Elasticity

Application deadline: 4 May 2025 23:59 CET
Residency dates: 3 – 30 November 2025

What does it mean for a body, be it human or (thinking non-anthropocentrically) more-than-human, to be elastic—physically, emotionally, socially? How do bodies, minds, and systems stretch, adapt, or rebound in response to pressure and change?

Elasticity is PRAKSIS’s 31st residency, inviting artists, cultural practitioners, and researchers to explore elasticity across disciplines—from its material expressions to its metaphorical and theoretical potentials. This programme asks how the concept of elasticity might help us rethink ideas of aging, illness, motherhood, belonging, or even global connectedness. Are these separate states—or part of an ever-shifting, elastic continuum?

Led by visual artist Marte Aas and art historian/curator Stephanie von Spreter, Elasticity will explore how both individual and collective bodies respond to—and resist—external forces. Through lectures, excursions, discussions, and collaborative sessions, residents will collectively investigate the meeting points of science, aesthetics, and artistic practice.

About Stephanie von Spreter
Stephanie von Spreter, PhD, is an art historian and curator. Her research interests include contemporary art and photography, Nordic/circumpolar art and feminist and decolonial art history. She is a member of the research group Worlding Northern Art (WONA) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway in Tromsø, where she completed her PhD entitled Destructed Environments, Gendered Spaces, and Colonial Legacies: Contemporary Artistic Practices Sensing the Arctic and the Circumpolar North (2024).

About Marte Aas
Marte Aas is a visual artist who mainly works with film and photography. Her practice explores what a body is, and how ideas about the body are malleable, relative constructs shaped by ideology, history, and biopolitics. Her films include It Cannot be Contained, an examination of the history of blood, and A Letter to Zoe, which considers the epistemology of the container. Both films probe the ways that conceptual frameworks shape our world, and the politics that emerge from the process.

Held in collaboration with Goethe Institut Norway and the Finnish-Norwegian Cultural Institute (FINNO)