MERI SALMELA / DANCE ARTIST
Meri Salmela is a freelance dance artist and a dance teacher based in Finland. She is openly awkward, straightforward, and loves hyping others. Meri loathes stiff social situations, and small talk in any shape or form, which leaves her in a constant crisis. She thrives on collaboration and is keen on working together with artists across different fields.
Meri creates work that is multidimensional and ambiguous. Her practice is movement driven and focuses on exploring the rhythms and musicality of it. Powerful high impact movement and expressive minimalism are the two extremities that attract her and searching for ways to combine them keeps her in a constant state of flux, searching for a stage of delicate strength.
In her work, Meri is drawn to explore themes that arise from everyday life as well as strong emotions such as shame, anxiety, and rage. She enjoys twisting, morphing, and distorting them into relatable and recognizable yet abstract performances. Her practice is influenced by other art forms such as spoken word, music, and theatre, from which she draws tools especially for her expression. She strives for making authentic, honest, and generous work.
INES MASANTI / MULTIDISCIPLINARY
ARTIST & DESIGNER
Ines Masanti is a multidisciplinary artist and a designer. Combining practices and materials inspires her. Working in diverse ways and trying out new is something that keeps Ines curious and happy. She avoids restraining herself into one profession.
Finding excites Ines. In her creative process she enjoy playing, experimenting and surprises. She is using play as a way of working.
Ines is now focused on fabric art, collage art, photography art, video art and multidisciplinary collaborations.
Ines is interested in themes around emotions and emotional experiences. She has a special interest towards plants, their lives and environments, their symbolism and names. Through her Master of Arts thesis she found ways to process her experiences as an artist with the help of artistic process done in the environments of plants.
Ines is interested in well-being caused by art for the people experiencing the art and for artists themselves.
EMILIA AHOPELTO / DANCE ARTIST
Emilia Ahopelto is a dance artist based in Helsinki. She focuses on developing her own artistic practice by creating solo works alongside working in several other creative projects. She joined Omiaruhje collective at the end of 2022.
Emilia is intrigued by movement and its mechanics as tools to actualize the themes of her works that often contemplate psychological phenomena. Inspired by human behavior, its consistencies and absurdities, in relation to themes such as time, void and imaginary dimensions, her works often present dark atmospheres. She aims at creating abstract worlds with a distinct approach to movement language reflecting on each work’s theme. This keeps her striving to find new ways to interpret and move as well as compose coherent worlds.
For Emilia, a key ambition in life is to pursue a variety of skill sets, always taking a step towards something new. Keeping the creative endeavors playful and slightly out of the familiar has led her to investigate how her creativity changes and evolves when working with different media such as sound design, visual arts and film.
MILLA KURRONEN / CIRCUS ARTIST
Milla Kurronen is a circus artist who has a strong interest in multidisciplinary research. She is in love with colour, on a process of building a rapper identity and on a journey to do less.
Milla has an urge to create vibrant and colourful worlds full of absurd scenarios that mirror the aspects of human connection and she is relentlessly pursuing bizarre and dynamic movement vocabulary through her work. Currently she is working on how to bring text and her competence in music as a stronger part of her practise through rap music and stage poetry.
Milla studied at SaSak Lahti circus school and then continued her studies in Stockholm’s University of Arts where she graduated as a bachelor of circus.
