Premiere in Sequences festival, Reykjavik, Iceland

Saturday, October 18th, 2025

I'm a heart beating in the world is a participatory performance and concert that unfolds in the natural hot springs of Hvammsvík. Created by dance and performance artist Maija Mustonen, performance artist Hrefna Lind Lárusdóttir, and dramaturg Ami Karvonen, with music and visuals by Rusto Myllylahti / Elatu Nessa, the work invites audience into the water to surrender to listening and floating. The working group also includes performer-dancers Vasilliki Kontopoulou and Saga Kjerulf Sigurdardóttir and a visual artist Caressa Betist.

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Today is Saturday and is made of the purest air, just air. I speak to you as a profound exercise, and paint as a profound exercise of me. What do I want to write now? I want something calm and without fashions. Something like the memory of a tall monument that seems taller because it is a memory. But I want to have really touched the monument along the way. I’m going to stop because it’s Saturday.

It’s still Saturday.

Whatever will still be later—is now. Now is the domain of now. And as long as the improvisation lasts I am born.

And now suddenly after an evening of “who am I” and of waking at one in the morning still in despair—now suddenly at three in the morning I woke and met myself. I went to meet myself. Calm, joyful, fullness without fulmination. Simply I am I. And you are you. It is vast, and will endure.

What I’m writing you is a “this.” It won’t stop: it goes on.

Look at me and love me. No: you look at yourself and love yourself. That’s right.

What I’m writing to you goes on and I am bewitched. 

– Clarice Lispector, Água Viva (translated by Stefan Tobler)

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Working group: Maija Mustonen, Hrefna Lind Lárusdóttir, Rusto Myllylahti, Ami Karvonen, Vasilliki Kontopoulou, Saga Kjerulf Sigurdardóttir, Caressa Betist

Production: Maija Mustonen, rendezvous ry, Sequences Festival

Assistants: Kid Kokko, Jarno Parkkima, Huginn Þór Arason 

Technician: Hákon Bragaon

Supporters: Finnish Cultural Foundation, Icelandic-Finnish Cultural Foundation, Samuel Huber Foundation, Arts Promotion Centre Finland

Residency support: SIM residency

Photographs: Inari Sandell, Jarno Parkkima

Many thanks to: Aguahara friends, Margrét H. Blöndal, Dalslaug og Ellen Elísabet Bergsdóttir, Sigurður Benjamín Guðmundsson, Ísleifur Gunnar Eysteinsson, Hvammsvik staff, Petri Kuljuntausta, Esa Mattila, Martynas Petreikis, SIM residency fellow artists, Unnur Valdís Kristjánsdóttir

📷 Inari Sandell