Heat in a Geopolitical World

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)

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.

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.

Jessica Hemmings is Editor-in-Chief of PARSE.

She studied Textile Design at the Rhode Island School of Design and Comparative Literature (Africa/Asia) at the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. Her PhD, awarded by the University of Edinburgh is published under the title Yvonne Vera: The Voice of Cloth (kalliope paperbacks: 2008). She is editor of In the Loop: Knitting Now (Black Dog: 2010), The Textile Reader (Berg: 2012 / second edition Bloomsbury: 2023) and author of Warp & Weft (Bloomsbury: 2012). Her editorial and curatorial project Cultural Threads (Bloomsbury: 2015) was accompanied by a travelling exhibition Migrations (2015–17).

Jessica edited PARSE Journal issue 18 Thinking in Motion and co-edited issue 19 Powers of Love with Jyoti Mistry, issue 15 Violence: materiality with Ole Lützow-Holm and issue 11 Intersections with Kristina Hagström-Ståhl and Jyoti Mistry. Recent writing includes the Afterword to Humanitarian Handicrafts: History, Materiality, Trade (Manchester University Press: 2024), “Toward a Minor Textile Architecture” in Entangled Histories of Art and Migration (Intellect: 2024) and “Crafting Extremes in Andreas Eschbach’s The Hair-Carpet Weavers” in Text/Techne (Bloomsbury: forthcoming). From 2020-2023 she was the Rita Bolland Fellow at the Research Centre for Material Culture, the Netherlands and is currently Professor of Craft at HDK-Valand, University of Gothenburg and Professor II at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design.

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.

Shivani Kasumra is a writer, researcher, and museologist from New Delhi. Her work examines the infrastructural regimes of cultural practice, industrial imaginaries, and exhibitionary form in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century India, situating these visual and technical systems within shifting matrices of empire and postcolonial statecraft. Following five years working at the intersection of contemporary art and museum pedagogy in India, she is now a graduate student in History of Art and Architecture at the University of Pittsburgh. 

Onkar Kular is Professor of Design at HDK Valand, Academy of Art & Design, University of Gothenburg. His practice has been disseminated internationally through commissions, exhibitions, education and publications. He has guest-curated exhibitions for The Citizens Archive of Pakistan, Karachi, and the Crafts Council, UK. He was Stanley Picker Fellow in 2016, Artistic Director of Gothenburg Design Festival in 2017, Co-Artistic Director of Luleå Art Biennial in 2022 and curator of the sonic festival, Bass Cultures, How Low Can You Go! Falkenbergs teater, Sweden in 2023. He is the co-editor of Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #6, Earthed Imagination (2023) and Urgent Pedagogies Journal Issue #9, The Right to design (2024).

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

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.

Gerrie van Noord is an editor/curator of publications and educator who has been involved with PARSE Journal since 2016. Her practice focuses on publications as sites for articulation in relation to both artistic and curatorial practices, and she is particularly interested in expanded understandings of collaboration. For Artangel she produced the ‘Afterlives’ publications (1997–2002) and for Book Works she commissioned the ‘Fabrications’ series of co-publications (2006-09). She was managing editor of the critical anthologies The Curatorial Conundrum: What to Study? What to Research? What to Practice?(2016), How Institutions Think: Between Contemporary Art and Curatorial Discourse (2017) and Curating after the Global: Roadmaps to the Present (2019), as well as Between the Material and the Possible: Infrastructural Re-examination and Speculation in Art (2022). She worked with Olivia Plender on the book Rise Early, Be Industrious (2016) and a website of the artist’s entire body of work (2021) and edited Curling Up with Reality (2021), a selection of Isabel Nolan’s writing. Moist recently she co-edited Kathrin Böhm: Art on the Scale of Life (with Paul O’Neill and Mick Wilson, 2023), Not Going It Alone: Collective Curatorial Curating (with Paul O’Neill and Elizabeth Larison, 2024) and Curious (with Paul O’Neill, 2024). Gerrie was a Visiting Lecturer on the MFA at the Glasgow School of Art (2003–15), Associate Lecturer on the MA Arts Policy & Management at Birkbeck, University of London (2006–19) and is now Tutor (Research) on the MA Curating Contemporary Art at the Royal College of Art, London. She has a PhD from Birkbeck, University of London (2021).

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.

Cara Tolmie spends much of her time oscillating between contexts as an artist, musician, performer, DJ, pedagogue and researcher. Her practice at large investigates the complexity of the bind between the voice and body – of how voice can traverse internal and external realities of both the sounder and listener and how it can research various qualities of embodiment, both pleasurable and disorienting. She is currently finishing a PhD at Konstfack, Stockholm, in critical sonic practice. 

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.