Residency Overview
For over 22 years, the SÍM Residency has hosted more than 3,000 international artists seeking creative inspiration amidst Iceland’s stunning natural landscape. This residency builds upon our tradition, with a special focus on fostering cross-disciplinary collaboration between artists, scientists, and environmental activists. During this period, artists will engage with Iceland’s unique geography and ecology, combining field research, creative exploration, and scientific inquiry.
Participants will be based at Korpúlfsstaðir, a dynamic hub that houses both the residency apartment and 37 local artists’ studios, SÍM Hlöðuloftið exhibition space and the meeting hall, fostering an environment of collaboration and creative exchange. The residency will culminate in a series of panel discussion, curated exhibition at the end of the residency showcasing research outcomes, artistic experimentation, and project proposals.
Grants & Support
This program is funded by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture, which covers travel costs, residency fees, accommodation, and expedition costs. The stipend is 2.000 EUR for the whole period, and the material costs are 300,00 EUR. Artists are encouraged to seek additional funding from local arts councils or institutions in their home countries if necessary.
Program Focus: Art, Science & Environmental Activism
The February-March 2025 program is dedicated to investigating the rapid changes in Iceland’s glacial systems, with a particular focus on the Vatnajökull glacier, one of the largest in Europe. The residency program will serve as a platform for a deeper understanding of the climate crisis, its impact on fragile glacial ecosystems, and the broader implications for the planet through a combination of collective learning and studying, open-ended research and experimentation, and on-site field expeditions.
The residency program invites artists from diverse backgrounds and practices to work and think together about what new perspectives, knowledge, sensibilities, and imaginaries can become a source of change toward a more sustainable and livable future. Thinking about the present moment and future of the glacial ecosystem, the residency program seeks new insights into its fragility, complexity, and connectedness, which can inspire critical thinking and action that can lead to transformative shifts at various scales, meaningfully addressing planetary urgencies and today´s overlapping crises.
Key areas of exploration include:
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Ecology & Local Biodiversity: Investigating the impact of climate change on the flora and fauna of Iceland’s fragile ecosystems.
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Sustainability & Green Energy: Gaining insights into renewable energy use practices in Iceland and discussing its far-reaching ecological, social, and material impacts and implications, alongside the role of art in discussing pathways towards a more sustainable and just future.
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Geology & Glacial Formations: Collaborating with local scientists to study the shifting landscapes of Iceland’s glaciers and volcanic formations.
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Human-Nature Relationship: Rethinking the human-nature relationships through more-than-human interconnectedness and interdependence.
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Eco-socially engaged art: Connecting with local communities and empowering social and environmental activism to inspire change.
Residency Activities
The residency offers a rich and immersive experience designed to foster creativity, knowledge exchange, and interdisciplinary research. Participants will engage in a variety of activities, including:
Expedition to Vatnajökull:
A highlight of the residency, artists will embark on an expedition to Vatnajökull, where they will witness firsthand the effects of global warming on one of Europe’s largest glaciers. This journey will provide invaluable insight into glacial formations and ongoing environmental
Workshops & Lectures:
A series of workshops and lectures led by local scientists, environmentalists, and artists will focus on topics such as climate science, renewable energy transitions, and artistic responses to environmental challenges. These sessions aim to inspire new perspectives and approaches in the artists' work.
Collaborative Research Projects:
Participants will have the opportunity to collaborate on interdisciplinary research projects, combining artistic and scientific methodologies. These projects can be developed throughout the residency, with potential for future exhibitions and presentations.
Studio Practice:
Artists will have dedicated time for their studio practice within the shared residency space. This collaborative environment fosters dialogue and creative exchange among artists and local practitioners, encouraging the sharing of ideas, techniques, and experiences.
Panel discussion and & Exhibition
The central focus of the residency outcome will be highlighted with a curated exhibition at SÍM Hlöðuloftið the exhibition space and a panel discussion where the local community, curators, and peers can engage with the artists and their research.
Excursions & Cultural Engagement:
Artists will be encouraged to explore Iceland's cultural and natural heritage through excursions to key ecological sites, museums, and historical landmarks. The residency will provide a visitor card, granting free access to all museums and discounts at local art stores.
Artists-in-residence
Taavi Suisalu he/him – Estonia
Taavi Suisalu conjures miniature utopias that act on technical, metaphorical, and poetical levels. His work manifests in interactive installations, performative situations, and curatorial endeavors that blend traditional and contemporary sensibilities and activate peripheral spaces for imaginative encounters. Suisalu’s work balances between artistic and scientific, studio and fieldwork, and his practice is informed by phenomena of contemporary society and how developments in technologies shape our environments and influence behavior, perception, and thinking of social beings.
During the SÍM Residency, Suisalu aims to develop a sound piece and establish connections with glaciologists. His interest in glacial soundscapes began during an Arctic residency, where he recorded maritime animals and shifting sea ice but found the glaciers themselves eerily silent. At Vatnajökull, he plans to capture their elusive sounds, transforming them into a work that oscillates between documentary and theatrical sensibilities.
This project will contribute to Arctic Embassies, exhibitions opening in Tallinn and Tartu in 2025. Through SÍM Residency, he seeks collaborations with scientists to enrich the project and explore artistic responses to ecological urgencies.
Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė - she/her - Lithuania
Aistė Ambrazevičiūtė is a digital artist and architect based in Kaunas, Lithuania. Operating between sensibilities of environments, surfaces, and textures, her work amplifies complex and diverse but often invisible worlds. Merging digital and natural realities, scales, and knowledge, her practice stimulates the arts of noticing and visualizing unimagined curiosities.
In 2024, she defended a practice-based PhD project, Lichen Grammar, at the Vilnius Academy of Arts. Aistė´s perception, shaped by a lichen lens, is highly texture and material-focused. By changing scale, shifting perspective, amplifying details, and reordering elements through digital tools and an experimental process, she creates new symbiotic outcomes.
In upcoming endeavors, she is eager to explore lichen metaphors alongside other organisms and ecosystems that share similar aesthetics and values. Since she sees the world as lichen, she perceives Vatnajökull glacier as lichen as well.
Calvin Guillot he/him - Colombia/Finland
Calvin Guillot explores new ways of engaging with the world through visual storytelling, interactive installations, immersive experiences, and large-scale works. His practice, situated at the intersection of art, science, and technology, challenges the audience’s ego by evoking the sublime, infinitism, and identity. Rather than adhering to a singular style, his work is guided by a process of discovery, experimentation, and play. Working across traditional painting, street art, generative AI, parametric sculpture, and artificial life, he draws inspiration from natural processes, emergent behaviors, human connection, and social conflict.
During the residency Calvin proposes an interactive digital simulation that explores the potential dangers of ancient microorganisms released by melting glaciers. He will collaborate with local scientists to analyze glacier water samples for frozen microorganisms or organic matter, using microscopic imagery as inspiration for a particle-based artificial life simulation. A high-fidelity 3D scan of the glacier will shape the virtual environment, where artificial microbes respond dynamically to audience interaction. As participants approach, the frozen landscape melts, triggering microbial activity; their challenge is to “refreeze” the environment to contain the spread. This work mirrors the urgency of the climate crisis, emphasizing human responsibility in preserving fragile ecosystems.
Urtė Groblytė she/her - Lithuania
Urtė Groblytė is a maker and performer working within dance, theatre, and choreography. Her eclectic approach spans multiple mediums, resulting in works that explore collage, collisions, and layered attachments of materials, emotions, thoughts, and movement. Fiction, poetry, and storytelling - alongside a deep engagement with physicality - shape her artistic process, fostering a continuous dialogue between text and movement. Her recent works, DUST and A LOVELY CONSTRUCTION SITE, investigate intimacy in its broadest sense, embracing ambiguity, conflicting desires, and attachments to that which may be harmful.
For the two-month residency program, Urtė proposes COLD ENOUGH FOR SNOW, a project exploring the desire for cold as a manifestation of fear, loss, and grief within the context of environmental change. Using thermal imaging, field recordings, movement practice involving screaming, and text, she seeks to investigate the horrors of environmental shifts through the lens of sensation and intimacy. Inspired by horror aesthetics, rather than its mainstream narratives, the work amplifies environmental anxieties through bodily and atmospheric explorations. The research may evolve into a multimedia performance or short film, shaped by the Icelandic landscape. The residency offers a unique opportunity for focus, collaboration, and direct engagement with the environment, deeply informing the creative process.
Heidi Holmström she/her - Finland
Heidi Holmström’s artistic practice navigates urgent observations and unfolding phenomena, forming site-specific installations, interventions, and sound works. Without a rigid hierarchy of materials, her projects adapt to the form they require, questioning social geography and the attributes of place. Her work has ranged from transmitting bird alarm calls through conference speakers on electricity pole structures to interventions in former U.S. Embassy surveillance rooms. By integrating artificial infrastructures into natural environments, she explores tensions between built systems and organic processes.
For the SÍM Residency, Heidi proposes The Hot & Cold Conference, a project that investigates the sonic relationship between glacial and thermal forces. Beneath Iceland’s glaciers, underground thermal waters keep the ice in constant motion, accelerating deformation due to climate change. Capturing this ongoing transformation through hydrophones and frequency recorders, the project aims to render audible the friction between these forces. The research will culminate in a two-channel audio installation, juxtaposing glacial and thermal sounds in a dialogue of movement and urgency. The residency’s unique landscape, with both glaciers and geothermal activity, offers an ideal setting for this work. Through collective sound walks and interdisciplinary exchange, the project seeks to amplify these hidden ecological voices and foster new understandings.
Marit Mihklepp she/her - Estonia
Marit Mihklepp’s practice explores relationships with more-than-human bodies, including stones, meteorites, plants, and soil. Through walking, listening, and collaborating with these entities, she investigates ways of storytelling beyond the human timescale. Her work materializes in video essays, written pieces, photo series, small-scale installations, and instructed situations. Currently, her research centers on geologic imagination and encounters with stones, tracing their imprints on landscapes and narratives.
For the SÍM Residency, Mihklepp proposes a continuation of her long-term research into meteorites and glacial formations, focusing on the ways landscapes record both presence and absence. Her work is informed by her participation in Liquid Stays, a collective project examining human-water relationships. At the Rhone glacier, she began drawing connections between melting ice and meteorite traces - one disappearing in the present, the other lingering as an imprint from the past. At Vatnajökull, she plans to create a photographic series documenting subtle transformations in the landscape over time. Walking the same path for 14 consecutive days, she will layer images to reveal the glacier’s fluidity, blurring distinctions between solid and liquid. This work aims to spark conversations around ecological grief and environmental wonder, offering a geologic perspective on time and change.
Linda Boļšakova she/her - Latvia
Linda is a research-based artist exploring thermodynamic reincarnation - a concept blending physics & spirituality to examine deep energy bonds. She works with relationality as the essential structure of being and imagine futures of more sustainable coexistence. Acknowledging the vibrancy and equality of material ambodiments, be they human or more-than-human, the developed work is often sculptural, but it is a sculpture that is attuned to the changing nature of things; sculpture that is, in this sense, always a performance.
Through the residency, Linda will work on a speculative performance at Vatnajökull, imagining the emergence of a post-glacier species - an interspecies cyborg, part human and part ancient plant - inhabiting land revealed by the glacier’s retreat. The project will integrate live performance, sound collaboration, motion capture, and video documentation, culminating in an installation or interactive exhibition. This future-oriented work explores whether an ancient plant, long preserved within the glacier, could sprout new life, carrying deep-time memories into the present. Through this, Linda seeks to uncover what the glacier and its landscapes might teach us about resilience, co-creation, and survival. The SÍM Residency offers a crucial space for interdisciplinary collaboration, allowing her to further this long-term research and engage with others in reimagining sustainable futures.
Curator
Sunna Dagsdóttir she/her - Iceland
Sunna holds an MA in Curatorial Practice from the Iceland University of the Arts and has curated numerous solo and group exhibitions. Her practice focuses on fostering interdisciplinary experimentation and cultural transformation through contemporary art, with a strong emphasis on environmental activism. Her work focuses on integrating innovative ways of thinking and uniting with the needs of the natural environment.
,,I am excited to work with international artists, all approaching the subject from different angles but uniting in the urgency and sensitivity that accompany this global state of uncertainty.’’
Scientists
Dr. Þorvarður Árnason
Þóranna Dögg Björnsdóttir
''Þorvarður Árnason studied filmmaking in Montréal, Canada, and has been engaged in filmmaking and photography for over forty years alongside other activities. He has been the director of the University of Iceland's Research Centre in Hornafjörður since 2006 and also holds the position of associate research professor in Environmental Humanities. Climate change has been a growing part of Þorvarður's work in recent years, especially the collection and dissemination of information about the downwasting of glaciers in Hornafjörður. For these purposes, Þorvarður has mainly used visual methods based on his knowledge of landscape photography and filmmaking. Þorvarður was awarded the Hornafjörður Cultural Award in 2018 for his photographs of Hornafjörður.''
Snævarr Guðmundsson
Glaciologist, Geographer and a GIS expert. Research field: models of vanished glaciers, geomorphology and draining system of glaciers. Geological mapping. Designed special maps of crevassed areas on Iceland's glaciers, intended to improve safety for travelers. Astrophotographer and Advanced Amateur Astronomer since 1988. Research field: variable stars, eclipsing binaries, exoplanets and galactic clusters. Photometry and light pollution. Mountainguide and a climber.
Interdisciplinary lectures
Melting Boundaries: Research and Artivism
Lectures by Konstantine Vlasis, Angela Rawlings, Daria Testo & Vena Naskrecka
As an environmental composer and audio researcher, Konstantine studies the relationships between sound, music, listening, and environmental change. His current project documents the sounds of Iceland’s glaciers, and explores how music can be a means for climate communication and environmental storytelling.
“Our abilities to encounter and produce sound are means through which we experience the wonder of our world. Music, too, as a legacy of human and more-than-human creativity, undoubtedly fills our world with wonder. It is through the act of listening; then, that we can bridge our perception of sound with our creative capacity for music and ultimately compose the environmental futures, we hope to foster for posterity.” --Konstantine Vlasis, in describing his focus as a 2024-2025 Fulbright-NSF Arctic Researcher, Fulbright-National Geographic Award recipient and National Geographic Explorer.
“Melting Boundaries: Research and Artivism” is an interdisciplinary lecture event that brings together scientific research and artistic practices to address the urgent issues of glacier preservation in Iceland. These lectures will explore how scientific research on glaciers' ecosystems intersects with the role of art in activism. The event seeks to foster creative solutions and ignite collective action for the preservations of Iceland's glaciers and beyond. Join us as we explore the dynamic intersection of science and art in cultivating global awareness and driving tangible change toward a sustainable future.
We are pleased to welcome an esteemed group of speakers, each bringing their unique expertise in both scientific research and artistic practices, to share their insights on the urgent issue of glacier preservation.
Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta (Snæfellsjökull for president), Iceland’s first rights of nature movement, nominated the glacier Snæfellsjökull for the country’s 2024 presidential race. The collective’s campaign introduced sociolegal innovations through novel language usage, ecosocial visual storytelling, and critical adaptation of conventional political structures.
Konstantine Vlasis is an environmental composer, Fulbright-NSF Arctic Researcher, and National Geographic Explorer. His work explores how sound and listening mediate our experiences of changing landscapes, and the ways that music can be a form of climate communication and environmental storytelling. Konstantine is currently studying the sounds of Iceland’s glaciers to develop the concept of “glacial auscultation.”
The event will be held in English.
Location: SÍM Residency Korpúlfsstaðir
Thorsvegur 1, 112 Reykjavik
in the Meeting Hall (up the ramp)
Date and time: 22. February 14:00-16:00
Free event
The event is financed by the Nordic-Baltic Mobility Programme for Culture and is part of the February–March artist-in-residence program exploring the significant impact of the climate crisis on Iceland’s glacial ecosystem.
Sunna Dagsdóttir, Residency Curator
Martynas Petreikis, Residency Director
Sustainability and Artistic Responsibility
In alignment with the United Nations' designation of 2025 as the International Year of Glaciers' Preservation, our program highlights the importance of glaciers and the need for responsible environmental practices.
Following the guidelines set by the United Nations and the Nordic Council of Ministers, SÍM Residency is committed to integrating sustainability into its operations by creating opportunities for international and local art practitioners and researchers to discuss and reflect on environmental and ecological crises. Through conscious efforts such as reducing waste, utilizing eco-friendly materials, and promoting environmentally responsible practices, we strive to minimize our ecological footprint while fostering a deeper connection between art and the natural world.
Snæfellsjökul fyrir forseta (Snæfellsjökull for president) , Iceland’s first rights of nature movement, nominated the glacier Snæfellsjökull for the country’s 2024 presidential race. The collective’s campaign introduced sociolegal innovations through novel language usage, ecosocial visual storytelling, and critical adaptation of conventional political structures.
Partners
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