Encounters and Discoveries: The NPT Audience Ambassador Program 2025
Introduction
By María Villa, NPT Curator of Audience Engagement
Deeply rooted in the city of Turku, its people, and its communities, the New Performance Turku Biennale (NPT) has been promoting the visibility and development of performance and Live Art in Finland for more than a decade. The work has created a thriving scene that activates discussions and experimentation, and is supported by collaborations with varied local venues and art institutions. The Biennale aims to further integrate the principles of social, ecological, and economic sustainability into its operations. It focuses on inviting high-profile artists to Turku and fostering connections between artists, local and international communities, and diverse audiences. In the process, NPT has progressively gained visibility as an international event, and has more recently sought to expand the audiences it reaches beyond the specialized art public.
In 2025 a pilot was created, the Audience Ambassador Program, with the support of the Arts Promotion Centre Finland (Taiteen edistämiskeskus) to develop a more organic link with local communities. The novel audience program creatively explored tools to facilitate people’s engagement with performance art, help the broader public to learn about this experimental art form and become more comfortable talking and sharing about their experiences with it. We offered a training program in the spring 2025 for a selected group of art enthusiasts that became NPT Audience Ambassadors. The group developed their own activities under themes of their choice, received tutoring, and implemented their proposals with varied communities in connection to the NPT Biennale performance week in September 2025.
This publication includes an overview of the aims and pedagogical approach of the pilot as well as the stories written by the Audience Ambassadors. In these stories they share their particular interest in engaging with local communities, their experiences facilitating during the Biennale, and their reflections on the learning process.
Objectives
The program responded to two concrete needs. Many middle and small art events and institutions today have the challenge of promoting engagement of broader society with diverse and non-mainstream art forms and practices. They are also increasingly aware of the limited employment opportunities for practitioners and professionals within the art sector, and of the need to strengthen, diversify, validate, and recognize their creative input and varied supporting roles and labor in the field.
The ambassador program was designed with five core aims:
- Increase the accessibility of contemporary art practices in Turku to larger society by building new connections with diverse social groups in the short and long term.
- Activate the local arts and cultural scene and promote inclusion in art spaces by facilitating encounters between local communities and art practitioners.
- Build a training program for art enthusiasts and active residents of Turku who wish to develop facilitation skills and engage with local art organizations.
- Create a platform to nurture innovative ideas for reaching and working with audiences in the NPT Biennale and test them in practice.
- Provide certification of training that can support and qualify practitioners’ audience work with different local venues and events in the long term.
As a first pilot to respond to all these aims in the context, the 2025 Audience Ambassadors Programme aspires to serve as a research project to develop a broader Ambassadors concept in the future in collaboration with Turku City and several local and international partner organizations.
The pilot had two distinct components essential to fulfill its mission: An intensive training program of one month and a paid job opportunity to work in the late summer with NPT. I designed both components as Curator of Audience Engagement, drawing on my experience as a contemporary art curator and education researcher working across Finland and Latin America. My approach put into practice a critical view of the relationship between art producers, narratives, and consumers; a conception of contemporary art circulation that focuses on its creative appropriation by the public, working to foster a true dialogue across different visions of aesthetic experience and of the world.
Components and Implementation
Intensive training program. We put out an open call and selected 16 participants to take the ambassador training (36 hours). The profile we looked for did not request previous experience with performance or art education. It had no age limit and included only familiarity with the local context or communities, desire to explore artistic ideas, and motivation to work with people. It was also important to highlight that we aimed to support people’s professional and personal development.
Aurinkobaletti
Turku Art Museum
EHKÄ / Kutomo
Turku City Theatre
Aura of Puppets
WAM
TITANIK
(2 x 4h selected venues)
The training was given in three intensive weekend modules dedicated to: 1) the NPT Biennale 2025 program, to familiarize ambassadors with the Biennale artists and upcoming performances; 2) Performance art history, practices and genres; and 3) developing pedagogical skills and engagement with art. The content and methods used in the modules aimed to provide the Ambassador students with the essential tools to develop and lead audience engagement projects. Simultaneously, we planned 8 visits to art venues in the city (coordinated by the Local Logistic professional, Maria Laitila), from art organizations that NPT collaborates with: Aurinkobaletti, Tehdas Theatre, Kutomo/Ehkä, Titanik gallery, Turku City Theatre, Turku Art Museum, Art House Turku, and Sibelius Museum.
Engagement proposals. Ambassadors were oriented to create activities and guiding questions that would help them unpack the Biennale performances with their groups (based on the topics of the works, the target communities, and the ambassador interests). They were also expected to explore different forms of perception, expression, and interaction, inspired by the activities given in the modules. Upon completion, participants submitted audience engagement projects and certification of the training was provided to everyone completing 80% of attendance and submitting a proposal. 12 of the projects were selected for possible implementation by NPT staff. In the end, 8 people were available and hired as Audience Ambassadors for the 2025 NPT Biennale.
Local implementation. The ambassadors were hired for the outreach work during the month prior to the Biennale and the realization of their proposals. During this period they received supplementary pedagogical training to test their ideas in practice and integrate their work with the logistics of NPT production. The ambassadors were also tutored in one-on-one meetings to check many aspects of the proposals, including the more practical and logistic issues. They worked with their groups during the Biennale week, bringing over a hundred new members of the public to see several performances, and received support throughout by the NPT staff.
In the process, Ambassadors were integrated visibly in the programming, highlighting their innovative and creative work in the general curatorial theme to the 2025 Biennale On the threshold. They also shared their proposals and journeys during the week in a public event (Ambassador Coffee and Cakes) attended by the international specialist audience and artists; and they joined the rest of the NPT staff for social events, parties and the closure of the Biennale, which offered possibilities for networking and exchange.
Impact and storytelling. The impact of a pilot such as this is not adequately shown by numbers. Rather than aiming to bring large groups of audience, our stakes lay in a deeper experiment: changing the way art organizations and experts relate to broader audiences; discovering if we could open real connections with complete strangers to these art forms. This is why the evaluation of the impact focuses on writing stories of what happened and what was discovered with each group. The impact is qualitative. We also wanted ambassadors to be vocal about the shortcomings of the process, and to make sense of the overall experience as a collective learning experiment. Publishing these stories is a way to make visible the creative work, investment and resourcefulness of the ambassadors, and to give inspirational examples of the concrete yet simple strategies that can render beautiful results with groups.
Ambassadors have put their full hearts into creating something unprecedented, each in their own way. They designed a journey based on topics or questions they were passionate about and held a safe space for a group of local people to explore the performances and these questions with them. They have also produced insightful and personal reflections in these stories about the role of the facilitator, the challenges of working with contemporary art, and their professional development in the cultural field.
We hope this novel approach to audience engagement will be useful to our local and international partner organizations, and to anyone interested in the promotion of a closer and richer relationship between art and its publics. The comprehensive report available here in pdf, alongside the stories, is meant to provide tools for future developments and creative initiatives dedicated to audiences in contemporary art events and venues in Finland and beyond.
Read more about the pilot design, pedagogical components and reflections, discoveries and future recommendations in the full report: “Audience Engagement. Building bridges for ephemeral encounters and long-lasting memories”
María Villa Largacha is an independent curator and educator with an academic background in Philosophy and Curating and Contemporary Art. She has worked with public art programs as editor, facilitator, and public program coordinator in Colombia. Her focus for more than a decade has been designing and organizing initiatives for discussion, collaboration, sustainability, and social change through participatory methods and experimental pedagogies. She has taught creative writing and curatorial practices at MA level in Helsinki and has been co-curator of the New Performance Turku Biennale before developing the 2025 Audience Ambassador program. She is currently a doctoral researcher working with transformative approaches to adult education at Tampere University.
Audience Ambassador Stories 2025
The Ambassadors who were part of our team and completed the 2025 training: Ionas Laine, Ilkka Kouri, Minka Salmirinne, Jena Alastalo, Janne Mattila, Julia Lauren, and Aya Ahmed.