nana francisca schottländer

Based in Copenhagen, Nana Francisca Schottländer (b. 1977, DK) is a Danish interdisciplinary artist whose practice moves between choreography, performance, installation, video, text, and conceptual art. Trained in dance and physical performance, she has spent more than two decades developing works that blur the boundaries between visual and performing arts.

A defining aspect of Schottländer's practice is an interest in encounters between human bodies and non-human entities—rocks, soil, wind, fungi, water, and entire landscapes. Rather than treating nature as a backdrop, these materials are approached as collaborators and agents with their own forms of existence.

 

For Schottländer, knowledge is generated through bodily experience as much as through theory or language, and the body i central as an instrument for research, often engaging in long-duration, immersive, and physically demanding processes.

Many of the projects emerge from deep engagement with specific places and invite audiences into collaborative experiences rather than conventional spectatorship. The works frequently unfold in landscapes undergoing ecological or industrial transformation.

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Belonging to a growing generation of artists working within ecological and posthuman performance practices, Schottländer's work stands out for its insistence on geological time and material agency. Stones, soil, and landscapes are not metaphors in the work—they become performers, partners, and co-creators. This approach creates performances that feel simultaneously ritualistic, ecological, and deeply embodied.

With their focus on extraction, landscapes shaped by industry, and human–stone relationships, the works resonate strongly with contemporary debates around ecology, resource politics, and how art can help us imagine forms of kinship beyond the human.
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Schottländer regularly takes part in the works of other artists as performer, choreographer, dancer and conceptualizer as well as through a curatorial practice.

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An ongoing sharing of methods is also part of the practice, among other places at:

Metropolis Residency Programme

Enhanced Practice Programme

Performing Landscapes Lab

Danish National School of Performing Arts (MA in Choreography)

Roskilde University (Performance Design)

Copenhagen University (Theatre and Performance Studies)