ECHO – Immersive Experiences for Cultural Heritage

ECHO is a European collaborative project exploring how immersive technologies, artistic practices and cultural heritage can come together to create new ways of experiencing, understanding and communicating stories. The project brings together organisations and expertise from several European countries across fields including culture, performing arts, technology, research and design.

Immersive experiences may use spatial sound, interactive environments, digital tools and other technologies that allow audiences to enter, navigate or influence a story. Within ECHO, however, technology is not treated as an end in itself. The project instead investigates how it can be used in meaningful, accessible and responsible ways, with respect for the people, places and cultures being represented.

Aira Dance Company contributes artistic experience and perspectives from Sápmi. Our work focuses particularly on how cultural knowledge and local perspectives can become an active part of the creative process from the very beginning. This means that the people and communities whose cultural heritage is involved should not merely appear as subjects or content within a finished work. They should have opportunities to influence how stories are selected, developed, represented and shared.

An important part of the project is identifying and challenging extractive ways of working. When stories, traditions or cultural expressions are removed from their original contexts, there is a risk that they may be simplified, misinterpreted or used without sufficient grounding, consent or reciprocity. ECHO therefore explores how immersive productions can be developed through more equitable forms of collaboration, in which cultural rights, responsibility, accessibility and long-term relationships are placed at the centre.

Through workshops, artistic processes, design development and international knowledge exchange, the project partners are developing methods and prototypes for future cultural heritage experiences. The work addresses technical and artistic questions, while also examining how audiences encounter the works, which barriers may limit participation and how different ways of experiencing and understanding culture can be recognised.

For Aira Dance Company, ECHO provides an opportunity to contribute to the development of new immersive formats while raising questions of representation, Indigenous knowledge and cultural responsibility. The project also creates new international collaborations and strengthens the conditions for developing artistic experiences in which place, body, movement, storytelling and technology can meet.

ECHO runs from 2026 to 2029 and is co-funded by the European Union’s Creative Europe programme.