Jessie Breslau

Jessie Breslau (she/her), originally from New York City, is now based in Amsterdam where she works at the intersection of agriculture, community, and land-use theory. Jessie and a friend have a plot of land just north of Amsterdam that they consider a social and agricultural experiment where they put some of the theory that they ponder into physical practice. Their 2022 season ended with a free commons dinner with food from the land for 60 of their neighbors.This season they are expanding their programming and hope to engage a broader community of people and plants.

Hadriana Casla

Hadriana Casla is a storyteller. She develops communication strategies using different formats and media, looking for original ways to activate desire, action and curiosity.Through her work -collaborative and individual- she explores the potential of micro-stories, those that emerge from collective memory and everyday experience, and contribute to the construction of a common past and future. 

Currently, through GRIGRI, a platform dedicated to cultural research, creation and production, its practice focuses on the creation of collective narratives across community processes. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Madrid UCM, specialized in film and documentary creation at the HBK Saar, Saarbrücken, Germany, and an independent postgraduate degree in Contemporary Art, Agroecology and Territory at the Inland Academy, Madrid

Xiyao Chen

As an interdisciplinary artist and researcher, Xiyao (b.1992, south of the Tropic of Cancer, currently based in London) situates their works in the expanded field of digital anthropology, moving images, sonic sculpture and agroecology through socially engaged and participatory works. They are currently nurturing an embodied practice that values care over extraction, challenging eco-social injustices by focusing on more-than-human interspecies kinship and the affective turn in ecology. Their latest project focuses on the residual stories/histories and sonic resilience from the metabolism of soil and fallow land, as part of the Soil Futures programme supported by Arts Catalyst and the Allotment Club in the UK. In parallel with their practice, they also teach participatory research at the University of the Arts London and Royal College of Art in London.

Katy Dammers

Katy Dammers supports the visual and performing arts field as a curator, producer, and writer committed to integrity, equity, and care. Her practice focuses on contemporary somatic practices, the intersection of art and ecology, and performance crafted in dialogue with community, site, and legacy. Over the past decade she has worked in the United States at The Kitchen (Assistant Curator + Archive Manager), FringeArts (Artistic Producer), and Jacob’s Pillow (Interim Producing Director). She is continuing to work with Jacob’s Pillow as the Project Manager for the construction of a new theatre for dance, inclusive of design facilitation, community engagement, and organizational oversight. Dammers also worked independently with artists as a creative administrator, and was the General Manager for choreographers Rashaun Mitchell + Silas Riener from 2014-2022, in addition to organizing projects with Jennifer Monson, Donna Uchizono, and Tere O’Connor. A 2017 writing fellow at the US National Center for Choreography, her essays about dance have been published in The Brooklyn Rail, Movement Research Performance Journal, In Dance, On the Boards, and an edited volume from The University of Akron Press, among others. Dammers will soon complete an MFA in Curating from Goldsmiths in London and is also a recent graduate of the Inland Academy, an experimental program focused on territory and contemporary art, in Spain. She now works as an independent curator, with recent projects including a contemporary art cabaret at CCA Goldsmiths and an upcoming project on ephemeral performance and water with the Thames Festival Trust.

Grace Gloria Denis

Grace Gloria Denis’ work converges agricultural research with interactive installation, braiding together edible matter and sound to propose a convivial and comestible approach to critical inquiry. Implementing the meal as both a medium and a pedagogical tool, her work refers to participatory action research models, engaging in collaborations with actors in local food systems utilizing agroecological or permacultural techniques. Her work considers the quotidien interaction with the esculent realm as a poetic tool of transmission, inviting a reimagination of sensorial relationships to consumption practices that prioritize reciprocity. Grace received her BFA from Cal Arts and her MFA from TRANS— at HEAD Genève, with a focus on critical pedagogy and socially engaged practice. Her post-graduate studies include ETH Zurich’s World Food Systems Center, Inland Academy, and agroecology at Las Cañadas. Her work has been exhibited in Mexico, France, Switzerland, Spain, Germany, Greece, the United States, and Morocco. She has taught and developed non-profit arts education programs for various institutions and recently published the book In, From, and With: Exploring Collaborative Survival. 

Larissa Figueiredo

Larissa Figueiredo (she/her) is a Brazilian filmmaker and educator. She studied Literature, Cinema and Visual Arts between Brazil, Fran- ce, Argentina and Switzerland, where she took classes with artists such as Miguel Gomes, Albert Serra and Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Larissa is an alumini from Locarno Film Academy and Berlinale Talents. The Bull, her first feature documentary, received the Visions Sud Est Award and had its world premiere at the 44th Rotterdam IFF. It was screened in dozens of international film events and was shown in Brazilian theaters and TV. Larissa worked as screenwriter, director, producer and editor in many different projects, from short films screened in international festivals to TV series for channels such as Disney, HBO, Canal Curta!, CinebrasilTv, and Canal Brasil. As an educator, Larissa headed many workshops and taught in universities in Brazil and abroad, such as the EICTV, in Cuba, and Calarts, in USA. In 2021, she has started the Cazumba School project, which propose online cinema courses with a pedagogical approach based on decolonial perspectives. She is current a PhD candidate in the Lisbon University based on the possible relations between agroforest, Encantaria and the labor conditions in art and cinema. Larissa believes in the re-enchantment of the world as an affective, political, and ethical mode of existence. 

Hussam Ghosheh

Hussam Ghosheh (he/him) is a theatre activist, writer, and director, born and raised in Jerusalem. He is currently the director of Khalil Sakakini cultural Center in Ramallah- Palestine. After obtaining his degree of Arts in Media, Hussam started his early practical research in the development of cultural traditional art. In his artistic practice between Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Berlin, he commits to developing and leading participatory and community arts projects, combining traditional and contemporary artistic methods. He employs the intense surrounding contexts in the interest of the work he creates. In 2015, Hussam co-founded Basta Theatre; an experimental socially engaged street theatre, where he voluntarily worked as an artistic director. He also participated in establishing several other key cultural and artistic projects locally and internationally. 

Tara Lasrado

Tara Lasrado is a producer and curator particularly interested in working on collective, experimental, and transdisciplinary collaborative works. her practice-based experiences permeate and confronts institutions. to find itself in public spaces, no-spaces, agricultural fields and empty theaters. since 2013 tara has worked in different constellations on production, curatorial, pedagogical and community works. on/with land-based; non-white; performative; and resistance practices.

She has been practicing with experi_theater and Blackbox since 2020 and is currently part of the experi_betriebsbüro working on production for various works of BIPOC* artists and collectives. tara is co-producer of «under the mango tree» a self-organised gathering of unlearning and decolonising practices. in 2020 she co-founded arvae to cultivate art, science, community collaborations that question practices of transdisciplinary exchange and production(s). she is currently in a research residency at SAE Greenhouse, centering decolonial feminist perspectives on agroecology. tara is also part of «with the fields», a trans-territorial collective with links to – and activations within – rural areas of the global south. together they reflect on sustaining land-based artistic and community practices, constructing common bases from which to speak about rurality, decolonisation, coast, biota and food.

Martina Manterola

Martina Manterola (b. 1995) holds a degree in economics from Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de México and a diploma in agroforestry systems. She specializes in analysing how the hierarchy of knowledge translates into losses of doing and knowing. Her practice investigates non-hegemonic knowledge. Within colectivo amasijo, she is developing the Complex Systems of Daily Life project, an archive of narratives through which she measures territorial degradation. For this, she has generated indicators to measure climate change from the narratives of the women close to the land who make up the amasijo network. Her relation to contemporary art has caused her distinctions to be organized around a reflective thought of the society to which she belongs. It has allowed a space of freedom to reclaim the creative capacity to imagine new possible worlds. 

Cassidy McKenna

Cassidy McKenna (b.1992) (she/her) is a British-Irish writer, farmhand & herbalist interested in god, intimacy and wonder. Offering her poly-erotic practices as conduits, she is committed to the collective reimagining of post-collapse futures that will be birthed, not from a delusional obsession with self-sufficiency, but from an honouring of the shared-sovereignty that seeds from the sincere understanding of the interconnectivity of all beings, human and otherwise. Faithful to her community and to curiosity, she is dedicated to a lifetime of honing skills that empower her to be of dedicated service as a story-weaver, bridge-builder, artist, lover, food grower and gatherer, medicine maker and sharer and, first and foremost, friend.

Mariana Murcia

Mariana Murcia (she/her) artist, born and raised in Colombia, living in Basel for the past three years, where she completed a master degree in art. She has been an artist for a long time and my practi- ce expands in many ways. She likes being part of collective proces- ses to unlearn and make with others; since 2010 she has been part of an artist-led platform called Laagencia, which focuses our inte- rests in ways of making schools. Her personal practice and re- search is based on questions dealing with the limits and superposi- tions of at least two different geographies, hers and the one she is inhabiting, in order to open a way to introduce specific thought forms, putting her body as a physical system, and her own experience in the center of it to unlearn its anthropomorphic meaning. If the landscape is unfamiliar from her standing perspective, how can she reverse this relation by being unfamiliar to the presence of the lands- cape? She has been taking different approaches to introduce herself into unfamiliar environments through sound and video, but for the past year she found in the North Atlantic Ocean a method in which she went deeper. To float in different sources of water, fresh and salty, has become a habit that opens up a language to describe and think with a place. 

Jean Ni

Jean Ni (they/she) is a habitual researcher and avid seeker of stories who advocates for spatial and social justice through care-based relational practices. Engaging land and bodies as storytelling apparatuses, Jean seeks to foster curiosity through deep explorations of under-acknowledged historical narratives, radical feminist thinking, and uncanny natural phenomena. 

Jean’s experience spans across outdoor recreation and therapy, education, and community-engaged landscape architectural design. They are currently a PhD candidate at the University of Sassari, researching the role of traditional knowledge in biocultural networks for green infrastructural placemaking in northern Sardinia.

Hannes Norr

I am an agronomist and gardener working at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences with the Convention on biological diversity article 8j and 10c. The aim with these articles is to preserve and maintain knowledge, innovations and practices of indigenous and local communities and protect and encourage customary sustainable use of biological resources in accordance with traditional cultural practices that are compatible with conservation and sustainable use. Beside from the academy, I manage a small farm in UNESCO area «East Vättern Scarp Landscape Biosphere reserve», which is placed in Småland (south Sweden). It’s a distinct landscape in the borderland of forest and arable land, that has emerged as a result of the topography and user tradition. I sometimes also do projects in the artistic fields to raise issues on the rural and natural resources connected to the place where I live and work, to be an active part of the changes that take place here over time.

Kibandu Pello-Esso

Kibandu Pello-Esso, is a Togolese-Swedish artist and spatial designer based in Stockholm, Sweden. His practice is focused on spatial design research. So far he has examined various typologies of spatiality’s, from well-developed urban public spaces to rural spaces. He is  interested in nature/culture, modern/primitive, private/public dichotomies and in defining and redefining certain established notions of our common living spaces. He takes his starting point in current discourses and, through design as a method, articulates forms, spatiality’s which then allow us to get closer to these discourses. He is interested in micro-narratives and also in counter-narratives.

Among many academic itineraries, Kibandu Pello-Esso holds a master in spatial design from Konstfack where he had been guest tutoring. He is further taking part in the postmaster education Decolonize architecture at Royal institute of art in Stockholm.

Dharmendra Prasad 

Dharmendra was born in-between stories, discrimination, hierarchies, chaos and silen- ce, full of winds and dusts, without any address, his practices between the fields of Gangatic plains in Bihar to the villages, water bodies and rainforests of Assam, India. Dharmendra is a follower and observer in the fields. He follows ants to cultivate slow- ness and harvest imagination, memories, times, non-extractive philosophies and toil, that are stored as residue’s in the backyard of life’s goal.

Dharmendra co-founded Assam based Anga Art Collective in 2010. The collective prac- tice through Geographical specificities with emphasises on the dissemination and distribution of collective power.
The collective initiated kNOw School (a nomadic post discipline pedagogy) and Granary (a mobile archive and multi – spatial temporal community library) as its central projects. Dharmendra initiated Harvest School in 2019. The school practices harvest and non-ex- tractive ways of living as philosophical take off points. The School is inspired from his grandfather (Hiralal Prasad) non extractive life as farmer in Nadaon Village.

His on-going project Carebioshphere (2020) maps threshing floors, mango and Mahuwa trees and stages of farming and farm memories in Bhojpur region of Bihar. The project explores the non-human and non-living as experts and pedagogues. The project involves children and old age farmers. Dharmendra lives and works in Buxar and Guwahati, India. 

Nickie Sigurdsson

Nickie Sigurdsson (she/her) is a Danish artist and alumni from the Jan Van Eyck Academie (NL) with an educational and practical background in agriculture. Her artistic practice and research deals with the intricacies around land and memory and takes into use tools such as the practice of rituals as a way of activating situated knowledge while seeking to generate modes of collectivity and mutability. She works across disciplines, often collaboratively and/or with a specific context. 

From 2018 to 2022 she took part in Soft Protest Digest, a research platform centred around food sovereignty and regenerative food systems co-founded together with Robin Bantigny and Jérémie Rentien-Lando. Central to their work was an experimentation with the meal as a container for public dialogue related to the planetary crisis and exhaustive paradigms as well as an engagement with actors in agricultural systems. Their work is published through a self-generated Wikipedia website and several podcasts.

Antonio Vincenzo Sotgiu

Antonio Vincenzo Sotgiu (he/him) born and based in Sardinia. He studied urban and regional planning and currently works as a freelance territorial designer, with a focus on dry stone artifacts. Currently he is also a PhD fellow in Agricultural Science (University of Sassari), with a research and project on the ecological restoration practices in the Mediterranean context and the importance of educational and practical training for local knowledge transmission.

In 2018 he started the project Foghiles, placed in Semèstene in Sardinia countryside, which aims to restore and reclaim narratives, practices and collective celebrations beyond the folklorisation of places and traditions. 

Jens Strandberg

Jens Strandberg is best defined as full-time-unemployed-artist. He spends most of his time in unemployment offices, claiming to be an artist, no-one believes him, he no longer believes it much himself. He sometimes goes on residency, which he sees as a holiday from unemployed life. He has developed an intense aversion to work and a rampant joy towards laziness. As a living contradiction he has decided to no longer strive to take part in an art world that does not seem to want him as its guest, instead he has shift his focus towards rejected material, rejected people and things that tend to disappear from view. Although this lifestyle would, in societal terms, be defined as unproductive or even bad, he remains optimistic and sees this as a possibility to concentrate his efforts on unionising as a form of therapeutic empowerment using an ever evolving suitcase of psychological artifacts that has thoroughly been rejected by every possible funding body.

Nahla Tabbaa

Nahla Tabbaa is an artist whose practice explores tensions between the urban and the organic,

the beautiful and the grotesque. Sensitive to the self-organising agency of materials, she

adventures into the world of immateriality and the intangible through experiments in alchemy and combining elements from the organic and inorganic. Her methods are intentionally slow-paced, meditative and labour intensive and permeate strands of her everyday life to heal and harmonise her otherwise fast-paced life.

She earned her MA in Curatorial Practice from the Bath School of Art and Design (2012), and

her BFA in Sculpture from Central Saint Martin’s College of Art and Design (2009). She

previously led and developed the community programme at Sharjah Art Foundation, and has

developed education projects independently and in collaboration with institutions including

Art Jameel, Warehouse 421, and the Beacon House National Trust University. She was

previously a culinary navigator and researcher at Frying Pan Adventures; is the co-founder of

The Alchemy of Dyeing; Forsa School; a critical and professional programme for artists and

Daftar Asfar; a sketchbook publishing collective. Her work has been presented at 421 (2022), Art Dubai (2021), the 8th cohort of the Salama Bint Hamdan Emerging Artists Fellowship (2021), Jameel Arts Centre Park Projects (2021) and is represented by Beyyn. In the culinary world she has led performance dinners and explorations at 421 in collaboration with Moza Almatrooshi, Al Serkal Avenue, Myocum and Amman Design Week, and has curated Sufra with Frying Pan Adventures and Rewilding the Kitchen with Alserkal Online. She has written for Alserkal Online, INLAND Academy, The Confused Arab and East East World.

Nahla is currently a guest resident at Alserkal Arts Foundation curating Rewilding the Kitchen and will earn her culinary degree at the Ballymaloe Cookery School in Ireland later this year.

Valeria Tee Lee

Valerie Tee Lee (b.1995) uses text, textiles, video, oral, and food materials. She embraces the practice of decoloniality and feminist pedagogy through research and works. As an Asian (im)migrant woman in the Global North, the questions of decoloniality are crucial. Decolonizing our (linear and dominant) narratives and history/herstory. She uses critical, feminist, and decolonial pedagogy to make questions about it. Also, she use it to learn and listen more about (subaltern) voices and (invisible) labors. Labor such as maintenance, care, domesticity which femini- zed and racialized. The practice (gesture) of care can be seen as an alternative form of knowledge production in her practice. She wants to unlearn hegemonic narratives to empower our voices and tongues.

Vilius Vaitiekunas

Vilius Vaitiekunas (b. 1996) is a curator of education and community engagement. He graduated from Fine Arts BA in Minerva Academy, Hanze University of Applied Sciences (NL) as well as a pre-master program in Arts, Culture and Media in University of Groningen (NL) with a focus on Culture and Cognition and Sociology of Arts. He followed selected courses on Cinematography and Directing at Universidad de Monterrey (MEX), taking part in 2020 Rupert’s alternative education program. After curating education at Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2019-2021), in 2021 autumn, Vilius started Visual Cultures, Curating and Contemporary Art MA program in Aalto University (FI) where he intends to develop a conceptual base for his current initiative in Aleknaiciai village. Since 2017, together with his family, friends, colleagues, and locals, Vilius has been developing a culture and education space in a former Aleknaiciai village school building. Here, he aims to create a space for cultural production and education that would target social, economical and cultural affordances of rural environments for cultural reflection and social cohesion, provide space for residencies, events and other cultural production.