Lectures & participants at IMPACT 2023
IMPACT invites artists, practitioners, theoreticians and advanced students from the fields of dance, theater, performance, visual arts, new media, film, music, architecture and other extended practices in art and science, to engage with various research interests, working methods and artistic strategies.
During IMPACT 2023 we had five Assemblies with 15min lectures from each participant, which made the days pretty intense, lots of new information, all interesting and inspiring but up to today still processing it. However, I don’t want to let go by the opportunity to share a small bio from the participants, where you will be able to discover their amazing work.
Sybille Neumeyer is an artist, curator and post-disciplinary researcher based in Berlin. Her practice
includes research about data practices, human-animal relationships and reconnection to biocultural
modes of sensing and being. She will give insights into her work by questioning what sensorial foundations are necessary to address todays systemic failures and how we can return to ecological and social justice by retracing biocultural routes and roots.
Amanda Romero is a Peru-born choreographer and performer based in Cologne. Her interest lies in
the human body as biological matter, as a phenomenon of nature, as a fragile and ephemeral
combination of cells in a specific system. Her presentation will explore how artistic forms can cultivate a profound awareness of our bodies in nature, the nature within us, and the nature we engage with.
Tahila Mintz is an Indigenous Yaqui and Jewish multidisciplinary artist and Founding Executive
Director of NGO (OJI:SDA’ Sustainable Indigenous Futures) based in Spencer, US. She will speak
about healing though land and natural world relationships, focusing on the Ancestral Gratitude Bridge as well as on a community Plant Care Fellowship, which she leads.
Ivan Penov is a musician and sound artist living in Italy. He will present “Lament” a composition for prepared cello and field recordings made in a burnt area after wildfires. The idea behind the
composition for Lament is to explore haunted qualities in sounds as a post-mortem entity by
examining the altered resonances of plants, trees and soil.
Martyna Marciniak is an Polish artist, researcher and architect based in Berlin. She will be discussing the digital aesthetics of fact, based on her recent essay “Aesthetics of Spatial Jurisprudence” by uncovering aesthetics of evidence that became hijacked using examples from art, media and architecture.
Paola Bascón is a Bolivian/Brazilian artist based in London. Her work can be described as an artistic and performative research about how body-based practice and ritual-poetic traditions can subvert the remains of colonial history and the modern understanding of nature. Her practice involves storytelling and somatic practice exploring the material and affective interconnections between humans and minerals. She aims to provide a greater insight into the mineral composition of human bodies, the ancient relationship with the mineral world as sacred entities, as well as its disruption by the project of modernity and colonialism beyond and within Europe.
Marco Kramer is a psychiatrist and postdoctoral researcher living in Germany. He is interested in reality and how differently it is experienced and lived by each individual and argues why new transdisciplinary ways have to be explored that radically burst open our discursive normality.
Connor Cook works as a media artist, researcher and educator in Amsterdam. He will present the Whole Earth Codec, a speculative proposal for a multi-modal AI foundation model trained on non-human, ecological data. The Codec is instead trained on ecological data from planetary sensor networks in order to detect hidden patterns in the biosphere. The project is conceived as an inverted model of the observatory: instead of looking outwards to the cosmos, the Earth observes (pays attention to) itself.
Nath Gélard and Thibaud Guichard
The multi-disciplinary duo h-artlab focuses on the question of ritual, how they create a territory anchorage, bound people, and generate a feeling of belonging using the example of their own rituals that they contribute to put in place at the ZAD of Notre-Dame-des-Landes, where they live.
Yipei Lee is a curator and researcher based in Taipei City and part of SUAVEART, a research-based curatorial institution which focuses on environment, nonhuman perspectives and nonspaces issues in islands, art and life. She is part of their ongoing art-driven urban program “Wagiwagi – Greeting to Nature” which is simultaneously an arts collective as well as a platform and incubator for innovative ideas which responds to environmental issues. The members include ecologists, scientists, plant hunters, landscapers, anthropologists, artists, historians, designers, cultural workers, etc.
Ekaterina Golovko is a researcher and photographer based in Dakar.
Her work focusses on the interwoven workings of the Northern Senegal bush uncovering the human, non-human, animate and non-animate elements and their impact on each other and their surroundings. In her research she tries to explore inter-species cohabitation and tries to find ways offside the anthropocentric thinking.
https://decolonialhacker.org/article/in-between-silence-and-noise
Selenia Marinelli is an Architect Phd and an independent researcher and EU project manager based in Rome. Her research is focused on how architecture can transform and actively impact forms of coexistence. By rethinking production methods and materials towards a more sustainable architecture Selenia Marinelli wants to redefine architecture to create beneficial living-spaces for human and non- human co-existence.
Dan Xu is a doctoral researcher based in The Hague. Her work focusses on multi-species interactive art in which animals, microbiome and plants actively participate in alongside humans. Through this form of art she explores the possibilities and limits of interspecies communication.
Sia Wen Di is a writer and researcher based in Petaling Jaya, Malaysia. Her work focusses on the Semai people, an indigenous group, and their rituals, cosmology and their way of perceiving nature. Opposed to governments around the world, the Semai people have managed to maintain a stable environment and live in balance with nature. Sia Wen Di’s research wants us to reconnect with the Semai’s ancestral knowledge and their cosmology to find solutions for the global climate crisis.
Khaled Alwarea is a Syrian architect and multidisciplinary artist based in Marseille. He is the co- founder and creative director of UV LAB. UV Lab is a creative studio that specializes in public art, using a multidisciplinary approach that includes spatial practices, digital technology, and construction science. Founded on the road between Syria and France in 2014 by architects, designers, and artists who share a passion for artistic expression and ecological responsibility, the studio is committed to collaboration with local communities and to developing sustainable solutions that are informed by social, cultural, and environmental contexts. Through its research and concept development activities, UV Lab aims to create innovative designs that transform inhabited spaces and redefine our experiences of them.
Felipe Shibuya is a Brazillian ecologist and visual artist based in New York. Through his work he tries to connect art and science as a necessary tool to understand and solve ecological and social issues. Focussing on nature’s communication methods from visible colours and sounds to signals humans can’t perceive. Humans, intrinsically part of nature, have grown distant from it, leading to the Anthropocene era. This detachment means overlooking essential messages from biotic and abiotic elements. He explores the UV spectrum and reveals messages from other species to understand our ecosystem role.
Ahnjili ZhuParris is a New York-born, Hong Kong-raised, Netherlands-based data scientist, Ph.D. candidate, artist, and science communicator. In her scientific and artistic research she explores the
multifaceted relationship between AI, surveillance, and how these influences shape our perceptions
and categorizations of the world.
David Turturo works in architecture education and is based in Texas, USA. His research traces the dialectic relationship between the urban and the wild, trying to depict the complex history and the gradual change of the concept of “wilderness” and its impact on politics and society. Based on this, Turturo and his team generate alternative strategies of knowing the world and generate multi-media montages that present alternate futures and new modes of kinship.
Agoston Nagy is an artist and researcher, at home both in art as in academia and is based in Budapest, Hungary. As an artist, Agoston Nagy has been making algorithmic art, building responsive environments using free and open source tools since the early 2000s. In his research he investigates algorithmic thinking, machine intelligence, extended cognition and complex systems through different cultural and artistic approaches.
Wenceslaus Mendes is a documentary filmmaker, researcher and artist based in Bengaluru,Karnataka, India. His work focusses on geospatial indigenous communities and their concerns of land, water, environments, sustainability, inclusivity and climate change. He documents their indigenous knowledge and practices bringing together their rich expertise in the fields mentioned above.
Nancy Awori is a teaching assistant based in Nairobi, Kenya. Her research focusses on the representation of black lesbian, bisexual and queer women in African cinema. Trying to create a safe space for these women, Nancy Aworis work paves a way for them to come forward and tell their story.
Ra’z Salvarita & Elledivine Wood
Ra’z Salvarita is a cross-disciplinary artist based on the island of Panay in the Philippines. His creative endeavors reflect the convergence of the three pillars he primarily works with: creative healing expressions, sustainable sacred ecology and practical mindful spirit vitality.
Elledivine Wood is an artist-writer based on the island of Panay in the Philippines. She is a devoted Disciple of Love; a teacher of conscious breathing technique and an intuitive guide for sessions that require deeper inquiry to birth remembrance into wholeness. She has been invited as international speaker in several events – sharing her journey on healing and awakening.
Constanza Javiera Ruiz is a choreographer and performer born in South America and now based in Cologne, Germany. In her current research she is dealing with the separation and connection between body and landscape, in order to dimension what a sacrifice zone means for the bodies of nature and for human bodies.
Below some moments of the presentations:
