First Times Do Not Exist, Translating and citing as relational practices of re-use

Jennifer Hayashida is a poet, translator, and artist, born 1973 in Oakland, California, today based in Gothenburg and New York. In 2018, she debuted with the poetry collection A Machine Wrote This Song (Gramma Poetry) and has translated poets including Athena Farrokhzad, Ida Börjel, and Burcu Sahin. Hayashida is since 2018 a doctoral researcher at Valand Academy, with the project Feeling Translation, which explores translation as scene and event in relation to race, the body, and the nation-state.

Nkule Mabaso is the director of Natal Collective an independent production company active internationally in the research and presentation of creative and cultural Africana contemporary art and politics. Forthcoming projects include producing the Gallery of Leaders exhibition for the Freedom Park Museum, Pretoria. Other recent projects include the curation, together with Nomusa Makhubu, of the South Africa Pavilion at the Venice Biennale Arte 2019 under the title The stronger we become. Nkule graduated with a Fine Arts degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 2011 and received a Masters in Curating from the Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK) in 2014. She is the former curator of the Michaelis Galleries at University of Cape Town (2015-2021). She has curated and organised exhibitions and public talks in Switzerland, Malawi, Tanzania, the Netherlands and South Africa. Nkule voluntarily serves on the advisory boards of VANSA, the Standard Bank Art Gallery in Johannesburg, The University of Cape Town Works of Art Committee, the Museum Services Board of the Western Cape Department of Cultural Affairs and Sport and is contributing editor to the Oncurating.org Journal at the ZHdK; an issue entitled “Decolonial Propositions”, edited together with Jyoti Mistry is forthcoming (April 2021).  Nkule’s practice is collaborative with her research interests centering around theorizing and articulating nuanced aesthetic questions from the black female vantage point and she has made significant strides in national and international curatorial projects and has contributed to a number of prominent research publications on the subject.

Femke Snelting develops projects at the intersection of publishing, feminisms, and Free Software. In various constellations, she works on re-imagining computational practices to disinvest from technological monoculture and the regime of The Cloud.

With Miriyam Aouragh, Seda Gürses and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest, a trans-practice and para-academic gathering of activists, artists, engineers and theorists that creates spaces for articulating what computational infrastructures in the “public interest” might be when “public interest” is always in-the-making.

With Jara Rocha, she edited Volumetric Regimes: Material Cultures of Quantified Presence (Open Humanities Press, 2022). The publication results from a collective disobedient research project which interrogated the concrete and at the same time fictional entities of “bodies” in the context of volumetric technologies.

In the research project Ecologies of Dissemination ​​​​​​ she develops, together with Eva Weinmayr, feminist and decolonial approaches to Open Access.

Until 2021, she was responsible for artistic direction of Constant, an association for art and media based in Brussels. Constant generates performative publishing, curatorial processes, poetic software, experimental research and educational prototypes in local and international contexts.

Femke regurlarly teaches at New Performative Practices (Stockholm University of the Arts) and supports artistic research at MERIAN (Maastricht). She also contributes to Nubo, a cooperative which provides locally hosted, Open Source digital services.

Eva Weinmayr’s collaborative practice is grounded in contemporary art, radical education and institutional analysis. In 2020 she published her doctoral thesis, titled Noun to Verb, on a MediaWiki. This research is concerned with the micropolitics of publishing from an intersectional, feminist perspective. (HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg, SE)

As interims chair of faculty Art and Education at Munich Art Academy (2022-23) she co-initiated together with students kritilab, an open source platform for discrimination-critical teaching in the arts. From 2019 to 22 she co-led the EU-funded collective research and study programme “Teaching to Transgress Toolbox” inspired by US activist, teacher and theorist bell hooks (with erg, Brussels, BE).

As part of Ecologies of Dissemination (HDK-Valand, 2023-24) she is currently Visiting Fellow at the Centre for Postdigital Cultures, Coventry University (UK). Ecologies of Dissemination​​​​​​, a collaboration with artist Femke Snelting, seeks strategies for dissemination and a politics of re-use that acknowledge the tensions between feminist methodologies, decolonial knowledge practices and principles of Open Access. More specificly, they explore in which way the current drive drive to universal access policies might overlook relational aspects.

Recent artistic research-based projects include “Teaching the Radical Catalog – a Syllabus” (2021-22, with Lucie Kolb), “Library of Inclusions and Omissions” (2016-20), “The Piracy Project” (2010-15, with Andrea Francke), AND Publising (2010-ongoing, with Rosalie Schweiker).