Biographies
contributors
Authors and Editors
Aliens in Green (Bureau d’études, Ewen Chardronnet, Mary Maggic, Julien Maudet, Špela Petrič) is an investigative laboratory and tactical theatre group combating the alien agents of anthropogenic xeno-power. The lab implements intermedia processes that connect open science, DIY bio practices, dietetics, speculative narration, serious games, cultural intelligence and science fiction to generate critical discourse and interventions in the public sphere. One may understand Aliens in Green lab as both a symmetrical and antagonist entity to the ‘Men in Black’. They act as discursive agents dealing with human relations and life forms of a third type. But unlike ‘Men in Black’ who operate secretly and erase people’s memories, Aliens in Green act openly and tactically, allowing earthlings to identify the numerous collusions between capitalist and xeno-political forces.
Lili Carr (born 1986) is an architect who studied at the Architectural Association in London. Her work explores how alternative models of architecture practice can encourage attention to the non-designed ecological effects of designed spatial and material transformation. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Vegetation Under Power’ (co-curated with Maya Errázuriz, Shaiwanti Gupta, Elizabeth Hong, Pierre Klein, Elisabetta Rattalino, Shivani Shedde & Nancy Valladares), Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, Dessau, 2021; ‘Free School of Architecture’ (co-curated with Karina Andreeva, Elisha Cohen & Tessa Forde), WUHO Gallery, Los Angeles, 2018. Recent contributed articles include ‘Infrastructures in the More-Than-Human Anthropocene’ (co-authored with Feifei Zhou and Anna L.Tsing) in KERB Journal of Landscape Architecture 28: Decentre (2020). Carr lives and works between the UK and Amsterdam.
Florian Cramer (born 1969, DE) is a reader in autonomous art and design practices at Willem de Kooning Academy and Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam, the Netherlands. His work focuses on multidisciplinary, self-organized, communal art practices. He is a contributor to artist-run initiatives including the Voluntary Fire Brigade of the Apocalypse, Radio WORM and BananSkole. Recent publications include Artistic Research: Dead on Arrival? Research practices of self-organized collectives versus managerial visions of artistic research (in: The Postresearch Condition, 2021) and Pattern Discrimination (2018) (co-edited with Clemens Apprich, Wendy Hui Kyong Chun and Hito Steyerl). Cramer lives and works in Rotterdam.
Display Distribute is a thematic inquiry, distribution service, now and again exhibition space and sometimes shop founded in Kowloon in 2013. Seeping via the capricious circulation patterns of low-end globalization into other subaltern networks and grammars, recent activities include manoeuvring and reading with the Black Book Assembly, experimental infrastructure LIGHT LOGISTICS, poetic research and archival unit Shanzhai Lyric, the readers’ digest publication CATALOGUE and a peripatetic radio programme of hidden feminist narratives known as Widow Radio Ching.
Baruch Gottlieb (born 1966, CA) is an artist, curator, and writer specialized in data epistemology and techno-aesthetics. Trained as a filmmaker at Concordia University Montreal, he has a doctorate from the University of Arts Berlin where he teaches and runs the Research Institute for Technical Aesthetics (RITA). He curates and contributes to the programme at West Den Haag and is founder, with Steffi Winkler, of flusser.club, an organization dedicated to the work of Vilém Flusser. He is a core member of the Telekommunisten and disnovation.org artist collectives. His latest book is Digital Materialism (Emerald, 2018).
Anja Groten (born 1983, DE) is a designer, researcher, and educator based in Amsterdam. Investigating collectivity in practice, her work revolves around the cross-section of digital and physical media, design and art education and her involvement in different interdisciplinary groups. In 2013 she co-founded the initiative Hackers & Designers, in an attempt to break down the barriers between the two fields by enforcing a common vocabulary through education, hacks, and collaboration. Anja is a PhD candidate at PhDArts, and the consortium Bridging Art, Design and Technology through Critical Making. In 2019 she became course director of the design department at the Sandberg Instituut Amsterdam (Master of the Gerrit Rietveld Academie).
Akiem Helmling (born 1971, DE) is partner and co-founder of the type-collective Underware (underware.nl/) and co-founder of the contemporary art centre West Den Haag. He studied graphic design at the FH Mannheim and type design at the Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. His interest lies in connecting people and challenging them to think through art. Helmling is curator of Alphabetum, the space dedicated to letters, writing, and philosophy at West. Recent projects include: ‘L’écriture avant la lettre’ (2022): ‘Writing Writing’ (2020), ‘Free Emoji’ (2020), ‘Laws of Form’ (2019) and ‘From Typography
to Grammatograhy‘ (2019).
Elaine W. Ho works between the realms of time-based art, language, and urban practice. She is the founder of artist-run project space HomeShop (Beijing, 2008–13) and continues to ask questions about the sociopolitics of syntax, more recently via ongoing collaborations with Amy Suo Wu, Display Distribute, and • • PROPAGANDA DEPARTMENT. Their work has been presented on a boat named Eleonore, docked along the Danube River (Linz, 2016), at the Singapore Biennial (2019), Hamburger Bahnhof (2017), Seoul Mediacity Biennale (2017), Power Station of Art (2016), Guangdong Times Museum (2021/2015), and on various street corners, among other places.
Thalia Hoffman (born 1979, DE) is an visual artist working in film, performance and public interventions in the area she lives in, east of the Mediterranean. Studied at ACPA, PhDArts programme at Leiden University, and currently teaches at the University of Haifa and the KABK. Her work strives to be involved in its surroundings and engage people to look, listen, and feel their socio-political landscape with attention. Recent exhibitions include: ‘Art has a Smell’, The Farm Gallery, Holon, Israel (2021); Experiments in Cinema, Albuquerque (NM), (2020); Striving for Touch performance festival, Jaffa (2020). Thalia Hoffman, lives and works in Jaffa–Tel Aviv.
Jatiwangi art Factory (2005) is a community that embraces contemporary arts and cultural practices as part of the local life discourse in a rural area. Their manifold activities, always involving the local public, include a video festival, a music festival, a residency programme, a discussion series, and a TV and radio station. At the beginning of the twentieth century, its clay industry made Jatiwangi the biggest roof tile producing region in Southeast Asia. A hundred years later, in 2005, using the same clay, JaF encouraged the people of Jatiwangi to create a collective awareness and identity for their region through arts and cultural activity. In doing so, JaF tries to cultivate clay with more dignity and to raise the collective happiness of the community.
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Frans-Willem Korsten (born 1959, NL) holds the chair ‘Literature and Society’ by special appointment at the Erasmus School of Philosophy, and works at the Leiden University Centre for the Arts in Society. He has published monographs on the Dutch baroque, theatricality and sovereignty and has written about the relation between literature, art, capitalism, and law. He participates in the NWO funded programme ‘Playing Politics: Media Platforms, Making Worlds’, and most recently published Art as an Interface of Law and Justice: Affirmation, Disturbance, Disruption; (2021).
Klaas Kuitenbrouwer (born 1964, NL) is a researcher, curator, educator. He studied History at the University of Utrecht. Currently he is Senior Researcher at Het Nieuwe Instituut in Rotterdam, where he initiated the Zoöp project. He works at the crossroads of culture, technology and ecology, with a special focus on the intersection of knowledge practices. Recent exhibitions include ‘Neuhaus—Temporary Academy for more-than-human Knowledge’, Het Nieuwe Instituut. Rotterdam, 2019, ‘Gardening Mars’, Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam, 2018. He co-edited Vertical Atlas (2022) together with Nyanjala Nyabola, Mi You, Amal Khalaf, Leonardo Dellanoce, and Arthur Steiner. He lives and mostly works in Amsterdam.
Pia Louwerens (born 1990, NL) is an artistic researcher, artist and writer. She has completed a post-master and fellowship programme at a.pass (advanced performance and scenography studies), Brussels. In 2021 she self-published her book I’m Not Sad, The World Is Sad, an autotheoretical, semi-fictional account of the increasingly paranoid relationship between an artistic researcher and the art institution where she is ‘embedded’. Next to her artistic practice Louwerens has written texts for De Witte Raaf, Metropolis M, Tubelight and Het Parool. Pia Louwerens lives and works in Brussels.
Lilia Mestre (born 1968, PT) is a performing artist and researcher working mainly in collaboration with other artists. She is currently the artistic coordinator of a.pass (Advanced Performance and Scenography Studies). Mestre works with assemblages, scores, inter-subjective set ups and other chance-induced processes as an artist, curator, dramaturge and co-learner. She is interested in forms of sociability created by artistic practice and she composes with semiotic agencies to explore these in her work. Mestre works and lives in Brussels.
Dani Ploeger (NL) is an artist and cultural theorist who explores situations of conflict and crisis on the fringes of the world of high-tech consumerism. He is currently a Research Fellow at The Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, University of London, and a Fellow at V2_Lab for the Unstable Media in Rotterdam. His artwork has been exhibited in museums, galleries and biennales worldwide, including ZKM Centre for Art and Media Karlsruhe, Venice Architecture Biennale and the Nairobi National Museum. He is the author of Deserted Devices and Wasted Fences: Everyday Technologies in Extreme Circumstances (2021).
Kate Rich (born 1968, AU) is an artist, trader and feral economist. She is currently undertaking PhD research into the ‘Feral MBA’, a radically different training course in business for artists and others, at the University of the West of England. She is part of the finance team at Bristol’s Cube Microplex and co-founder of the Institute of Experiments with Business (Ibex) with transnational network FoAM. Other active business interests include: Cube-Cola, co-manufactured with Kayle Brandon (since 2004); and Feral Trade, a sole trader grocery business (since 2003). Rich lives and works in Bristol UK and temporarily in Tasmania, Australia.
Femke Snelting (born 1969, NL) develops projects at the intersection of design, feminisms, and Free Software. With Seda Guerses, Miriyam Aouragh and Helen Pritchard, she runs The Institute for Technology in the Public Interest. With Jara Rocha, she studies material cultures of quantified presence in the disobedient action research project Volumetric Regimes and computational imaginations of rock formations with the Underground Division (Helen Pritchard, Jara Rocha). Femke supports artistic research at PhDArts (Leiden), MERIAN (Maastricht) and a.pass (Brussels). She occasionally teaches at XPUB (Rotterdam).
Olu Taiwo is a senior lecturer at the University of Winchester. Olu teaches in Street Arts, Visual Development and Contemporary Performance in a combination of real and virtual formats. He has a background in Fine Art, Street Dance, African percussion, physical theatre and the martial arts. He has performed in national and international contexts pioneering concepts surrounding practice as research. This includes how practice as a research strategy can explore the nature of performance and the relationships between ‘effort’, ‘performance’, and ‘performative actions’ as they occur in different arenas. Consequently, his aim is—through the use of practice—to propagate twenty-first century issues concerning the interaction between the body, identity, audience, street and technology in an age of Globalization. His interests include: Practice as Research, Visual design, Movement, Theatre, Street Arts, New technology, Trans-cultural studies, Geometry, Philosophy and Religious studies.
Janneke Wesseling (born 1955, NL) is an art historian and art critic. She obtained a doctoral degree at Leiden University with a dissertation on contemporary art and reception aesthetics. Wesseling is Professor in the Practice and Theory of Research in the Visual Arts, Faculty of Humanities, Leiden University (NL). She is director of PhDArts, international doctorate programme in visual art and design, at the Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) of Leiden University, and head of the Research Group in Art Theory & Practice at the University of the Arts, The Hague. Wesseling writes as an art critic for the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad.
Feifei Zhou (born 1992, CN) is a spatial and visual designer and an Associate Lecturer for MA and BA Architecture at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London. Her work explores spatial, cultural, and ecological impacts of the industrialized built and natural environment. Recent publications include: Feral Atlas: The More-Than-Human Anthropocene (co-edited with Anna L.Tsing, Jennifer Deger, Alder Keleman Saxena) (2020). Recently contributed articles include ‘Noticing the Anthropocene’ in Inflection Vol. 08 Presence: Journal of the Melbourne School of Design (2021); ‘Root Seeker’ in e-flux (2021); ‘Architects Draw the Anthropocene’ (co-authored with Lili Carr and Anna L.Tsing) in Perspecta 53: Onus Yale School of Architecture Journal (2020). Zhou lives and works in London.
Z. Blace (born 1976, SFR Yugoslavia) is an anti-disciplinary artivist, cultural worker, and queer instigator, who studied at Fine Arts Academies in Zagreb and Sarajevo, also with Keiko Sei & Vasulkas (FaVU Brno) and Nan Hoover (Summer Academy Salzburg). Ze was media/design researcher at Jan van Eyck Academie and doctoral candidate in PhDArts at Royal Academy of Art, The Hague. Ze is (in+) consistently working (in-)between fields of contemporary culture and arts, digital technology and media, community sports and activism—by cross-pollinating queer/commoning perspectives and embodied experiences with thinking and doing methods across different networks and contexts.
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Other Contributors
Lucas Evers is trained in fine arts and teaching at Maastricht Academy of Fine Arts and Design and he studied political science at the University of Amsterdam. He worked at De Balie, Centre for Culture and Politics and the Melkweg in Amsterdam, programming cinema, new media, and politics. He is currently Head of Programme of Make at Waag–Technology & Society, where he is actively involved in several projects that concern the interactions between the arts and sciences and contemporary maker culture. He is co-editor of Open Design Now: Why Design Cannot Remain Exclusive (opendesignnow.org). Waag operates at the intersection of science, technology and the arts, focusing on technology as an instrument of social change, guided by the values of fairness, openness, and inclusivity. Make researches materials, material practices, as well as the social and ecological meaning and future impact of these materials and processes.
Coordinator of the Project
Emily Huurdeman (born 1985, NL) is a Dutch artist, researcher and educator. As an artist she works with video and performance. Her research revolves around theorizing and practicing essaying as unmethodological method for artistic research. She presented her work at multiple international conferences and has published an academic article on the topic. As a teacher she works at multiple art institutions in the Netherlands. She is the coordinator of the Lectorate Art, Theory & Practice and the NWO/SIA funded research project Making Matters at ACPA Leiden University, both headed by Prof. dr. Janneke Wesseling. She is also the co-initiator of Café Chercher, and art café for unfinished art and research projects.
Partner Institutes Research Project
Academy of Creative and Performing Arts / PhDArts
PhDArts, an international doctorate programme in art and design, is a collaboration between Leiden University Academy of Creative and Performing Arts (ACPA) and the Royal Academy of Art (KABK) in
The Hague.
Het Nieuwe Instituut
Het Nieuwe Instituut hosts exhibitions and debates on architecture, design and digital culture in Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and develops new practices that combine these fields.
Waag
Waag Future Lab contributes to the research, design, and development of a sustainable, just society by collectively researching emerging technology and questioning underlying cultural assumptions; by experimenting with and designing alternatives on the basis of public values; by developing an open, fair, and inclusive future together with civil society.
West Den Haag
West Den Haag presents contemporary art in a brutalist Breuer building, offers artists space to develop new work and, through a broad dialogue, places it in a social context.
Willem de Kooning Academy
In its research programme Autonomous Practices, Willem de Kooning Academy (WdKA), an art and design school in Rotterdam, investigates new concepts of autonomy and self-organization in contemporary arts.
Designers
Anja Groten, Heerko van der Kooij, Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak (Hackers & Designers)
Hackers & Designers is a non-profit initiative organizing activities at the intersection of technology, design and art. By creating shared moments of hands-on learning H&D stimulates collaboration across disciplines, technological literacy, and different levels of expertise. H&D members at the time of this publication are Loes Bogers, André Fincato, Selby Gildemacher, Anja Groten, Heerko van der Kooij, Juliette Lizotte, Karl Moubarak, Christine Kappé, and Pernilla Manjula Philip.
Publisher
Valiz is an independent international publisher, addressing contemporary developments in art, design, architecture, and urban affairs. Their books provide critical reflection and interdisciplinary inspiration in a broad and imaginative way, often establishing a connection between cultural disciplines and socio-economic questions. Valiz is headed by Astrid Vorstermans and Pia Pol, and is based in Amsterdam.