Inkeri Kurkilahti is a ritual artist and butoh practitioner working with voice, sound and embodied practice.
Her work moves between ritual art, folk tradition-based new music, and contemporary performance art.
Her artistic path has unfolded through long-term mentorships and lived practice rather than formal education. She has learned from folk musicians, ritualists, healers and butoh artists, grounding her work in embodied transmission, oral traditions and sustained practice.
Kurkilahti’s current work focuses on refining a long-term, sustainable ritual art practice informed by Karelian heritage, runosinging, performance art and ecological thinking. She approaches folk traditions as living processes: practices that continue to transform, adapt and renew themselves through bodies and communities.
A central part of her practice is creating and holding spaces for collective presence and transformation through voice, movement, singing and somatic work, often structured through traditional ritual forms. She understands performance not as a fixed event, but as something that continues to live in the people it comes into contact with.
She works with voice, kantele, traditional flutes and somatic exploration, combining archival research, composition and participatory formats. She is particularly interested in how traditional myths, runosongs and crafts can function as protection and strength in times of fragmentation and rootlessness.
Any being embodying its own true nature is her greatest muse.
Inkeri Kurkilahti 