DIFF. META.MORF ARENAS, 12. APRIL – 28. JULI
Kurator: Alex Murray-Leslie
HELP! MANIFESTO [2026]
INCONVENIENCE COLLECTIVE
In a time of hyper-mediated communication and stacked schedules, random encounters and authentic, unfiltered social exchanges with strangers are harder to come by. Our collaborative practice, initiated by seven students of the Trondheim Art Academy, experiments with the act of helping as a way of reclaiming direct, human connection.
We are writing a manifesto dedicated to acts of helping and asking for help. The HELP! The manifesto proposes asking for help as a simple gesture, creating space for spontaneous, meaningful personal exchanges.
Central to the project is the belief that people not only enjoy helping others…offering help can generate a sense of purpose, agency, and belonging, affirming that one’s skills and presence are meaningful. But asking for help can be challenging for a number of reasons, often we just don’t want to be inconvenienced, or worse, we fear inconveniencing someone else. The HELP! The manifesto shows how asking for help not only creates a moment of connection for the person asking but also makes the person helping feel valued and, in turn, more comfortable asking for help themselves.
Our manifesto encourages everyone to ask their neighbours, teachers, peer students, colleagues, bicycle repair persons, friends’ grandparents, even strangers on the street for help, whether it’s a practical task, emotional support, or dating advice, anything goes!
It may be small or big. The task is to challenge the urge to “Do Not Disturb” others, highlighting how both parties benefit from the action by emphasising helping as a fundamental human impulse and need. It frames helping as a form of resistance that can make time and break time, creating “multiple time” that fosters slowness and the possibility of hanging out with someone you don´t know.
Over the period of the Meta.Morf festival, our project consists of performing actions where we ask random strangers in public; the street, library, supermarket, gym, bus etc., for help. The encounters and conversations that unfold will be reflected on post and transformed into text as a medium, gathered into a zine alongside illustrations and photographs, to be distributed across the key Meta.Morf venues. Echoes of the encounters are carried forward as a collaged sound work, accessible online via a QR code included in the fanzines.
Through these actions and their documentation, the project explores how asking for help can function as an artistic method, a social practice, and a catalyst for small-scale but meaningful human connection, small arenas where trust and community building follow vulnerability, care, and mutual aid.
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Nadia Caroline Andersen [NO]
Nadia Caroline Andersen is based in Trondheim and studies in the BFA programme at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. She works primarily with photography, writing, and textile installation, exploring analogue/digital time-based media and narrative through process-based approaches.
Ester Uth Lauritzen [DK/NO]
Ester Uth Lauritzen is currently based in Trondheim and studies for a Bachelor’s degree at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. Her practice centers on storytelling at the intersection of sound, performance, text, sculpture, and film.
Paulina Marleen Koyun [DE/NO]
Paulina Marleen Koyun is an Erasmus + exchange student currently based in Trondheim, studying Media and Cultural Analysis at Heinrich Heine University in Düsseldorf. With a background in animation and film production, her work engages critically with the performing image in post-cinematic media cultures.
Maya Cecilie Ellingsen [NO]
Maya Cecilie Ellingsen (b. Nittedal, Norway) is currently a bachelor’s student at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. She works primarily with painting, focusing on feminist themes and questions of representation and bodily autonomy.
Ingeborg Fegth [NO]
Ingeborg Fegth is an artist based in Trondheim working with photography, video, sound, and performance art. Her practice draws inspiration from DIY culture, rave scenes, phenomenology, and spiritual feminist rituals and psychedelic experiences.
Theo Wiederkehr [DE/NO]
Theo Wiederkehr studies Fine Art at the Art Academy in Stuttgart and is currently an Erasmus + exchange student in Trondheim. He approaches photography as a form of artistic research, engaging with materiality, architectural surfaces, and image making as investigative tools in public participative spaces, including skate parks and rubbish tips as sites for collaborative art happenings.
Annamaria Zemkova [SK/NO]
Annamaria Zemkova (b. Slovakia) is currently based in Trondheim, where she studies in the Master’s programme at the Trondheim Academy of Fine Art. She loves birds and works with illustration, engaging them as collaborators to explore interspecies relations and more-than-human forms of knowledge.
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www.researchcatalogue.net/view/2506643/3745022
Photo representing the project by Prof. Alex Murray-Leslie (Chicks on Speed, 2026).
