitator: Tess Skadegård Thorsen

12:30–13:30 Lunch break

13:30–14:30 How to change things – practical tools for equity and sustainability in the arts 
Roundtable Workshop

This roundtable workshop focuses on sharing and developing concrete tools for redistributing power and resources within the arts. Together, we explore practical approaches to equity and sustainability—what can we change, and how do we start?
Facilitator: Sonya Lindfors

14:30–15:00 Wrap-up for the day

DAY 2 – Expanding Perspectives

09:30–10:00 Registration and coffee/tea/snacks

10:00–10:15 Welcome and opening remarks
by Sonya Lindfors (UrbanApa) and Naja Lee Jensen (HAUT)

10:15–11:00 From words to action: rethinking equity in cultural institutions
Keynote and interactive reflection by Lea Hedeskov (In futurum)

How might we move from statements of intent to structural change when it comes to equity, diversity and inclusion in the arts? In this keynote, Lea Hedeskov draws from their experience advising and working strategically with a wide range of cultural institutions to share insights into how equity work can be embedded in organisational practices. How to root change? The session offers reflections on current developments and gaps—particularly within the performing arts—and opens space for concrete approaches, questions and perspectives that can help bridge the distance between institutional structures and the independent field.

11:00–11:15 Mini break

11:15–12:00 Three perspectives on futures

In this short session, three artists and cultural workers share personal reflections on their hopes, visions, and questions about the futures of the arts. What kinds of practices, structures, or values do they imagine in a more just and sustainable future? Each perspective offers a unique lens into what “possible” could mean—rooted in lived experience, artistic thinking, and collective longing.

Speakers: Cath Borch Jensen, Celine Szabó and Louisa Yaa Mensah Aisin

12:00–13:00 Lunch

13:00 –13:50 A short conversation between the future dreamers

Following the session Three Perspectives on Futures, the participating artists and cultural workers come together for a brief conversation—an open moment to reflect on each other’s visions and to explore the act of imagining futures in times of polycrisis. How do their ideas resonate or diverge? What new questions emerge when different perspectives meet?

This informal exchange invites us into a shared space of curiosity, connection, and radical imagination—where dreaming of possible futures is not just a luxury, but a necessity. Together, the speakers consider how we might imagine more just, diverse, and equitable futures in the arts. What kinds of structures, practices, or values are needed to truly support multiplicity and inclusion? How can we build cultural futures that hold space for many ways of being, knowing, and creating?

Speakers: Cath Borch Jensen, Celine Szabó and Louisa Yaa Mensah Aisin.
Facilitator: Alex Blum

13:50 – 14:00 Mini break

14:00 –15:00 Possible and impossible futures – reimagining the horizons of the Danish art field
Roundtable conversation 

This roundtable invites participants to dream of the possible and impossible futures of the Danish art field. What kinds of artistic ecosystems could exist beyond current funding models, hierarchies, and institutional logics? What futures feel unreachable—and what holds them back? Through collective reflection and dreaming, we will explore how equity might be radically redefined, how contradiction and imagination can be tools for transformation, and how art can act as a testing ground for alternative ways of being, organising, and creating.

Facilitator: Sonya Lindfors

15:00–15:30 Closing remarks and thank you

Read our safer space guidelines HERE

About UrbanAPA

Founded in 2009, UrbanApa is an anti-racist and feminist art community that acts as a platform for art events, new ways of doing, and discourses that centre on art. The community has been managed by the UTT ry association since 2011. UrbanApa organizes events, performances, arts incubators, clubs, music festivals, site specific works and workshops. The community’s goal is to employ artists and to create a platform for new artistic events and meetings.

UrbanApa’s values include communality, intersectional feminism, decolonialism, inclusivity, equality, softness, play and joy. The community strives to look into the future, to re-think the kind of art that could and should be done.

Photographer Tuukka Ervasti

The programme for this PERSPECTIVES ON has been curated in collaboration with Sonya Lindfors, Artistic and Managing director of UrbanAPA.

Sonya Lindfors is an awardwinning Cameroonian/Finnish choreographer and artistic director who also works in facilitation, community organizing, and education. Lindfors’ recent works - One Drop (2023), common moves (2023), We Should All Be Dreaming, camouflage (2021), and Soft Variations Online (2020) - focus on questions of Blackness and Black body politics, representation and power structures, speculative futurities, and decolonial dreaming practices.

On a broader scale, Lindfors divides her time between her own artistic work, educational initiatives, and her role as the artistic director of UrbanApa. In all her positions, she is dedicated to creating and facilitating anti-racist and feminist platforms, where a festival, performance, publication, or workshop can serve as a site for empowerment and radical collective dreaming.

About PERSPECTIVES ON

PERSPECTIVES ON creates space for thoughts and knowledge that drive the performing arts forward. It is a knowledge-sharing format that focuses on the insights we need right now for the arts, artists, and the field to evolve. By inviting new ideas and discourses into the Danish performing arts landscape, it serves as inspiration, provocation, and a catalyst for artistic development. The format functions as a platform for knowledge exchange, conversation, and learning.