Jessica Hemmings writes about textiles. She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design, graduating with a BFA (Honors) in 1999 and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, earning an MA (Distinction) in 2000. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh in 2006, was published by kalliope paperbacks under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (2008). In 2010 she edited a collection of essays titled In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog), and in 2012 edited The Textile Reader (Berg) and wrote Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury). Her editorial and curatorial project Cultural Threads is about postcolonial thinking and contemporary textile practice (Bloomsbury, 2015) and was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015–17).  

In 2022 Jessica co-edited Violence: materiality (PARSE Journal issue 15, with Ole Lützow-Holm), and in 2020 Intersections (issue 11, with Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry). Recent writing includes “Can That Be Taught? lessons in tacit knowledge” in Somaesthetics and Design Culture (Brill, 2023); “Material Scent: Textiles Beyond Touch” in Kinesic Intelligence in the Humanities (Routledge, 2023); and the second edition of The Textile Reader (Bloomsbury, 2023). She is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and was the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands (2020–23).

Jyoti Mistry is Professor in FILM at Valand Academy and works in film both as a research form and as a mode of artistic practice. She has made critically acclaimed films in multiple genres and her installation work draws from cinematic traditions but is often re-contextualized for galleries and museums that are outside of the linear cinematic experience. Select film works include: When I grow up I want to be a black man (2017), Impunity (2014), 09: 21:25 (2011), Le Boeuf Sur Le Toit (2010) and I mike what I like (2006).

Select publications include: we remember differently: Race, Memory, Imagination (2012) a collection of essays inspired by her film which explores the complexity of racial identity in South Africa. Gaze Regimes: Films and Feminisms in Africa (2015). Places to Play: practice, research, pedagogy (2017) explores the use of archive as an exemplar entry to rethink colonial images through “decolonised” film practices. She has co-edited a special issue of the Journal of African Cinema: “Film as Research Tool: Practice and Pedagogy” (2018).

She has taught at University of the Witwatersrand (South Africa), New York University; University of Vienna; Arcada University of Applied Science Polytechnic in Helsinki, Nafti in Accra and Alle Arts School at University of Addis Ababa. Mistry has been artist in residence in New York City, at California College of Arts (San Francisco), Sacatar (Brazil) and a DAAD Researcher at Babelsberg Konrad Wolf Film University (Berlin). In 2016-2017 she was Artist in Residence at Netherlands Film Academy. In 2016 she was recipient of the Cilect (Association of International film schools) Teaching Award in recognition for innovation in practices in film research and pedagogy.

Ole Lützow-Holm studied composition with Klaus Huber and Brian Ferneyhough. Coming from a central European, avantgarde mode of expression, he has created works for a great variety of ensembles and contexts, early receiving international recognition for his music. Lützow-Holm is a professor of composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

2012 he completed the artistic research project Towards an Expanded Field of Art Music. There, the topic was to experimentally intro­duce ideas and hands-on procedures that promoted unorthodox ways of responding to historic as well as contemporary classical music. The applied research methods aimed at facilitating practice-based musical dialogues, inviting a wide scope of trans­disciplinary discourses to participate in the quest for a potentially broader range of per­formative strate­gies and conceptual protocols. In recent years, Lützow-Holm has explored generative approaches, elaborating on short-term, transient musical practices that, inspired by perceptions of ambiguity and incomplete­ness, would integrate elements of improvisation and open form, recur­rently in collaboration with other artists.

Maria Bania is professor in Musical performance and interpretation at the Academy of Music and Drama. She is currently leading the project “Rhetorical and Romantic affective strategies in musical performance”, which explores the aesthetic and affective ideas and mindsets in the performance discourses of both the eighteenth-century sensibility culture and the early Romantic aesthetics. She has had an international career as a flutist, specialized on eighteenth-and early nineteenth-century instruments and music. Recordings include solo concertos with Concerto Copenhagen, and solo sonatas by Roman, Scheibe and Raehs. In 2008 she achieved her PhD in Musical performance and interpretation. Publications include ”Affective practices in mid-18th-century German music-making: reflections on C.P.E. Bach’s advice to performers” (Early Music, 2020), ”Om termen affektlära och det svenska ordet affekt i diskussioner om 1600- och det tidiga 1700-talets musik” (STM, 2021), and “The Improvisation of Preludes on Melody Instruments in the 18th century” (The Consort, 2014).

Gerrie van Noord is a free-lance editor and educator. Following a variety of roles at the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten (1988-1992) and de Appel Foundation (1992-1996) in Amsterdam, she was Head of Publishing at London-based commissioning organisation Artangel (1997-2002), project manager for the first official independent Scottish presence at the Venice Biennale (2003), and commissioning editor of a series titled Fabrications published by Book Works (2006-2009). Although now mainly engaging with one-off projects, she has longer term collaborations with several artists, arts organisations and education institutions, including PARSE Journal, for which she has been a copy-editor and proofer since issue #3. Recently she was the managing editor of a series of anthologies edited by Paul O’Neill, Lucy Steeds, Mick Wilson and Simon Sheikh – The Curatorial Conundrum (2016), How Institutions Think (2017) and Curating after the Global (2019) – published by The MIT Press. For information on current and past projects, see https://gerrieat.work/.

Gerrie has contributed as a Visiting Lecturer to the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003-2015) and was an Associate Lecturer at the MA Arts Policy & Management at Birkbeck, University of London (2006-2019). Currently she is a Visiting Lecturer on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She is undertaking a practice-led PhD (Birkbeck, planned submission 2021), which focuses on publications and their role in and contribution to curatorial practice and discourse.

Rose Brander (born Leeds, UK) lives in Olsfors and works in Gothenburg. In 2014 Rose moved to Sweden to study a masters degree in Fine Art at HDK-Valand. She is currently the PARSE Project Coordinator.

Rose creates spaces, discussions and events, often working collaboratively. She is interested in expanded notions of artistic practice, how we organize ourselves and each other. She also uses film, sound, performance and space in order to promote dialogue and experience with an audience.

Her work seeks to operate within an ambiguous, interdisciplinary, subjective arena; refusing the autonomy often ascribed to canonical modernist practice and asserting that art is always social.

Erling Björgvinsson is Professor of Design at the School of Design and Crafts, Faculty of Fine Arts, Gothenburg University. A Central topic of research is participatory politics in design and art, in particular in relation to urban spaces and the interaction between public institutions and citizens. He has published in international design and art journals and anthologies. ​​

Dr Andrea Phillips is BALTIC Professor and Director of BxNU Research Institute, Northumbria University & BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art. Andrea lectures and writes about the economic and social construction of public value within contemporary art, the manipulation of forms of participation and the potential of forms of political, architectural and social reorganization within artistic and curatorial culture.

Recent and ongoing research projects include: Curating Architecture, a think tank and exhibition examining the role of exhibitions in the making of architecture’s social and political forms (AHRC 2007-2009: http://www.art.gold.ac.uk/ research/archive/ curating-architecture/); Actors, Agent and Attendants, a research project and set of publications that address the role of artistic and curatorial production in contemporary political milieus (in collaboration with SKOR 2009-2012: http://www.skor.nl/ eng/site/item/ actors-agents-and-attendants-ii-programme); co-director with Suhail Malik, Andrew Wheatley and Sarah Thelwall of the research project The Aesthetic and Economic Impact of the Art Market, an investigation into the ways in which the art market shapes artists’ careers and public exhibition (2010-ongoing); Public Alchemy, the public programme for the Istanbul Biennial 2013 (co-curated with Fulya Erdemci); Tagore, Pedagogy and Contemporary Visual Cultures (in collaboration with Grant Watson and Iniva, AHRC 2013-2014: http://art.gold.ac.uk/tagore/); How to Work Together (in collaboration with Chisenhale Gallery, Studio Voltaire and The Showroom, London 2014-ongoing: http://howtoworktogether.org/).

Benjamin De Kosnik is an artist in residence at Art Science Node in Berlin and engineer at Mozilla in San Francisco, California. His art research interests are visual augmentations for machine vision, media remix and fan production, and global media flows on the distributed web.

Catharina Dyrssen is Professor of architecture and design methodology. In her research she looks into how design and an architect’s work process can be developed, both within architecture and in trans-disciplinary research. Her focus is the development of architectural thinking, a flexible, spatial thinking which coincides with a material and modelling practice, at the intersection of art, technology and the social perspective. Catharina Dyrssen also has a strong connection to music, as she is a musicologist and teaches contemporary music at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg.

Darla Crispin is Director of the Arne Nordheim Centre for Artistic Research (NordART) at the Norwegian Academy of Music (NMH), Oslo. A Canadian pianist and scholar with a Concert Recital Diploma from the Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London, and a PhD in Historical Musicology from King’s College, London, Darla specialises in musical modernity, and especially in the music of the Second Viennese School. Her most recent work examines this repertoire through the prism of artistic research in music, a process which has been reinforced through her work as a Research Fellow at the Orpheus Research Centre in Music (2008-2013). She is sought after for her experience in the developing field of artistic research, currently serving on the International Advisory Board of PARSE (Gothenburg) and as a regular advisor for the Norwegian Artistic Research Programme.

Crispin’s publications include a new book co-edited with Bob Gilmore, Artistic Experimentation in Music: An Anthology (Leuven, 2014); a collaborative volume with Kathleen Coessens and Anne Douglas, The Artistic Turn: A Manifesto (Leuven, 2009); and numerous book chapters and articles. She is currently working on a book entitled The Solo Piano Works of the Second Viennese School: Performance, Ethics and Understanding (Boydell & Brewer).

Ingrid Elam is a Swedish writer and critic. She is a former Professor in Literary composition and the former Dean of the Faculty of Fine, Applied and Performing Arts at the University of Gothenburg and ex Chair of PARSE. She holds a PhD in Comparative literature since 1985. Between 1989 and 2000 she was the cultural editor of the Swedish newspapers iDAG, Göteborgs-Posten and Dagens Nyheter. From 2003 to 2012 she was employed at Malmö University, where, among other positions, she acted as the Dean of the School of Art and Communication.

Jason E. Bowman is an artist with a curatorial practice. He is currently a Senior Lecturer and in Fine Art at the HDK-Valand Academy where he also is the Programme Director of the MFA in Fine Art As an artist his projects interrogate the coercion of publics and counter-publics, for which he employs participation as a method. His curatorial work circulates around questions of how artistic practices may be curated, as much as what those practices produce. His research has been previously funded by the Swedish Research Council as Principal Investigator of Stretched: Expanded Notions of Artistic Practice via Artist-led Cultures (2015-20). Three exhibitions were a framework for researching how exhibition-making may be conceived of to challenge dominant limitations, within the field of curating, that often render organisational and administrative activities, modalities of collaborative artistic labour, and the production of socialities to be antecedental, process-centric or extra-artistic to how exhibition-making displays artistic practice. His next body of research departs from the question: how are people curated in art’s social turn. Jason E. Bowman: Talk to the Hand, an exhibition of prototypes for new thoughts and for previous thoughts being re-thought opens at Galleri Cora Hillerbrand, Gothenburg, Sweden on Friday 17 November, 2023.

Lars Hallnäs is Professor of Interaction Design at the Swedish School of Textiles, University of Borås. He has a background in philosophy and mathematical logic and is concurrently Associate Professor of Logic at Stockholm University.

Besides research in design theory, he has undertaken research work in mathematical logic, computer science and experimental interaction design. He was Visiting Professor of Interaction Design at the Department of Applied Information Technology, Chalmers University of Technology until 2011. Additionally, Lars Hallnäs is musically trained and has been active as a composer since the 1970s.

Magnus Bärtås is an artist, writer and Professor at Konstfack, the University College of Arts, Craft and Design in Stockholm. In his work he has mainly focused on biographies, storytelling and architecture. He presented his dissertation You Told Me – Work stories and video essays at Gothenburg University 2010. His film Madame & Little Boy won the first prize at Oberhausen International Film Festival 2010. Magnus Bärtås is represented at Moderna Museet, Stockholm, among other institutions and his work has been shown at international filmfestivals and exhibitions, such as the 9:th Gwangju Biennale 2012 and ABCDEFGHI at Marabouparken 2013. Together with Fredrik Ekman he has published three volumes of essays. Their latest book, Alla monster måste dö (“All monsters must die”), was nominated to the Swedish August prize.

Maria Nyström is professor at the School of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg. Nyström is also a professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Faculty of Architecture, Gothenburg. Through her carrier she has been working as an industrial designer mainly in South East Asia and Eastern Africa. She is also active within the project Homes for Tomorrow where she leads the group for Design and Architecture. The project, a co-operation with NASA, focuses on finding methods for sustainability and stable building with a minimal use of resources.

Markus Miessen is an architect, writer, and Professor at HDK- Academy of Design and Crafts, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He received his PhD from the Centre for Research Architecture at Goldsmiths, London. The initiator of the Participation tetralogy, his work revolves around questions of critical spatial practice, institution building, and spatial politics. Miessen has previously taught at the Berlage Institute (Rotterdam), the Architectural Association (London), and has been a Harvard Fellow at the Graduate School of Design. Most recently, he has held a Stiftungsprofessur for Critical Spatial Practice at the Städelschule (Frankfurt), has been a Studio Professor at HEAD, Geneva School of Art and Design, and Distinguished Professor of Practice at the University of Southern California (Los Angeles). Amongst many other books and writings, Miessen is the author of The Nightmare of Participation and Crossbenching (both Sternberg Press, Berlin). 

Dr Ola Sigurdson is Professor of Systematic Theology at the Department of Literature, History of Ideas, and Religion, University of Gothenburg, Sweden. He finished his doctorate in 1996 at Lund University and is the author of more than twenty books in Swedish and English. His interests lie in theology and contemporary continental philosophy, theology of culture and arts, political theology and medical humanities. His most recent books in English are Theology and Marxism in Eagleton and Žižek: A Conspiracy of Hope (2012), and Heavenly Bodies: Incarnation, the Gaze and Embodiment in Christian Theology (2016). He has been a Research Fellow at Uppsala, Cambridge, and Princeton universities, as well as Guest Researcher in Nagoya, Stellenbosch, Rome and Oxford. He is also active as a culture journalist in the Swedish media.

Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor at the New School for Social Research. He also teaches at the European Graduate School. His many books
include Very Little… Almost Nothing, Infinitely Demanding, The Book of Dead Philosophers, The Faith of the Faithless, and, with Tom McCarthy, The Mattering of Matter: Documents from the Archive of the International Necronautical Society. A new book on Hamlet called Stay, Illusion!, co-authored with Jamieson Webster, was published in 2013 by Pantheon Books in the US and Verso in the UK. An experimental new work, Memory Theatre, is forthcoming. Simon Critchley writes for The Guardian and is moderator of ‘The Stone’, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.

Vinca Kruk is an artist/designer and co-founder of Metahaven. Originally experimental graphic designers, Metahaven turned to art and moving image as a natural progression of their work on aesthetics and politics after the internet. Metahaven’s publications include Uncorporate Identity (2010) Can Jokes Bring Down Governments? (2013) and Black Transparency (2015). They’ve worked with WikiLeaks and Independent Diplomat, and produce music videos with the progressive EDM superstar Holly Herndon. Their film The Sprawl (Propaganda about Propaganda) premiered at IFFR 2016. Metahaven’s work has been exhibited and published world wide. 

Vinca was visiting faculty at Otis College of Art and Design (2011) and Art Center, Los Angeles (2015). She has been a teacher at ArtEZ Academy of Arts since 2009. Together, Vinca and Daniel teach at European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland

Kristina Hagström-Ståhl is a researcher, director, and translator, who works at the intersection of critical theory and artistic practice with interests in feminist and decolonial theory, performance and philosophy, questions of visuality, dramaturgy, and translation, and interdisciplinary collaboration in the arts. Kristina publishes internationally, and has a PhD in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley. Recent work in directing includes August Strindberg’s/Margareta Hallin’s Den Starkare (Strindbergs Intima Teater, 2020), Sophocles’ Antigone (Gothenburg City Theatre, 2019), and Kristian Hallberg’s Här skulle vi leva, tillsammans (Folkteatern Göteborg, 2017). Kristina is the 2020 Hildeman Fulbright Fellow at the University of Washington, Seattle. Between 2015 and 2020 she was PARSE Professor of Performative Arts at the University of Gothenburg.

Anders Hultqvist is a composer, sound artist and Professor of Composition at the Academy of Music and Drama, University of Gothenburg. Besides writing for different orchestral, chamber music, electro-acoustic and sound art settings, he has since 2005 been involved in different artistic research projects concerning musical interpretation and sound in city spaces. The research projects “Transmission, Urban experiments in sound art and sonic space” and “Into noise” were undertaken by the research group USIT—The Urban Sound Institute.

He is currently involved in the artistic research project “At the conceptual limits of composition: A shrinking emptiness – meaning, chaos and entropy”, which explores certain topics concerning the creation of meaning in musical and literary composition. Examples of publications relating to earlier research projects are Sound and Other Spaces (with C. Dyrssen, S. Mossenmark and P. Sjösten: Bo Ejeby Förlag, 2014) and Musikens frihet och begränsning. 16 variationer på ett tema (ed. Magnus Haglund, Daidalos, 2012). Some of Hultqvist’s more recent chamber music works include Entropic Pleasures (2015) and E.P. delineation II (2016), composed for Ensemble Mimitabu, and Disembodied (2012), written for KammarensembleN.

Sanne Kofod Olsen holds a Bachelor of Arts and a Master of Arts in Art history from the University of Copenhagen. She has a Master of Business in Leadership Development from Copenhagen Business School (CBS). Kofod Olsen was the Vice-Chancellor at the The Schools of Visual Arts, The Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and Kunsthal Charlottenborg in Copenhagen, the Director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Roskilde and the Vice-Chancellor at Funen Art Academy.

Kofod Olsen has previously been employed by Statens Kunstfond/Kunststyrelsen in Denmark. In addition, she has worked as a curator and a writer. As an art historian, writer and curator, Sanne Kofod Olsen has been interested and engaged in Contemporary Art and Feminist Art, especially in the field of Performance Art.

Sanne Kofod Olsen has been a member of the Statens Kunstråd, now the Statens Kunstfond, and in the committee for Art history and Artistic research at Novo Nordisk Fonden. She is currently the chairman of Konstex, whose mission is to safeguard common interests for higher artistic education, as well as a member of the Bikuben Foundation’s committee for Academic Guest House in New York.

Tristan Bridge is an artist who works with video games. He received his bachelor’s from The University of Southern California’s School of Cinematic Arts with a focus on Interactive Media. In 2021, he finished his master’s at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design where the focus of his thesis was emergent languages in multiplayer video game spaces.

Research and visual art have been the focus of many activities developed by Henk Slager over the last ten years. As professor of artistic research he has made significant contributions to the debate on the role of research in visual art and as Dean of the Utrecht Graduate School of Visual Art and Design (MaHKU) he has contributed to the launching of productions such as the yearly Dutch Artistic Research Event (DARE) and the publication of the biannual MaHKUzine: Journal of Artistic Research. In 2005, Henk Slager, together with Jan Kaila and Gertrud Sandqvist, initiated the European Artistic Research Network (EARN), a network investigating the consequences of artistic research for current art education in symposia, expert meetings, and presentations. Departing from a similar focus on artistic research, he has also produced various curatorial projects, the most recent being The Judgment is the Mirror (Living Art Museum, Reykjavik, 2013) and Joyful Wisdom (Parallel Event Istanbul Biennial, 2013).

Valérie Pihet co-founded and directed with Bruno Latour the Programme of Experimentation in Arts and Politics (SPEAP) at Sciences Po, Paris (2010-2014). Since 2002, Pihet has collaborated with Latour on a number of other projects: she was in charge of coordinating the exhibitions and research projects Iconoclash (ZKM, 2002), Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (ZKM, 2005), and created and developed the Sciences Po médialab. She has also worked with numerous artists (including Pierre Huyghe and Armin Linke) as well as with researchers. She is the President of Dingdingdong—Institute of Coproduction of Knowledge on Huntington’s Disease, co-founded with Emilie Hermant in 2012.

Bruno Latour (1947-2022) was a philosopher, sociologist of science and anthropologist. Especially known for his work in the field of Science and Technology Studies and for his books We Have Never Been Modern (1991), Laboratory Life (with Steve Woolgar, 1979) and Science in Action (1987). In addition to work in philosophy, history, sociology and anthropology of science, he collaborated with researchers in science policy and research management. Latour was Professor at Sciences Po, Paris, after five years (2007-2012) as the Vice-President for Research. While at Sciences Po, he created the médialab to seize the opportunity offered to social theory through the spread of digital methods, and, together with Valérie Pihet, he created a new experimental programme in art and politics.

Erik Betshammar is a visual artist and web developer based in Trondheim, Norway. His main focus areas as an artist has been into the photographic medium, and related universes. He holds an MFA from School of Photography at Göteborgs Universitet since 2012. He has developed websites for Kungl Konsthögskolan, Dansehallerne and multiple scandinavian artists. He was PARSE web developer during 2023 and 2024.

My main research interest lies in understanding the role of technology and other material artifacts in organizing and managing professional work, especially in cultural and creative fields. I am more specifically interested in how professional norms, rules, structures and ideas are enacted, changed and maintained, in practice and how technology intervenes in these professional practices, transforming over time what is considered professional. Theoretically, I have mainly worked between institutional theory and actor-network theory.

My main field of investigation has been news production. I have conducted a number of ethnographic studies in Italy, France and Sweden in established and new news organizations, all struggling with the establishment and development of so-called digital journalism. Most recently, I have been following two relatively new trends in journalism, namely entrepreneurial journalism and robotjournalism. Both enabled by digital technologies, they have been different responses to the so-much-debated crisis of journalism and news organizations.

I am also interested in the meeting between the arts and business both in academic and industrial practices. I have done research on artistic interventions, that is the use of art in business and other organizations. I have a deep interest for developing qualitative studies and academic writing and in particular by looking at art practices, such as choreography.

I have studied and worked internationally in different countries. I have been visiting researcher at Stanford, Bocconi University and Sciences Po. I have also worked at Jönköping International Business School and Copenhagen Business School before coming to the School of Business, Economics and Law in Gothenburg.

Henric Benesch is an associate professor (docent) in Design at HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, acting Dean at The Artistic Faculty and an associate of Centre for Critical Heritage Studies (CCHS) at the University of Gothenburg. He is an architect interested in transdisciplinary and intersectional aspects of knowledge creation within and in relation to education and built environment with a particular interest in site-based and speculative methodologies. Recent publications include “The Right to Design” (2020), “What if a 1%-rule for Public Design” (2021) and “Co-curating the city: universities and urban heritage past and future” (2022).