Starptelpa 2025: More Than Human

The theme of the Riga Performance Festival STARPTELPA 2025 is More-Than-Human. The festival will explore the multifaceted layers of interaction between humans and non-humans, focusing on interspecies reciprocity and the dynamic relationships between the natural and material worlds. Although performance art traditionally centers on the human body—shaping its forms, materials, and meanings around anthropocentric frameworks—the upcoming festival challenges this notion. Artists are invited to create works that conceptually decenter the human as a dominant entity, highlighting the capacities of other species, objects, and materials. By framing these works within the philosophical lens of posthumanism, the festival emphasizes ideas such as bioperformativity and the More-Than-Human paradigm, encouraging artists to engage with themes that transcend the human-centric perspective.

Riga Performance Festival STARPTELPA* is an annual international art and culture event focused primarily on performance art, yet also supporting cross-disciplinary and experimental synthesis of performative arts. The aim of the festival is to strengthen the position of performance art as a sovereign form of art, fighting against its constant ghettoization in the arts and culture ecosystem. In the increasingly alienated contemporary society, a dialogic and communication-driven art should be seen as a powerful tool not only enriching and diversifying the arts field, but also providing an opportunity to expose audiences to thought-provoking and empathy-encouraging experiences.

* translated as a liminal space or space in-between