Foto: Per Bolkert
Petra is a Swedish-Italian dancer, maker and facilitator based in Stockholm. Previously with a base in the UK, she has been freelancing within the field of dance for almost 20 years. Her practice is rooted in improvisation, a long-term interest in collective and collaborative processes, ecology and the relationships between human and other-than-human bodies at different stages of life. Projects include This walking in the dark and Sleeping a walking mountain. Whilst an associate artist with Fevered Sleep (UK), she developed work focusing on touch within residential dementia care. Petra has engaged with Body Weather since 2010 through training, research and laboratories with first generation practitioners and a ongoing exchange within its community. Graduating from the MA programme in Choreography at Stockholm University of the Arts in spring 2026, her research, Intimacies and Transmutational Bodies explored bodies as relational, ever-changing and situated, using drifting and lingering as practices of observation, participation and performance-making. She keeps researching an expanded relationship to prosthetics and ways of attending to changing corporeal conditions.
Instagram: @petra_romyflora
What role does a year-long residency play for your artistic career?
– I’m really grateful as it’s a really precious opportunity to have a base and a holding space for both structure and exploration, not in isolation but alongside and in exchange with others. The past two years the master’s programme in choreography gave me an opportunity to explore methods and practices, work that I now wish to continue whilst also developing organisationally some of the different strands of my work.
Is there something specific in your artistic practice that you’re looking forward to devoting particular attention to during a year at SITE?
– One of the focus areas that I would like to evolve is my work related to prosthetics, something I have been approaching in an expanded way during the MA and the project Intimacies and Transmutational Bodies and in the work Relanomalia. Based in recent changes in my own fysiology I became interested in other ways of considering extensions of the body and prosthetic processes beyond forms of reconstructive surgery. I would also like to keep exploring what I call ”companionship lingerie/lingering”, how we might find ways to accompany and celebrate tender, disrupted sites or processes of change both personally and together. I’m also continuously interested the spaces of encounter that dancing and performance can generate as forms of occasions, gatherings, procedures and rituals and spending time both indoors and outside.
What are you looking forward to sharing with other artists who are here at SITE?
– I’m looking forward to go through the seasons of the year together, to meeting each other at different times turning up for work and to tend to both the resources and the challenges our work proposes.