Some Like it Hot

Nora Almeida is an urban swimmer, social practice artist, educator, and activist based in Lenapehoking. Her work explores intersections of ecological investigation, spatial disruption, and urban autonomy. Recent public artworks—Last Street End in Gowanus (2021), Land Use Intervention Library (2022), Open Water (ongoing), and Creek: Two Cavities of the Heart (ongoing)—focus on relationships between people and environmentally disturbed waterfront spaces. Her art and research involves methods including: performance, installation, stewardship, oral history, public printmaking, counter-mapping, and somatic movement.

Nora was a 2023-2024 Climate Justice Fellow with Culture Push, a 2022 Water Connector with Works on Water, and a 2021 Social Practice CUNY Faculty Fellow. She works at the City University of New York, volunteers at Interference Archive, and is a printmaking apprentice at Shoestring Press. She is co-founder of the Hydrofeminist Map Collective. Her book, The Social Movement Archive, co-authored with Jen Hoyer, was published in 2021.

Costanza Julia Bani is a filmmaker working internationally, Assistant Professor in film and media production at the Stockholm University of the Arts and course manager at isff Berlin producer program.
She is an EAVE graduate, a participant of the Cannes producer’s network, a TFL and Circle Alumna and Sundance Grantee. Since 2023 she has joined Stockholm based production company Fellonica Film AB.
A selection of productions includes: Darkness Matters (multiscreen installation 2024, dome version in production for 2025) After Work (premiere in competition CPH:DOX 2023, as associate); Heart of an Astronaut (premiere in competition Visions du Reel 2023); All of Our Hearts are connected through Exploding Stars (premiere Visions du Reel 2022, as associate producer); Duduk (aka Bitter Apricot 2019); Little Black Dress (2017) The Forgotten Army (2016); Constructing Sochi (2013); Der Kampf um die Freiheit (2013); Max Beckmann (2012); Rushes (2012)

Alejandra Salinas and Aeron Bergman are an artist-duo. Salinas is Assistant Professor at the University of Missouri. They were both professors at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and Senior Artists-in-Residence at the University of Washington. Bergman was Professor at the Oslo National Academy of the Arts.

Published writing includes in OEI (Stockholm), Rab-Rab Press (Helsinki), MARCH journal of art & strategy (St. Louis), INCA Press (Portland) and TLTRPreß (Berlin).

They have shown internationally including Athens Biennale; Bergen Assembly Triennial; Turku Biennial; Struer Tracks Sound Art Biennial; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; Fundação de Serralves, Porto; Eastside Projects, Birmingham; Kunsthalle Exnergasse, Vienna; Kunsthall Aarhus; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; ICC Tokyo; Center for Contemporary Art Glasgow; Dundee Contemporary Art; MOCA Novi Sad; Taipei Fine Art Museum; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; Centre George Pompidou and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Nikolaj Kunsthal, Copenhagen; Henie Onstad Art Center and Kunstnernes Hus, Oslo and MUDAM Luxembourg. 

Ritika Biswas (b. 1995, Kolkata) is a nomadic curator and artistic researcher whose praxis enmeshes eco-criticism, experimental aesthetics, and forms of justice. She holds a Liberal Arts degree from Yale-NUS College and an MPhil in Film and Screen Studies from the University of Cambridge. She was a curator at New Art Exchange Gallery, Nottingham (2019-2021), co-curator of the fifth iteration of Museum Without Walls, and Artistic Director for the 2021 Sea Art Festival, ‘Non-/Human Assemblages’, for the Busan Biennale. She has curated significant exhibitions such as ‘—scape’ at Project 88 Gallery Mumbai (2025), ‘Spectres of Our Own Making’ at Gwangju Biennale (2024), ‘Nine Nodes of Non-Being’ at 421 Arts Campus Abu Dhabi (2023-24), and the collaborative research platform ‘Littoral Chronicle’ (2023-ongoing) among others. She was the 2024 Curator in Residence at Fondation Fiminco in Paris and the 2022 International Research Fellow at MMCA Seoul.

Louise Bouvet-Zieleskiewicz is a doctoral student in philosophy of art and aesthetics, associated with the LESA laboratory (Laboratoire d’Études et Sciences des Arts) at Aix-Marseille University and Sorbonne University, Paris. Her doctoral research focuses on a historical and theoretical cartography of the notion of phenomenological event, as expressed and singularised in the experience of cinema.

She has published numerous articles on the mutations of the moving image, on contemporary experimental cinema and the phenomenology of cinematic experience. 

As an exhibition curator, she works regularly between Paris and Venice.

Johnny Chang (b.1988 US-TW/SE) is a Stockholm-based interdisciplinary designer, artist, and researcher working across visual communication, graphic design, publishing, lecture performance, and writing. His practice engages with the sense-making (and breaking)—or poetics—of visual language and material culture, nourishing collective capacities for sensing, feeling, and being. 

Chang’s artistic practice and research attends to questions of care, access, and tactics for gathering, listening to resilient knowledges from below that emerge from diaspora liminality, community memory, and social movement archiving. Through a citational practice, he works with the re/de/composition of material and symbolic-discursive residues to reflect on conditions and processes of social reproduction and relation. https://livingwithimages.info/

Steven Chodoriwsky is a Canadian designer, artist, writer, and educator. His research-centered practice engages with performance and interdisciplinary platforms, pedagogical models, and speculative acts of reading and writing with the built environment. His projects employ a diverse range of media including site-specific installation, workshops, publishing actions, theatre pieces, and audio-visual artifacts.

Based in Salt Lake City, he is Assistant Professor in the Division of Multi-Disciplinary Design at the University of Utah. Prior to this, he taught at Cal Poly Pomona, Cornell, and at the University at Buffalo, where he held the Peter Reyner Banham Fellowship. He was educated in architecture at the University of Waterloo and the Tokyo Institute of Technology. He has also held art/design research positions at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht, and the Center for Contemporary Art, Kitakyushu.

Chodoriwsky has exhibited and performed work at venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, Toronto, de Appel Arts Centre, Amsterdam, and the Suzuki Company of Toga International Theatre Festival, Japan, among others. With curator Julie Niemi and designer Chris Lee he is a member of Collective Question, a working group that studies structures of resistance through archival research and exhibition production. He also publishes experimental documents for organizations and ad hoc occasions under the loose moniker Edits.

Marcelo M. Miranda, Jully Acuña Suárez, and the Ayentš Collective are researchers, artists, and cultural practitioners committed to advancing Kamëntšá rights, decolonial methodologies, and collaborative knowledge production. Their work at the Tsebionán Curatorial Centre is rooted in Kamëntšá ethics and ontology, engaging in research, artistic practice, and community-driven curation that challenges colonial legacies and sustains Indigenous knowledge systems.

Through interdisciplinary approaches spanning archaeology, anthropology, museums, cultural heritage, environmental history, and the arts, they explore the intersections of language, territory, and identity. Their initiatives include experimental and collaborative workshops, artistic interventions, and critical engagement with cultural heritage, fostering spaces for dialogue, care, and resistance. Their work at the Tsebionán Curatorial Centre serves as a platform for Indigenous-led research and creativity, promoting cultural resilience and reclaiming narratives that have been historically marginalised. Together, they strive to strengthen Kamëntšá knowledge and language, ensuring their continuity for future generations.

Kerry is traditionally trained in stained glass and art foundry practices. Using humour as a vehicle for accessibility, their work explores the intersections of fertility, gender, sex, violence, pleasure and pain. These narratives are illustrated through traditional stained glass techniques, subverted sacred iconography and hidden symbols. Kerry is intent on bringing stained glass out of the church and into a contemporary art space.

Claire Dickson is a vocalist, composer, improviser, and producer practicing emergent embodied songwriting. She considers song to be an artistically flexible modality that can encompass poetry, melody, harmony, rhythm, theater, philosophy, and any other idiom catalyzed by voice. Her work utilizes microphones, pedals, synthesizers, field recordings, acoustic instruments, and draws from lineages of improvisation, extended vocal technique, sampling, and deep listening. She creates interdependently with the Berlin and New York experimental music communities as an improviser. She graduated from Harvard in 2019 with a BA in Psychology and Music and has released two albums, Starland (2022) and The Beholder (New Amsterdam Records, 2024).

Erin Cory is a researcher, writer, and educator whose work explores the intersections of media, migration, and creative practice. She focuses on how displaced communities use storytelling and technology to navigate identity, belonging, and resistance. Erin is currently Senior Lecturer in Media & Communication Studies at Malmö University, where she collaborates on interdisciplinary projects that bring together scholars, artists, and activists.
Her research often takes shape through participatory and arts-based methods, including exhibitions, workshops, and multimedia storytelling. She has worked closely with refugee-led organizations, youth, and grassroots initiatives in both Europe and East Africa, co-creating spaces for dialogue, healing, and political expression. Committed to accessible and inclusive scholarship, Erin’s work challenges traditional academic boundaries and centers lived experience. Whether in the classroom or the field, she is driven by the question: how can we tell stories that resist erasure and build futures rooted in solidarity and care?

Michaela Domiano is an interdisciplinary scholar whose research engages questions of global and diasporic process, the physical and imagined geography of the US/Mexico border, and transnational perspectives and experiences of migration with a focus on Central American and Mexican migrant desire, solidarity, and agency. S he draws from her training in Creative Nonfiction writing to merge sensual writing with the critical to invite her audience into an affective encounter that calls attention to migrant bodies as storied by movement, desire, creative productions, and performances of resistance and solidarity in the face of the prohibition of borders. Her research, which is poetic and political, makes key contributions to migration and border studies by providing counter-perspectives to sensationalized and simplistic portrayals of undocumented migration through Mexico that dominate media and academic discourse. She is currently an Associate Professor of Ethnic Studies at Bowling Green State University.

Óscar Perdomo Ceballos is a poet, writer, and historian who earned his doctoral degree in Medieval History from Freie Universität Berlin in 2024. His debut novel, The God of the Heretics, was published in 2015. In 2016, he released the non-fiction book Las Señoras de los Indios. His novel The Wild Vanity was a finalist in the Clarín literary contest in Buenos Aires. His research focuses on intercultural connections across continents and historical periods.

In her anti-disciplinary practice, Monika Gabriela Dorniak traverses the fluid boundaries between bodies, objects, and environments, seamlessly weaving together performance, (textile) sculpture, and multimedia interventions. With a background spanning fine art, choreography, psychology, and design, Dorniak’s work often unfolds within collaborative frameworks as a living map—charting the shifting terrains of the self amidst the entanglements of inherited and embodied memories, as well as belonging. Her works have been exhibited internationally, including the National Gallery Vilnius, Tate Exchange at Tate Modern London, Drugo Mare Rijeka, Galeria Promocyjna in Warsaw and KINDL Berlin. In 2024, Dorniak embarked on a practice-based PhD at HfK Bremen and HDK Valand in Gothenburg, where she continues to explore the ongoing impact of the Second World War through auto-ethnographical, agricultural and interspecies positions.
https://monikadorniak.com/

Yaw Atuobi (they) is a writer and culture worker currently based in Accra.

Esé Emmanuel (they/she) is a writer, artist, curator, etc. currently based between Iowa City, Lagos & Accra. They work at the intersection of West African cultural history and Black poetics.

littoral zone[s] is a collaborative archival, artistic research, and pedagogy project. Informed by alternative writing and thinking practices, it anticipates, challenges and animates the notion of the coast—both as a geographic/ecological space and an ideological framework—to open up discourses of intimacy, relationality, aesthetic responsibility, and power.

Jack Faber is a filmmaker-researcher whose practice investigates the intersections of militarization, ecology, technology and anticipatory imaginaries. His work merges subversive storytelling with rigorous research, offering fresh perspectives on historical and emerging narratives, myth-making, and contemporary crises. Faber often explores interdisciplinary methodologies, combining cinema and animal studies, cultural analysis, and philosophical inquiry to create richly layered texts and participatory artworks.

His recent project, Accelerated Landscapes, exhibited at CCA Tashkent, reflects his commitment to making complex ideas accessible through compelling visual forms and public engagement. He has published three books, contributed to a range of publications, and exhibited award-winning films and installations internationally.

In recent years, Faber has focused on vulnerable climate frontiers, particularly in the High Arctic, where the entanglement of environmental change and militarization profoundly affects ecosystems, local communities, and more-than-human life. Through these contested landscapes, he examines the infrastructures that shape collective understandings of conflict, progress, and survival in increasingly fragile environments.

Zachary Furste is an artist, scholar, and permanent lecturer in New Media and Digital Culture at the University of Amsterdam. He works on theories and histories of technical media, artistic research, and technology in the arts. His multimodal practice draws from archival techniques, digital forensics, software infrastructures, and the history of aesthetics.

In experimental websites like compressions.cc, postal.media, i-o.tv, thermostat.tv, iiil.li, and cybersyn.cc, he explores how the technical layers of the internet condition knowledge and social value.

Alongside his research and creative practice, Furste is a systems developer at the Digital Methods Initiative, where he works on the infrastructure behind the DMI’s suite of tools for internet research.

Furste holds a PhD from Harvard University. Previously, he has held fellowships at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, University of Southern California, and Carnegie Mellon University.

fields harrington (b. 1986) is a Brooklyn-based artist whose practice spans sculpture, performance, video, photography, drawing, and writing. harrington investigates the political, social, historical, and economic forces shaping the production of empirical knowledge, with a particular focus on science. His work critiques how ideologies—such as racism and the enduring financial logic of slavery—have shaped scientific practices that uphold systems of oppression. By revealing the intersections between knowledge production and the abstraction of power, harrington challenges the construction, transmission, and weaponization of knowledge.

harrington has a BFA from the University of North Texas, an MFA from the University of Pennsylvania, and studied at San Antonio Community College. He was a participant in the Whitney Independent Study Program. He has presented solo exhibitions at the David Salkin Gallery, KAJE, Petrine, and Y2K Group. He has exhibited in group shows at MIT List Visual Arts Center, Galerie Thomas Schulte, Parsons School of Design, 52-07 Flushing Avenue, and Automat Gallery. fields harrington was an L.A.B. researcher in residence at The Kitchen in collaboration with The School for Poetic Computation and participated in the research residency Site to be Seen at RAIR.

Lichen Kelp, Audax Mrozik Gawler and Marilena Hewitt are Australian artists working to envision habitable worlds through kin-making, interspecies collaboration and collective actions. Their transdisciplinary work utilises publication, live-art, media, queer ecology, science and futures thinking to traverse artistic and curatorial practices, creating the conditions for collaborative survival and equitable planetary futures. Their award winning work has been shown and collected both locally and internationally, with work most recently appearing at the Centre for Projection Art, Unconformity Festival, SCA Gallery, The Powerhouse Museum of Applied Arts and Sciences, The Australian Network of Art & Technology, and the Sydney Institute for the Environment. Lichen is one half of performance duo Kelping, and her curatorial projects include Seaweed Appreciation Society international (SASi) and the Forum of Sensory Motion. Audax is founder of interspecies futures lab Urthling and the Trans* Ecology Club and Marilena is founder and editor of PLATYPUS, an Art publication informed by fieldwork.

Lisa Hoffmann is a multidisciplinary artist whose work spans installation, film, and performance, both material- and research-driven. Her work critically engages with themes such as the eco-eco crises, the anxieties spawned by capitalism, and the decomposition of dominant cultural narratives. 

She is a graduate of Bauhaus University Weimar (MFA Sustainable Product Design) and Berlin University of the Arts (MFA Art and Media). There she was recently appointed the title of a “Meisterschülerin“. She is an active member of the collective Klasse Klima and currently co-creates the Studium Planetare, a pilot project in applied climate education at art colleges.

Lisas work has been shown at l’escaut (BE, 2025), Kommunale Gallery (DE, 2024), BAK – basis voor actuele kunst (NL, 2023), KOMMET Art Space (FR, 2023), Hamburger Bahnhof (DE, 2022), Tampere Film Festival (FI, 2022), Roman Susan Art Foundation (US, 2020), Biennial of Photography Porto (PT, 2019) and Triennial of Photography Hamburg (DE, 2018), among others. She was Artist in Residence at an• other here and Cité Internationale des Arts Paris. She lives and works in Berlin.

www.lshhhh.net

Hsuan Hsu received his PhD in English from UC Berkeley. He is a Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, where he works in the fields of American literature and culture, environmental humanities, critical ethnic studies, sensory studies, and cultural geography. His publications include Geography and the Production of Space in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Cambridge, 2010), The Smell of Risk (NYU, 2020), Air Conditioning (Bloomsbury, 2024), and articles in journals such as American Literary History, ISLE, Panorama, Camera Obscura, and Jump Cut. He has on the editorial or advisory boards of several journals, including Literary Geographies, American Literature, Genre, Multimodality and Society, and Venti: Air, Experience, Aesthetics. He has received fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the American Council for Learned Societies, and the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts. He is currently completing a short book on Olfactory Worldmaking and co-editing (with Ruben Zecena) a special issue of Senses and Society on the topic of Migrant Sensoria.

Nam Huh is a curator, researcher, and PhD candidate in Media and Communication at Loughborough University. With a background in Social History of Art (University of Leeds) and Art Theory (Hongik University), their practice intersects curating, sound, documentary forms, and minoritarian politics. Nam has held curatorial and programming roles across countries, including with Migration Matters Festival, No Bounds Festival, The Royal Standard, and Seoul Museum of Art. Recent curatorial work explores diasporic time, ecological memory, and sonic interruptions in the everyday. Their multidisciplinary apporach investigates involuntary bodily sounds as metaphors for migration, tension, and cultural residue. Nam’s programming has been supported by institutions such as FSAS (Dublin) and Arts Council Korea. They are currently based in the UK, curating across film and visual art platforms with a focus on post-growth ecologies, migrant labour histories, and intergenerational storytelling through sonic and documentary strategies.

Andrea Jaeger is a photographic artist and researcher exploring the entanglements of visual culture, environmental systems, and posthuman agency. Holding a practice-led PhD in Posthuman Photography, her research draws on sensory ethnography and multimodal artistic inquiry to challenge conventional human- and image-centric approaches. Jaeger projects engage with relational ethics and sustainability, and hidden environmental processes, bringing together sound, moving images, and data-driven visual storytelling. ‘Straight Rivers’ continues this trajectory, tracing the movement of water in Tokyo’s underground transport systems to uncover unseen ecological entanglements between technology, climate control, and urban life. 

Shivani Kasumra (she/her) is a researcher and writer from New Delhi. She is a PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh where she works on British imperialism and its afterlife in South Asia as well as the trajectory of art and culture in post-colonial India. She has been working at the intersection of museum pedagogy, contemporary art practice, and art historical scholarship since 2019.

Richard L. Kramár (legal name: Richie Lux Kramár) (*1995, Bratislava) is a poet, director, dramaturg, kabarettier, and librettist. He studied Directing and Dramaturgy of Alternative and Puppet Theatre at DAMU in Prague, Theatre Practices at ArtEZ University of the Arts in Arnhem, and is currently pursuing a PhD in Dramatic Arts at JAMU in Brno. Between 2014 and 2016, he co-founded and co-led (with Terézia Klasová) the independent cultural space Divadlo na ôsmom poschodí in Bratislava. Theatre projects he has contributed to have been selected for the příští vlna/next wave festival three times (2016, 2022, 2023). He is also a co-founder of several art collectives and conceptual clusters. Kramár has published four poetry collections: Štuchanie do medúz (Spolek přátel Psího vína, 2017), Úchopový inštinkt (BRAK, 2021), BORDERLINE (with Kino Peklo, Adolescent, 2022), and Sukces saisóny – atto i. & atto ii. (Adolescent, 2025). During the 2022/23 season, he worked as a full-time prompter at the State Opera in Prague, where he now continues as an external collaborator. Since 2024, he has been part of the editor-in-chief duo (with Terézia Klasová) of Psí víno, a digital curatorial platform for contemporary poetry, where he focuses primarily on translating English-language queer poetry and editorial work.

Dr. Friederike Landau-Donnelly [she, they] is an intersectional political theorist, urban sociologist and cultural geographer. She is interested in political theories of conflict, and the ways in which public spaces are contested. Through empirical and artistic research in places like Vancouver, Berlin, Leipzig, Linz, Vienna and Malmö, Friederike theorizes different modalities of conflict in cultural policy and governance arrangements amongst commissioned and self-instructed artists, artist collectives, policymakers, and local communities. Friederike has developed and taught undergraduate, graduate and PhD-level courses in a variety of disciplines such as human geography, spatial planning, arts and design, political theory and sociology. As co-editor of publications such as Handbuch Kulturpolitik (Handbook of Cultural Policy, Springer, 2023), Konfliktuelle Kulturpolitik (Conflictual Cultural Policy, Springer, 2023), and [Un]Grounding – Post-Foundational Geographies (transcript, 2021), Friederike has contributed to create an understanding of the conflictual underpinnings of the production of space and culture. Friederike publishes poetry as #PoeticAcademic: https://friederikelandau.com/poeticacademic/  

Elizabeth is an artist, educator and research director. Her interdisciplinary practice utilises new media, oration and public programming to interrogate post-tropical environments, psychospiritual traditions and the neo-gothic.

She has exhibited work at V&A Museum (London, UK), Rockbund Art Museum (Shanghai, CN), Asian Film Archive (Singapore, SG), Espace Niemeyer (Paris, FR), Taiwan Film and Audiovisual Institute (Taipei, TW), Nguyen Art Foundation (Saigon, VN), Jimei x Arles (Jimei, CN), Sinema Transtopia (Berlin, DE), UNSEEN (Amsterdam, NL), Foto Tallinn (Tallinn, EE), DECK (Singapore, SG), Photo London (London, UK), Odessa Photo Days (Odessa, UE).

She is an Associate Lecturer who teaches cross programme in the School of Media and Communication at London College of Fashion, University of the Arts London.

We are an artist-curator duo who are currently working on a project collaborating with NSFW.

Jessica Ekström (b. 1995) is a visual artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She holds a master’s degree in Fine Art Photography from HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg (2023), and has exhibited in numerous solo and group shows in Sweden. With photography as method and artistic approach, Ekström uses her body and the self-portrait as an entry to question the gaze and its impact upon female representation. In her practice, she tends to proceed from herself as the character of a “woman”; the “woman” is a masquerade created by others, for others.

Viola Dóra Lenkey (b. 1998) is a curator from Budapest, earned her master’s degree in Contemporary Art Theory and Curatorial Studies from the Hungarian University of Fine Arts (2024). During her studies, she initiated an ongoing research project examining the evolution of female body representation in visual arts. Her focus lies in photography and performance art, particularly in the context of self-representation. Through her research, she explores whether self-representation can counteract exploitation and reduce social discrimination against marginalized bodies.

Dr Jacina Leong is an artist-curator, educator and researcher engaged in critical processes of community engagement, arts leadership, cultural strategy, and curatorial practice.

From 2023 to 2024, Jacina was Acting CEO/Director for Next Wave, a leading not-for-profit arts organisation that, since 1984, has played a pivotal role in supporting early-career practitioners working across multiple art forms. She is the former Co-Director of Bus Projects (2021–2022), Public Programs Curator at The Cube (2012–2017) and Ipswich Art Gallery (2009–2011), Gallery Manager at Jan Murphy Gallery (2011–2012), Creative Producer for the Creative Industries Precinct (2008), Sessional Academic and HDR supervisor at RMIT University and La Trobe University (2020–2023), mentor for the ACMI CEO digital mentoring program (2022), and co-founding member of the Guerrilla Knowledge Unit (2017).

Jacina is currently Co-Chair of Bus Projects, a Sessional Academic at RMIT University School of Art Industry Advisory Committee, and guest curator for La Trobe Art Institute.

Swantje Lichtenstein is a performance artist, sound creator, and scholar whose work critically engages with the intersections of language, sound, and embodied practice. Her artistic exploration focuses on how sound and text can be reimagined to question dominant narratives, build solidarity, and create spaces for new meanings—especially from feminist and transmedial perspectives.

Lichtenstein’s research-based practice spans multiple forms, including electroacoustic sound art, conceptual performance, and experimental writing. Her work is concerned with the ways language and sound challenge existing boundaries, offering alternative forms of expression. She approaches artistic practice as a transformative space for exploring feminist issues, transcultural connections, and community-based collaboration—viewing art not as an external intervention, but as something created within the very communities it engages.

Her work has been showcased in diverse cultural contexts and festivals worldwide, including the Sound-Text Festival; Issue Project Room/Goethe-Institut New York; Poetic Voices Africa Festival, Cologne; SoundEye Festival, Cork; and festivals in cities such as Istanbul, Yerevan, Mexico City, and Bucharest.

Lichtenstein’s publications include poetry, theoretical essays, sound works, and translations. She served as the artistic director of the cOsmOsmOse Festival for Performance Poetry and Verbophony (2013–2017) and the Rolling Eyes Festival (2018), a feminist arts event. She is also a curatorial board member for the Monheim Triennale, a major international festival for contemporary music.

As a professor of Aesthetic Practices and Text at the University of Applied Sciences Düsseldorf, Lichtenstein brings her diverse expertise to a wide range of international academic and creative platforms, teaching at universities and art academies across Europe and beyond.

Explore her work and projects:
www.swantjelichtenstein.de
www.covertext.org
www.commarts.net

Samuel Ian McCarthy (he/him) is a photographer, artist, and emerging researcher currently studying an MFA in Photography at HDK-Valand in combination with an MA in Communication for Development and Social Change at Malmö University; his current practice is centred around questions of ecology, queerness, and justice, specifically trans-species interaction, costs, and imaginaries.

Lars Lindqvist (he/him) is a senior lecturer in the unit for film, photography and literary composition at HDK-Valand; teaching photography at undergraduate and advanced levels, and often arranging extensive workshops focusing on a variety of b&w analogue photographic processes. Educated at Konstfack in the early 90s, Lars is an active photographer, artist, and educator in Gothenburg since 1999.

Through a collaborative practice grounded in holistic values, Sam and Lars engage with the intensifying ecologies of sustainability, violence, and justice. Their artistic research unfolds through workshop-based methodologies that embrace slowness as a form of resistance to extractivism, fossil-fuel dependency, and digital acceleration. Working with alternative and experimental analogue photography, they critically confront the medium’s entanglement with animal-derived gelatine, petroleum-based plastics, and toxic chemical processes. In response, they explore and develop plant-based, non-toxic, and ecologically sensitive approaches; seeking to reimagine photographic practices that are both materially and ethically attuned. Within this framework, heat is not only a threat but an essential ingredient: a catalyst for change, care, and collective alternative imaginaries.

Mann is a London-based filmmaker, writer, and Lecturer at King’s College London, whose work examines the material politics of visual media and environmental imaginaries. His films have screened at major festivals including Berlinale Forum, Rotterdam, Cinema du Réel, DOC NYC, and Visions du Réel. His latest feature, Under a Blue Sun (2024), won Best International Film at Documenta Madrid. His upcoming project, The Uganda Plan, was selected for the 2025 Cinemart and will be filmed in 2026.

Mann is the author of “Occupying Habits: Media as Warfare in Israel\Palestine” (Bloomsbury, 2023) and has published widely in academic journals. His forthcoming book, “Hot Locations: Cinema on the Planetary Frontier” (UC Press, 2026), explores desert film sites and cinema’s planetary politics. He previously held fellowships at Queen Mary University and King’s College, earned his PhD from Goldsmiths Centre for Research Architecture.

Jessie Martin is an interdisciplinary geographer and photographer. She is currently developing her PhD project as a Research Assistant in the Practicing Place DFG funded graduate school at the University of Eichstätt. Her interdisciplinary practice explores relations between capital, power, politics and ecology in and across places. She looks to reimagine the practices which construct places, while investigating their historical formation and conceptualisation. Jessie previously worked as a photography lecturer at University of West London, has an MA in Photography and Urban Cultures from Goldsmiths, University of London, and completed her BA in Photographic Arts from University of Westminster. Her PhD project adopts a transdisciplinary approach to investigate how capitalism practices place through the relations of fossil carbons, and specifically oil. Her research acts against the Nature/Human binary to re-articulate how the relations of nature, capital and global power function through petro-geographies and their associated spatial imaginaries.

Richard is a visual artist and educator whose practice-led research delves into time, geology and cosmology. He crafts intricate, shifting forms and installations through textile-based works. Richard studied at Manchester School of Art before completing a Textiles MA at the Royal College of Art in 2008. McVetis has been shortlisted for several distinguished prizes, including the Trinity Buoy Wharf Drawing Prize, UK, 2023; the Jerwood Drawing Prize, UK, 2011 and 2017; and the international Loewe Craft Prize, 2018. In addition, McVetis has shown work nationally and internationally at several exhibitions, including Threads at Arnolfini, UK, 2023; The British Textile Biennial, UK, 2021; RENEW at Kettles Yard, UK, 2019; Loewe Craft Prize, Design Museum, London, UK, 2018; ‘Form + Motion’ – a major exhibition with the British Council, South Korea, 2017. In 2022, his solo show was held at the Craft Study Centre, Farnham.

Erin Marberger, Director of Climate and Sustainability, Anchorage Museum
Simonetta Mignano, Climate Initiatives Coordinator, Anchorage Museum

The Anchorage Museum is a museum for people, place, planet, and potential, in service of a sustainable and equitable North, with creativity and imagination for what is possible. It is a place of ideas and transformation, narratives and perspectives, resilient and relevant communities, responsive to a rapidly changing world toward a better future for all. The Anchorage Museum sits on the traditional homeland of the Eklutna Dena’ina. The museum is committed to recognizing and celebrating the culture and language of the Dena’ina people.

Natalie Novik is a spatial practitioner, researcher, and educator based in Sweden. Her work centers on urban commoning, collective care, and socially engaged architecture, exploring how multiple subjectivities are embodied in the spaces we inhabit. She has worked as an urban planner and design consultant, focusing on dialogue processes; created site-specific installations as a member of the Creature Collective, and co-founded  Studio REplay. Her practice incorporates urban curating through ficto-critical methods, games, speculative narrations and cartographies, assemblages and scores. She holds a master’s degree in Architecture and Planning Beyond Sustainability from Chalmers and is pursuing a PhD in artistic research at HDK-Valand Academy of Art and Design. Her research examines spatial practices from the margins, particularly maintenance and repair as a form of spatial activism.

Gina Enslin is a Berlin-based freelance audio journalist and podcast author, working mainly on the topics of politics and history. She has worked on several educational, storytelling and news podcasts, for example for the German Federal Agency for Political Education, for several production companies, as well as for German public broadcasters. 2024, she was part of the scholarship program “Resonance” by the Goethe Institute France where she researched the effects of the climate crisis between France and Germany.

Anne Pretzsch is a performance artist, curator and author based in Hamburg and Cologne. She develops transprofessional and transgenerational participatory performances with non-professionals and is currently teaching at University of Osnabrück and University Cologne. Together with Lisa Florentine Schmalz, she is the artistic director of WE PRESENT Festival at Lichthof Theater Hamburg. Pretzsch is funded by the Claussen-Simon-Stiftung for her PhD at HfbK and FUNDUS Theater Hamburg until 2026.

Eleni Riga is an independent curator focusing on ecofeminisms in the Mediterranean South She has held key roles, including assistant curator for Case_L at Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg and director of the Contemporary Art Department of Eleusis 2023. She was a curatorial assistant for documenta 14 in Athens and Kassel and has collaborated with major European institutions. Since 2022, she has led the Office of Hydrocommons, a curatorial initiative on water and body politics, in partnership with ATOPOS cvc. She holds degrees from Panteion University, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne, and Konstfack. Riga has participated in residencies worldwide. Her upcoming exhibitions include projects at the Bath House of the Winds-Museum of Modern Greek Culture in Athens and Billedkunstnerne i Oslo, further expanding her curatorial impact.

Galadriel González Romero is a Spanish-born, Kenya-raised visual artist, Rights of Nature activist, and folklore enthusiast. Their upbringing in close connection with East African ecosystems fostered an ongoing sense of kinship with the more-than-human reflected in themes of ethical collaboration between human and nonhuman beings, climate catastrophe, and speculative worldbuilding in their artistic research. Their artistic interventions weave narratives into landscapes in the form of speculative folktales or science-fictionesque accounts emphasising reconnection with our environment in a time of ecological collapse.

Emelie Röndahl is a weaving artist who for several years works with figurative rya, a traditional Scandinavian weaving technique that historically has been used to weave blankets that imitate sheep skins where the hairy part lays against the body. She was educated at HDK-Valand University of Gothenburg, holding an MFA in crafts (2012) and a PhD in artistic research (“Crying Rya- A Practitioner’s narrative through hand weaving” (2022). She has exhibited her woven works both in Sweden and internationally, most recently at the Gothenburg Art Museum as one of the recipient of the Stenastiftelsen culture scholarship (2024). Emelie Röndahl is currently Professor of Textile Art at the Oslo National Academy of Art.

Parsa Sanjana Sajid is a writer, researcher, and cultural practitioner. She works across disciplines spanning digital, visual and literary cultures, social spaces and movements, migration practices, and gender justice. Her writings have appeared in the Funambulist Magazine, Migrant Journal, Caravan, New Internationalist and March among others. She is working on an upcoming co-edited volume on national imaginaries to be published by Routledge and has an upcoming text-video essay on spatial and temporal negotiations around mazaars in the […] Ellipses Journal for Creative Research. Most recently she curated a group show titled Disquietous (November—December 2024) on the imbrication of data, corporeality, digital and physical spaces at Kalakendra in Dhaka, Bangladesh and a multi-venue Palestinian film series called Cinema Palestine Bangladesh (December 2024) also in Bangladesh. Previously she developed an oral history project on the 1947 partition of the Indian subcontinent focusing on emigres from India to Bangladesh (then East Pakistan).

Sara Sassanelli is co-founder of Alice Agency and Associate of CONDITIONS studio programme. Until 2024, they were Curator of Live at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) where they programmed across dance and electronic music, with a focus on emerging artists. Their work explores collective and enthusiastic cultures that form around raving and how these manifest in multidisciplinary practices. Their most recent ICA programme, this dark gleam (2024), showcased artists engaging with formal technique, social dance, pop culture, and punk sensibilities. Currently, they are collaborating with Eve Stainton, Fernanda Muñoz-Newsome, Billy Bultheel, and Jose Funnell, among others. Previously, they have worked at Tate, Goldsmiths, and the Royal Academy of Arts, and have programmed events at Ormside Projects, Somerset House Studios, Southwark Platform, Guest Projects, Arts Admin, Fierce Festival, and Block Universe. They programme across dance and electronic music.

Recent programming includes: NX FUIMO by Tamara Alegre (2024), GONER by Malik Nashad Sharpe (2024), Afterlife by Louis Schou Hansen (2024) IMPACT DRIVER by Eve Stainton (2023), minus one series (2022 – 2023), Dykegeist by Eve Stainton (2021), The Last Breath Society by Martin O’Brien (2021), Rave Trilogy by Rebecca Salvadori (2020) The Tender Interval: Studies in Sound and Motion (2020), a convening exploring the transformational qualities of sound and dance practices and an all-night takeover of ICA by collective INFERNO (2020 & 2023).

Usha Seejarim (b. South Africa) is a conceptual and socially engaged artist who uses found objects to communicate complex and simple ideas around the domestic position of women.

Seejarim holds a Master’s Degree in Fine Art from the University of The Witwatersrand (2008) and is currently completing an MBA through Henley Business School. She is a sculptor who has built an impressive record, having exhibited over 14 solo exhibitions.

She created the great slate figures representing the South African Freedom Charter, a 40 ton steel sculpture of half a clothes pin in 2022, and is probably best known as the artist who produced the 2m high beaded portrait of Nelson Mandela, which formed the backdrop to his funeral in 2013.

Sara Sepulcri is an Italian visual artist and historical researcher with a background in history and politics from the University of Bologna. Her work explores climate change, migration, and their impact on humans and animals through photography, AI, writing, sound, and language. Drawing from her global experiences, she examines how memories, traditions, language, and the human body evolve over time and across migrations. Influenced by her son’s deafness, she investigates sound’s role in perception and memory. Her multidisciplinary practice challenges human exceptionalism, speculating on future transformations and fostering a deeper understanding of interconnected life in a changing world.

Ram Krishna Ranjan is a lecturer in Film at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg. He works at the intersection of research, pedagogy and film practice. His educational background is in Economics, Media and Cultural Studies, Fine Art and Film. In his work, he critically explores decolonial and postcolonial perspectives and the intersectionality of caste, class and gender. He has made several films on these issues. His latest, Fourth World, delves into the various facets and stages of a creative-collaborative practice that attempted to foreground and engage with Dalit experiences of the Bengal famine of 1943.

Becky Shaw is an artist researcher and Professor in Fine Art Practice at Birmingham City University. She led the Sheffield Hallam University art and design PhD programme from 2015-2024,and co-led Static Gallery, Liverpool 2000-2006. Becky makes live, collaborative artworks that examine the tension between individuals and social structures, in institutions of ‘public good’ including healthcare, education, utilities and work. Works examine a specific assemblage of people, structure and time, with movement often functioning to unsettle the institutional apparatus. Commissions include for City of Calgary Water Services, Sarah Wigglesworth Architects, Guys and St Thomas Hospital, Walsall Art Gallery, Sainsbury Centre, Grizedale Arts and Amstelveen Art Incentive Prize. Currently, Becky is exploring what artists bring to interdisciplinary research teams. This includes Infrastructure as Culture with Sophie Hope (et al), Justheat (CHANSE fund, 2022), Odd: Feeling Different in the World of Education (2018-2022) and Things of the least (AHRC exhibition fund, 2023-2026).

Based in Malaysia, Wen Di Sia is a writer and researcher with an interest in Indigenous arts and culture, particularly in topics such as Indigenous knowledges, cosmologies, and eco-critical thoughts. She was trained as a journalist, spent 10 years in the advertising industry, and now dedicates herself as a collaborative partner to Indigenous Malaysian (Orang Asli) communities through her collective, Gerimis Art. In 2018, she started Gerimis Art, a collaborative artistic and archiving collective that co-produces artworks and cultural content with Orang Asli contemporary artists, artisans, and communities. Together with Orang Asli collaborators, the collective showcases Peninsular Malaysia’s indigenous histories, traditions, and ecological wisdom via artworks, photography works, publications, installations, workshops, and exhibitions. Through their body of work, the collective strongly advocates for the Orang Asli’s customary territories and the return of these lands to their custodianship.

Mohamed Sleiman is a Sahrawi multidisciplinary artist, filmmaker and writer. Born and raised in the Sahrawi refugee camps in Tindouf, southwest Algeria, he runs Motif Art Studio, a small art space built entirely from discarded materials. His art draws from the past and present life of the Sahrawi people and the multilayered social, political and environmental issues they face in their exile in the Hamada Desert. He explores these interconnected realities through diverse art practices including films, writing and community-based art. His film DESERT PHOSfate weaves through narratives of sand particles, plants, people and minerals displacement. His international exhibitions include the Helsinki Biennial, Finland, Luleå Biennial, Sweden and recently the California African American Museum, USA. His works brought the Sahrawi cause and story to art spaces and institutions worldwide. He was recently awarded the Prince Claus Fund award “Cultural and Artistic Response to the Environmental Crisis”.

Elektra Stampoulou engages in art and research. Her practice mainly develops around questions related to narrative, dissemination, iterability, the undecidable, and the enchanting. Employing time-dependent processes, various media, and often olfactory components, she attempts to explore among others, shared experience, agency, indeterminacy, and the digressive. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Athens School of Fine Arts on an IKY scholarship. She holds a BA in English literature from NKUA, an integrated MFA in visual arts from ASFA, and an MPhil in ethics from NKUA.

Ayesha is an interdisciplinary artist and facilitator born and raised in London. Using their background in jewellery as a conduit for speculating ontological relationships, they explore animism and mediums and messages to express anti-colonial wisdom, decontextualised adornment and mysterious materials – past and futures –  that float in open ended and ongoing dialogues between the body and psycho-magic states.

Their practice is led by symbiosis between the cosmos and conditions of consciousness – merging bodies with other bodies both human and not, to somehow locate oneself not just in the world but of it. Figurative forms dance in repetitions illustrating cyclical and divine glitters in nature collapsing time around us. 

They developed a series of speculative alchemical objects (Morley College Scholarship 2024) that considers change and rage through plantcestors and misappropriated symbolic fantasies made through an explorative aniconic design practice with each piece made using copper finished in natural patinas with fire, water and soil.

Ongoing and previous awards and residences include: Blackhorse Road Maker in Residence (UK), Feminist Lecture Curatorial Programme (UK), Arebyte X Goldsmiths University Artist in Residence (UK) and Morley College Jewellery Scholarship (UK).

Jane Théau’s art practice encompasses sculpture and installation, collaboration with performers, curation, and the facilitation of community art projects.  She works with media as weighty and permanent as bronze and as ephemeral as performance but returns always to that most tactile medium: textiles. Jane completed a PhD on textiles and tactility in contemporary art at the Australian National University and has a Masters of International Affairs from Columbia University and a Bachelor of Applied Science from the University of Technology Sydney. She is the founder of Textiles Sydney, past President of the Willoughby Art Centre and a sustainability activist. Awards Jane has received include the Australian Design Centre Award, the Rookwood Sculpture Prize, the Grace Cossington Smith Early Career Award and residencies at Hill End and Bundanon. Her lace portraits featured onstage in Sue Healey’s On View: Panorama Suite which toured Japan, Sydney and Hong Kong in 2020-21.

Montana Torrey is an artist, researcher, and educator. Her current doctoral research explores how expanded painting and printmaking can be used as a tool to investigate the geological and the archeological imaginary via overlapping temporal and spatial scales. Through this practice-based approach, she examines the intersections of palimpsests, material traces, weather, and time.

Montana received a BFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and a MFA from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She has been an artist-in-residence at Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, Catwalk Institute, and the Frank Lloyd Wright School of Architecture, among others. In addition, Montana has taught at Chiang Mai University, Lane College, UNC-Chapel Hill, and North Carolina Wesleyan University.

Marina Otero Verzier is an architect and researcher whose work sits at the intersection of critical spatial practices, ecology, technology, and activism. In 2022, she received the Harvard GSD’s Wheelwright Prize for a project on the future of data storage. She is a Lecturer in Architecture at Harvard GSD and Dean’s Visiting Assistant Professor at GSAPP, Columbia University, New York, where she leads the ‘Data Mourning’ clinic, an educational initiative focused on the intersection between digital infrastructures and climate catastrophe. She collaborated with the Supercomputing Center of the DIPC to develop alternative models for storing data, such as the project Computational Compost, first presented at Tabakalera. Otero was also invited by the Ministry of Science, Technology, Knowledge, and Innovation to participate as an expert in the development of Chile’s first National Data Centers Plan, together with “Resistencia SocioAmbiental – Quilicura” and other local communities on the front lines of extractivism. Otero was the Head of the MA Social Design Masters at Design Academy Eindhoven (2020-2023) and  Director of Research at Het Nieuwe Instituut (2015 to 2022). She  has curated exhibitions such as ‘Wet Dreams’ at Mayrit, CentroCentro (2024), ‘Compulsive Desires: On Lithium Extraction and Rebellious Mountains’ at Galería Municipal do Porto (2023), ‘Work, Body, Leisure’ at the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale (2018), and ‘After Belonging’ at the Oslo Architecture Triennale (2016).  Otero is the author of En las Profundidades de la Nube (2024), a book on data storage and sovereignty in the AI era. The book proposes new paradigms and aesthetics for data storage, integrating architecture, preservation, and digital culture.  She has co-edited Automated Landscapes (2023), Lithium: States of Exhaustion (2021), More-than-Human (2020), Architecture of Appropriation (2019), Work, Body, Leisure (2018), among others.

Born in England in 1986, Anna Voke works between Paris and the Alps in France. After studying art history at the University of East Anglia (BA, MA), she trained in ceramics in Germany for three years. She then worked in numerous wood-firing and salt-glazing studios throughout Europe, before setting up her personal studio in 2018. She is currently completing a practice-based PhD under the direction of Professors Antonella Tufano and Sophie Fétro at the Institut Acte, Université Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne. Her doctoral research focuses on the interplay of the notions of crisis and chance in contemporary ceramic practices. She has taught ceramics in art schools since 2017, and is currently responsible for the ceramic studio at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-arts de Paris where is an elected member of the Research Council. She is currently leading a ceramic material research project on glacial clays funded by the Beaux-Arts Paris.

Charlotte Moore (Cornwall, UK) explores how botanical life reclaims & adapts to post-industrial, climate-stressed landscapes. With previous research supported by IASPIS & Linnaeus University, her upcoming project for British Ceramics Biennial traces speculative plant mutations in response to increasing wildfires in Cornwall through ceramic archiving, scent & digital wildflower modelling. Her installations translate ecological data into spatial forms speculating on future floral communities.

Rosa Whiteley (London, UK) is a spatial researcher with a background in Architecture. She is a current fellow at Onassis Air in Athens, where she is researching wildfire ecologies & atmospheres. She co-leads Architectural Design Studio: Dry-Spells at the RCA, London. Since 2019, she has been part of Turner Prize nominated Cooking Sections, which examines how the world is organised through food.

Tintin Wulia is an artist and Senior Researcher at the HDK-Valand – Academy of Art and Design, University of Gothenburg, Sweden, and an Honorary Senior Research Fellow at the Slade School of Fine Art, University College London, UK. She explores the intricate power dynamics of societal and geopolitical borders as interfaces, through a multi-disciplinary approach that includes text, video, sound, painting, drawing, dance, installation, performance, and public intervention, tackling these subjects both pragmatically and conceptually. Since 2000 she has contributed to 200 international exhibitions and publications, including Istanbul Biennale (2005), Moscow Biennale (2011), Sharjah Biennale (2013), and most recently the 2021 Chicago Architecture Biennale, as well as a solo pavilion at the 57th Venice Biennale in 2017. Her text publication includes a chapter contribution to the award-winning edited volume Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (New York: Routledge, 2022). Her works are part of prominent public collections worldwide, including the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum and He Xiangning Art Museum. Currently she is Principal Investigator of the Swedish Research Council-funded Protocols of Killings: 1965, Distance, and the Ethics of Future Warfare (2021-24) and the European Research Council-funded Things for Politics’ Sake: Aesthetic Objects and Social Change/THINGSTIGATE (2023-28).

Elsa Casanova is a designer and artistic researcher exploring the structures that shape our cultural imaginaries, using image production, object hacking and performance as her main research/production tools. She has recently been an artist-in-residency in Matadero developing The Banality of Talking about the Weather, an investigation on the influence of meteorological representations in our relation with the climate crisis. The project has been awarded by Barcelona Crea and Sala d’Art Jove grants, and has been presented in TBA21 and Miró Foundation.

Víctor Betriu is a PhD candidate in Philosophy at Wageningen University, where he critically analyses the concept of responsible innovation through Simondon and Derrida. His academic interests revolve around deconstruction and poststructuralist thought in relation to the philosophy and ethics of technology. He also has experience in critical and speculative design practices at DOES Work.

They have been collaborating to explore the productive tensions between philosophy and art.

Anı Ekin Özdemir is a writer and artist working with poetry, performance, and printed matter. Her practice moves through porous bodies, intimate ecologies, and the textures of relation—thinking with water, weather, and pollution as forces that blur boundaries between inside and outside, self and world. Working across fragment, image, and poetry, she treats language as a site of permeability and entanglement, where writing becomes affective, unstable, embodied. Ekin is currently based in Antwerp, where she is pursuing a PhD in Arts at LUCA School of Arts & KU Leuven. Her text-based contribution to PARSE, Burning Bright, turns toward heat—as sensation, excess, and transformative intensity.