NPT Audience Ambassadors 2025

The New Performance Turku (NPT) Biennale is an event that presents contemporary artistic currents of performance art in Finland and internationally. After working as co-curator of the 2023 Biennale, NPT invited me in 2025 to create a pilot to develop a more organic link between the performance event and local communities. Inspired in my experience with audience engagement platforms in contemporary art spaces in Colombia, the 2025 Audience Ambassador program I proposed and coordinated set to reimagine how local audiences engage with performance art. The challenge was to approach people who do not belong to the art field and help them engage and actively participate in the week-long performance event and connect with this very experimental form of art. The proposal was to create the figure of the audience ambassador (a figure moving between art and society) and to design a training and production scheme to put it to practice.

The pilot had two distinct components essential to fulfill its mission: an intensive training program for facilitators in the spring (40 hours), and a local implementation of the engagement approach with the New Performance Turku Biennale in September 2025. The program ran for four months in 2025. It involved an open call to assemble a team of ambassadors, and 3 training modules supporting pedagogical experimentation, and bringing ideas to life during the 2025 performance Biennale week. 16 people, local art enthusiasts with no previous experience teaching or with performance art, were selected in the open call with a simple motivation letter. They committed to receive the 36-hour training in English, submitted audience engagement projects upon completing the training, and received a certification. From these, 8 people were hired for the 2025 NPT Biennale.

Ambassadors developed tools to translate across worldviews and sensitivities: bringing communities into contact with art, and offering unexpected ideas for the community to reflect and create with. They received further tutoring on their proposals, and support on the production side to work with their groups from different local communities within the event.

The pedagogical approach proposed long durational experiences, where audience members spend full days or afternoons attending the performances and developing conversations and varied activities. At the end they wrote stories telling about their process with the groups and reflecting on the engagement approach.

The international New Performance Turku Biennale took place in Turku from 2—7 September 2025, presenting works by 25 artists in different art venues and locations in the city and along the Aura river. The Biennale’s theme, On the Threshold, reflected on transformation, embodiment and survival in a world shaped by ecological grief, social crises, and shifting identities. This edition of NPT was an exercise in understanding the time we live in---a moment of unprecedented transition that is at once disorienting, uncertain, and full of possibility. Audiences were invited to ponder on these themes and explore them creatively as well.