2025 is a different year. We don't want to call it a transitional year, but rather the beginning of something new, something big, our future.

During the spring, we have been working on a Creative Europe collaboration project. We are six organisations from around Europe, that plan to work together over the next four years. The application was submitted in mid-May and we will receive a response in mid-October. Exciting! We invited representatives from our partners to this year's SurpriseLab to meet, work together and develop the ideas for collaboration.

The organisation is Sippo Artist Association, Finland; Lithuania Artist Association, Lithuania; Trondheim Biennial, Norway; Docasny Kulturny Priestor, Slovakia; Moholy-Nagy University, Hungary.

Participants in Surpriselab 2025 included:

From Finland, Mika Helin and Kim Jotuni.

Lithuania, Solveiga Gutautė and Vidas Simanavičius.

Slovakia, Martin Kleibel.

Hungary, Flora Vagi.

Sweden, Lars Apelmo, Per Brandstedt, Edwin Böck, Tindra Englund, Kalle Hjalmarsson, Henning Lemcke and SIMKA Karin Lind.

We kicked off the lab with a workshop led by SIMKA, Karin Lind and Lars Apelmo and the following days we made an object together.

The laboratory is our workshop model. The idea is that the work should be exploratory and provide the opportunity to test new forms and expressions, that it is experiments we work with, that we laboratory. We live and eat together in Näsby, the village where we work. During the concentrated days together, a positive force and a trust is created that provides great artistic freedom. After dinner, we had daily time for presentation of the organisations and the artists representing them.

This year's results are presented in an exhibition in Grönhögen on south-west Öland. The site is located south of the harbour just along the waterfront in one of Mörbylånga municipality's green areas. 

Foto: Tindra Englund, Martin Kleibl, Lars Apelmo