Trado

From 19 — 23 September 2026, sound artists Natalia Beylis (Ireland), Augustė Vickunaitė (Lithuania), and sound and textile artist Jan Anderzén (Finland) join weaver, researcher, and historian Dimitris Mitakos (Cyprus) for five days of shared artistic exploration — bringing together practices rooted in field recording, tape collage, improvisation, mask and character, and traditional weaving to find unexpected resonances across sound and textile, memory and material.

Throughout the residency, the artists will bring their work out into the fabric of everyday life in Leitrim, presenting individual public engagements and pop-up performances in locations such as the farmer's market, holy wells, and the mart. The residency culminates on 23 September with an installative performance which will weave together the artists' collaborative work at The Dock Arts Centre.

Natalia Beylis' music revolves somewhere between sonic story-teller and multi-instrumental explorer. Based in rural Ireland, her work parallels the lines of her surroundings: creaking trees, farm animals, vocal samples taken from conversations with her neighbours, the northwesterly breeze, creatures rusting in the hedgerows, strange noises from the bog at dusk and rainfall. Her solo compositions and improvisations are a mix of garbled tape collage recordings, manipulated sounds of seemingly mundane objects, eerie mandola mantras and dreamscape piano voyages. While she regularly records on a variety of traditional instruments, she is just as likely to use non-musical sound sources within her compositions — recently releasing an album using just the sounds created by a domestic Singer sewing machine.

Alongside several other solo albums, Natalia has also released collaborative records with cellist Eímear Reidy (Whose Woods These Are, She Came Through the Window to Stand by the Door) and violinist Agathe Max. She has played in and founded numerous groups, including Woven Skull, Divil A' Bit, the free improv collective Three Eyed Makara, and currently the duo Hedgling with percussionist Willie Stewart. Natalia also composes pieces for ensembles. Her latest composition Around Here, The Birds Plant The Trees uses conkers both as a sonic source and as a visual conducting aid to direct the players.  

Augustė Vickunaitė is a Lithuanian sound experimentalist with a background in physics. Augustė exclusively employs vintage reel-to-reel tape recorders to play, record, and create sounds, articulating diverse layers of recordings including found material, field recordings, voice, music instruments, objects, and the whole spectrum of malfunctions of decaying technology. Auguste specializes in tape music, noise, and collage music, known for her theatrical and darkly humorous approach, often exploiting errors of analog audio equipment. Her solo work encompasses tape loops and collages of found audio tapes.

Her notable performances include appearances at venues such as Studium P and Retrito Smarsas in Vilnius, Cafe Oto in London, Km28 and Volksbuehne (Psychic Liberation series at Roter Salon) in Berlin, Fylkingen in Stockholm, and many others. She has also participated in festivals like Seanaps (Leipzig), Braille Satellite (Lithuania), and Troglobatem (Stuttgart), Gražuolė Smegduobė (Lithuania) and has created Radio art works for Radio Art Zone in Esch, Luxembourg; Cashmere Radio in Berlin; Rasų Radijas in Vilnius; KunstRadio in Vienna, among others.  In collaboration with sound artist Hugo Esquinca, she developed the performance series and installation Works for Electromagnetic Tape and Digital Signal Processing, and she has also created radio pieces for Colaboradio, Rasų Radijas, and others. She released her first solo CD, Dance Alone, and has held residencies including one at Elektronmusikstudion EMS in Stockholm.

Jan Anderzén is a Kaakinmaa, Finland-based collage artist making experimental music, quilts, drawings, mosaics, videos and other things. He is known as the founder of Kemialliset Ystävät, a cornerstone project of the Finnish experimental underground since the late 1990s, and for his solo project Tomutonttu.   Tomutonttu is a character that Jan discovered 20 years ago for his musical experiments. Tomutonttu performs in mask and costumes handmade by Jan and creates the sounds of an improvisatory glitchy electronic, dense, groove-driven mosaic. Jan's prolific discography spans labels such as Fonal Records, Dekorder, Leaving Records, VHF Records, and Beta-Lactam Ring, and he has toured and performed internationally at venues and festivals including Roskilde, Flow Festival, ISSUE Project Room in New York, and Institut Finlandais in Paris. In recent years his practice has expanded further into the visual arts, with solo exhibitions in Helsinki and Turku exploring the intersection of music, sheet music, dance, album artwork, and synesthesia, alongside public sculpture proposals and collaborative works with contemporary ensembles like NYKY Ensemble.

Dimitri Mitakos is a Greek-speaking Cypriot artist, researcher, weaver and poet interested in the intersection between heritage, memory, identity formation and affective experiences. Born in South Africa, the child of second-generation Cypriot immigrants, he repatriated to Cyprus where he came in contact with his own ancestral heritage at a very young age. The island has been at the centre of his art and research, as its culture becomes not only the case study for a lot of his written work and poetry, but also the primary standpoint from which he operates from.

Coming from a long line of traditional weavers from the village of Fyti in Paphos, he has been active in the preservation of Fyti's intangible heritage as a weaver and academic. His research focuses on the emotional experience created by a weaving network, which consists not only of the women that weave but all other human and non-human nodes. He is currently working on the creation of a digital depository at the Library of the University of Cyprus, which aims to preserve the tangible weaving heritage of his village. At the same time, he has collected oral histories in the form of recorded interviews as well as recordings of weaving processes. His own weaving focuses on the utilisation of traditional patterns and practices as starting points for the exploration of the fluidity that sits between tacit knowledge, personal memory and collective affective experiences. His work consists of an assemblage of disciplines, where materiality meets cultural theory.