ECADC continues its collaboration with the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, UK, through the Baltic|States Residency Exchange Programme. Established in 2019, it supports artistic research and professional exchange between the Baltic region and the North East of England. The initiative began its cooperation with Lithuania in 2019 and expanded to include partners from Estonia in 2023. Previous Estonian participants in the Baltic|States residency include Maria Kapajeva and Kristina Õllek. The programme operates as a three-part partnership together with the Narva Art Residency (NART), which in 2025 hosted the UK-based artist Stevie Ronnie.

The residency provides artists with time and space for research, opportunities to meet local curators and art professionals, and access to regional art institutions. Participants are encouraged to share their research with the public through open studios, talks, screenings, or workshops. The programme supports artistic engagement with contemporary geopolitical, social, and ecological questions, fostering dialogue around landscape, memory, identity, and power.

Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins (b. 1993) is an Estonian artist whose research-driven practice spans textile-based processes, installation, archival methods, photography, and video. Her work centres on memory, landscape, and language, with a particular focus on rural environments in Lääne-Viru County. She approaches landscape as an archive — a layered carrier of memory shaped by political power and human intervention. Her long-term research project Landscape as Archive: The Story of a Lost Artisans’ Village focuses on the village of Koplimetsa in Harju County, examining transformations of the Estonian landscape from 1939 to the present. Through artistic, archival, and field-based methods, she explores how political regimes have materialised in the landscape and how these traces continue to shape contemporary experience, local identity, and perceptions of cultural heritage.

Teinfeldt-Grins studied textile art at Pallas University of Applied Sciences and the Art Academy of Latvia, and contemporary art at the Estonian Academy of Arts. She is a member of the Estonian Textile Artists’ Association and the Estonian Artists’ Association. Her recent solo exhibitions include Suuremjault mälëstustes at the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design (2024) and Kes mälëtab viimasena? Kes mälëtab paremini? at Tütar Gallery, Tallinn (2024). She has participated in international residencies including Villa Sarkia (Finland), the Icelandic Textile Centre, the Ventspils International Writers’ and Translators’ House, and NART in Narva. Maryliis Teinfeldt-Grins is a recipient of the Eduard Wiiralt Scholarship as well as the Adamson-Eric Scholarship and her works are held in the collections of the Art Museum of Estonia and the Estonian Museum of Applied Art and Design.

The residency is co-funded by the Estonian Ministry of Culture.