Marika Seidler
Artistic director and producer
Marika Seidler, visual, video and performance artist, is the woman behind Seidler's Sensorium, who as artistic director, producer and stage director creates performance walks in nature in an interdisciplinary field between visual and performing arts, about biological processes and their reflection of society's communities and dynamics.
Over the past ten years, she has worked in an interdisciplinary manner, with threads to sensory performance, in collaboration with co-creative performing actors and especially with dramaturgical consultant writer and actor Betina Birkjær, who has her own company in Denmark, Luna Park Scenekunst, and is affiliated with Teatro de Los Sentidos in Barcelona.
I Sensorium udvikles performance-vandringerne i naturen sammen med medskabende performere. Kunstneriskleder Marika Seidler står for ide og sammen med dramaturgisk konsulent Betina Birkjær udvikles en arbejdsramme udfra samtaler med fagfolk indenfor lokal historie, biologi og naturomgivelser.
Visuelt design og tekstramme skabes af Seidler til de medskabende performere, dansere og sangere. Seidler leder produktions teamet på Fabrikken for Kunst og Design, der skaber kostumer masker til performere og publikum, objekter og implementerbare installationer til performance-vandringernes scenestationer.
Seidlers has a clear desire for children, young people and adults to immerse themselves in nature through art, and in art through nature. Over 10 years, it has resulted in 5 performance walks with accompanying artist-in-residence courses in performative processes, created in extensive multi-year collaborations with Art Institutions, Nature Centers and Municipalities in Denmark.
Aesthetic learning processes, sensoric presence, immersion and communication have always been of interest to Seidler. The Danish Arts Foundation's House Artist Scheme and the Theatre Reimbursement Scheme have given Marika Seidler the opportunity to create a wide range of art projects in collaboration with art institutions and municipalities, expanding ways of working across art, science and the humanities.
The foundation for Seidler's Sensorium working method was laid in a multi-year collaboration with Boserupgaard Nature Center and Roskilde Municipality about art, biology and learning. The first performance walk VOKS SKOV with resident artist course, about trees and fungi connections under the forest floor, was created in 2017 in a single major collaboration between Marika Seidler, puppeteer Sif Jessen Hymøller and scenographer Annika Nilsson. VOKS SKOV has had a good life, it has played almost 100 times in different forests around Denmark.
Seidler expanded VOKS SKOV in 2019 with VOKS SKOV for the little ones, aged 4 - 6, which connects childeren at their level to the living conditions of the trees through characters in the forest.
Openair Deep Forest Art Land invited Seidlers Sensorium to create a performance walk and artist-in-residence concept for their art festival 100 years of the Green Girl Scouts, where 100 Girl Scouts participated. The performance walk Å vil liv was created for the local Døvlingebæk å, about straightening and re-swinging the Danish rivers, as an allegory for the young girls' choice of life path.
Udstillingsstedet Munkeruphus invited Seidlers Sensorium to a 3-year collaboration on performances for exhibition guests and local schools, including artist-in-residence courses in performative processes for their outdoor Art & Nature school in Munkerup Strandpark. The performance walk Fod Flugt was created based on local history about the geological journey of rocks and the escape of Danish Jews across the strait during World War II.
Nikolaj Kunsthal invited Seidler's Sensorium to create a performance for Nikolaj Tower, hall and surroundings in connection with the Artmatter art festival. The local historical starting point from the 19th century was the butcher's quarter of Mavens Kaluns, which was located around the former Nikolaj Church, which was a fire station. Seidler created the Performance city walk Maven about the stomach microbiome and the 19th century.
KunstCentret Silkeborg Bad og Silkeborg Municipality invited Seidlers Sensorium to create a series of site-specific performative studies of soil and water around the Silkeborg Bad Art Center in collaboration with the Silkeborg School of Nature. The art project ran over a whole year in connection with the annual exhibition "Amazing Nature" in 2023. 9 artists from Seidlers Sensorium came to Artist in Residence, realized via the Danish Arts Foundation's Artist in Residence pool of the house art program, the Silkeborg Bad Art Center and the Silkeborg Municipality. In this connection, we created the performance walk DROJ JORD about the earth's inner core. It was later expanded with the performance walk DROJ JORD for the little ones, where 4 - 6 year olds at eye level connect to the earth's inner core through characters in the forest.
Guldborgsund Kommune has collaborated with Seidler's Sensorium for many years on performance walks and artist-in-residence courses in nature. For the past 3 years, Seidler has been working on a public ceramic decoration and sound walk in the local area Friheden between school, residential area, housing development and forest. The works are based on aesthetic learning processes and performance walks in nature.
Marika Seidler has served on the board of KKS Women's Artist Society, been chairwoman of FASTvideo workshop, member of the Artists' Society, member of BKF. The Association of Visual Artists.
Under her own name, Seidler has created video art installations for 20 years in a hybrid field between video art, staged documentary, anthropology, and performance, with stagings of documentary material with performers in Benin, West Africa with colleague Michelle Eistrup and the group GASPAC, Russia with colleague Seimi Nørregaard, as well as in Spain, Japan, India, the USA, Syria, Lebanon, and Denmark.
In addition to creating her own teaching concepts for children and young people, she has worked with teaching for the Statens Museum for Kunst, Otis College of Art and Design master's program. During her studies at the academy, she and a group of fellow students created a 2-year foreign guest teacher program.
Seidler is educated at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen, in video production, performance, installation, painting, sculpture and media, and studied West African film for 1 year at KUA.
Seidler lives in Copenhagen, grew up in Canada, Denmark and India.
She speaks Danish, English, Spanish and to a lesser extent French.