NPTB: Fresh Start Club Night

At the Fresh Start Club Night we’ll experience three performances.

Anna Maskava: Milk and Vodka

Milk and Vodka is an autobiographical performance focused on storytelling. It blends personal memories with social commentary, offering a humorous yet honest reflection on life in the Latvian countryside during the 1990s, a time shaped by change, uncertainty, and questionable decisions. The performance reflects on growing up in Latvia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, using personal experiences, absurd rituals, and moments that reveal the unexpected sides of everyday life in a society undergoing transformation.

Milk and Vodka employs audience interaction to explore how early experiences, local environments, and social conditions leave lasting marks on a person’s life. It is not only a reflection on the past but also a look towards the future, exploring how the past shapes who we are and what we are becoming.

Anna Maskava (she/her) is a transdisciplinary visual artist whose work has a particular focus on performance and photography, often blending the two. Maskava’s works explore themes of kinship, particularly women’s experiences and the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans. With gathering and storytelling as core elements of her artistic practice, she weaves together actual and imagined narratives to examine Latvia’s socio-political forces and collective memory.

annamaskava.com

---

Hanna Ijäs: The Body Harvest

The Body Harvest is an exercise of attention.

The performance dips into the abstraction of physicality, bodies and tangible worlds in the face of digitalisation. It depicts a wavy motion of coming to the surface, plugging in and fading out. Exploring a divided attention between reality and imagined through live poetry, rhythm and story-telling. The performed text searches for a way to return to the neglected body which exists in the crossroads of the split attention. The discomfort of this exercise is magnified through soothing motions of touch.

Framed with a sound that pulsates, distracting the performer. The sound is reminiscent of an external call, a *haptic element that weaves the body and sound together.  While attentions divide, will you connect? The Body Harvest is a moment of delirium, friendship and self-destruction through toxic fibres.

(*Haptic refers to a broad range of sensations that simulate the sense of touch, acting as a form of touch communication between an inanimate object and a human.)

Hanna Ijäs (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist and performer based in Helsinki. In times where technology molds and forms interactions, Ijäs aims to grasp this through performance, ways of communication and methods of understanding. Writing and performing are the tools to reveal, discover and frame the value systems, power structures and conditions of humans. At the very core Ijäs re/de/constructs identity and the question of what it is to be a human within expanding and contracting borders and boundaries in a vast fluid changing world. The core of her research is the mapping of the modern human at large in digital and physical realities.

https://hannaijas.framer.media

---

Anabela Veloso: Crafting a Nation

Crafting a Nation explores how the Barcelos Rooster—a folk symbol from northern Portugal—was transformed into a national emblem during the authoritarian Estado Novo regime (1933–1974).

Veloso combines personal storytelling with historical reflection to trace how a handmade ceramic figure became tied to nationalist propaganda. The work asks how cultural symbols become vehicles for political power manipulated by authoritarian forces. Through pottery and spoken word, Veloso reflects on her own childhood memories of roosters as trophies and kitchen decorations, revealing how these symbols continue to shape everyday life, even long after their political meanings have faded.

Anabela Veloso (she/her) is a Portuguese artist whose practice explores how relationships and cultural narratives shape society and politics. Working across video, installation, and participatory formats she investigates the intersections between personal stories and collective history.

Veloso focuses on how symbols become tools of power and how everyday objects are politicised through repetition and belief. She zooms in on the Estado Novo regime which used folklore, religion, and rural aesthetics to construct a national identity rooted in obedience and myth. Her previous works include “Armandina Ferreira”, a portrait of her grandmother revealing a broader narrative of women under the dictatorship, and “três bichos-da-traça”, a video-letter reflecting on her family’s knitwear factory and the emotional legacy of economic exploitation. Veloso holds an MFA from the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and has exhibited across Portugal, Denmark, Austria, and Sweden.
anabelaveloso.com

---

The work has been developed as part of the FRESH START Nordic / Baltic programme in collaboration with Live Art Denmark (Copenhagen) and the Starptelpa Festival (Riga). The programme is funded by the Nordic Culture Point.