Isra Abdou
collaborators
Through its facilitation processes, Spore is working with a network of people, organizations, and communities. Every list of names is inherently incomplete. As with every process, it is constantly growing.
Isra Abdou is an Egyptian artist, educator, activist, art mediator and curator. She primarily works in Berlin, focusing on decolonial structures, diasporic identities, self- and external perception, and wallahy she has a mind of her own.
Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo
Rosa Cordillera A. Castillo is a socio-cultural and public anthropologist and curator working on social justice issues through interdisciplinary research, teaching, and multi-media knowledge transfer and praxis. Straddling academic, artistic, and activist practices, her work spans critical areas of memory, imagination, media and politics, political emotions, solidarity, ethics, and decoloniality. Rosa has published extensively on these topics and is co-editor of the book Thinking with the South: Reframing Research Collaboration Amid Decolonial Imperatives and Challenges (2023). She is currently a substitute professor of public anthropology at the University of Bremen's Department of Anthropology and Cultural Research.
Javier Aguilar
Valeria Aguilar Hernández
Najwa Ahmed
Najwa Ahmed is a Palestinian filmmaker and writer whose work weaves together themes of the homeland, memory and displacement attempting to use their art as an anti-colonial instrument. Their films have been shown at many spaces including Sinema Transtopia and Hungry Eyes Festival. Their writings have been published by CFFP, visual Vers and Jeem, amongst other platforms.
Humberto Ak'abal
Humberto Ak'abal was born in Momostenango, Guatemala in 1952 and passed away on 28 January 2019. Ak'abal, was a Maya' K'iche' poet and Guatemalan writer. He created and wrote his poems in the K'iche' language and self-translated them into Spanish. He was one of the most renowned Guatemalan poets in Europe and South America. His works have been translated into French, English, German, Italian, Portuguese, Hebrew, Arabic, Scottish, Hungarian, Estonian, in more than 20 languages.
Ulaş Aktaş
Dean of the Faculty of Fine Arts and Professor of primary school education, musical-aesthetic education and art didactics at the Berlin University of the Arts since 2021. His research focuses on the area of aesthetic education in childhood that is critical of hegemony and power.
Ghayath Almadhoun
Ghayath Almadhoun is a Palestinian-Syrian-Swedish poet, born in Damascus and today living between Stockholm and Berlin.
Jasmina Al-Qaisi
Jasmina Al-Qaisi is a poet who writes for voice and paper, articulates and performs language with sound, food or care practices towards uncontainable forms of literature.
Havin Al-Sindy
Havîn Al-Sîndy works in Berlin, Düsseldorf and Kurdistan. Al-Sîndy studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. She graduated as a master student in 2018. In parallel, she studied biology and chemistry at the University of Duisburg-Essen. She currently teaches at the University of Fine Arts in Braunschweig.
Oudai Amer
Issa Amro
Issa Amro - Palestinian Human Rights Defender from Hebron, West Bank. Founder of the Hebron-based direct action group Youth Against Settlements, recipient of the 2024 Right Livelihood Award and the 2009 One World Media Award, and recognized as Human Rights Defender of the Year in Palestine in 2010 by the United Nations.
Sheena Anderson
Sheena Anderson is a Black feminist, political scientist and activist who is particularly committed to anti-racism, decolonial approaches and climate justice. After her bachelor's degree, Sheena worked for many years in political education work to prevent right-wing extremism. In addition, she is a certified anti-bias trainer. After her master's degree in peace studies and international politics and a year as a fellow at the Mercator Kolleg, Sheena worked as a program manager for the Centre for Feminist Foreign Policy from October 2021 to March 2024 , where she headed the areas of anti-racism and climate justice. Sheena writes and speaks regularly about intersectional feminism, climate justice and feminist foreign policy.
Ricardo Arzápalo
Abeni Asante
Abeni is rooted in movements of anti-racism, gender liberation, and environmental justice.
Daniel Aspuru
Multi-instrumentalist musician, music producer, sound engineer, electronics designer and software author. Founding member of the band "El Gabinete" and collaborator of the Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y expresión de la Naturaleza.
Estela Ay Chan
Artisan, painter from the town of Yaxuná, Yaxcabá, Yucatán. She is the founder of the Sanestel workshop: wood crafts; a place where she shares her knowledge with her daughters.
Ahmad Baba
Ahmad Baba: Ahmad Baba is a Lebanese multidisciplinary performance artist whose work intersects dance, multimedia, and rituals, reclaiming their necessity within the broader context of archiving cultural practices. He investigates the body as an archive and a digital entity, emphasizing its potential for transformation. Ahmad’s performances reimagine queer temporalities and representations within Arab popular culture, particularly in the context of diaspora, focusing on the Levant and Egypt
through the lenses of cinema and music. Additionally, Ahmad is an MA dance movement psychotherapist, with a focus in his work on racialized sexual and gender minorities.
Rocío Bárcenas
Andrea del Rocío Bárcenas García, June 17, 1991, State of Mexico, Mexico. Biologist, nature lover, turtles, good food and music. My field of action is focused on biodiversity conservation, where I have had the opportunity to address the issue from academic and governmental research. I work with communities through environmental education and art. I believe that education is the best tool to share and transform our ways of thinking and valuing nature.
Mina Bárcenas
Graduated with a Master's Degree in Production and Teaching of Visual Arts from the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán, and in Engineering in Automated Management Systems from the Instituto Superior Politécnico de La Habana. She has designed for different editorial, cultural, educational and scientific diffusion projects for different national and international entities. In addition to teaching, she is creative director of Myra Diseño and Página en Blando.
Michael Barenboim
MICHAEL BARENBOIM is one of the leading violinists of his generation, performing as a soloist with the most renowned conductors and orchestras. He is also Professor at the Barenboim-Said Akademie, and concertmaster of the West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which was created in 1999 by his father Daniel Barenboim and Edward Said. Since early 2024 Michael has come into the spotlight mainly for speaking out about Gaza. He is also part of Make Freedom Ring, a classical musicians collective that regularly organises charity concerts for Palestine in several cities across Europe.
Yossi Bartal
Yossi Bartal is a researcher and journalist.
Julia Bar-Tal
Julia Bar-Tal, farmer from Brandenburg, is executive director of the Arbeitsgemeinschaft bäuerliche Landwirtschaft Nordost (Germanchapter of La Via Campesina), co-founder of the Bündnis junge Landwirtschaft, which has a focus on the struggle to fair access to land in eastern Germany, and campaigns for the rights of young farmers. She is also co-founder of 15th Garden Syria. Julia Bar-Tal's activist background is also influenced by her experiences in war and crisis regions. Next to being a farmer in Brandenburg and a representative of farmers here, for the last ten years she has been working intensly on agriculture, food sovereignty and the rights of people in rural areas during times of war and crisis.
Camille Sapara Barton
Camille Sapara Barton (they/she) is a writer, artist and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. Barton works across the realms of embodied social justice, grief, harm reduction and the cultural sector. Camille Sapara Barton is also the author of the newly published book “Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community”
Lana Bastašić
Lana Bastašić is a Yugoslav-born writer. She has published fiction, poetry, essays and plays. Her short stories have received numerous regional awards in the Balkans, including the Ulaznica and Zija Dizdarevic. Her first novel, Catch the Rabbit, won the European Union Prize in Literature and the International Latisana Prize in Italy. The book was shortlisted for the Dutch European Award and longlisted for the Dublin International Literary Award. It has been translated into more than 20 languages. She also published a collection of short stories, Milk Teeth, and a diary titled The Red Suitcase. Bastašić is one of the founders of Escola Bloom literary school in Barcelona.
Baufachfrau Berlin e.V.
BAUFACHFRAU Berlin e.V. is a recognized education and qualification provider that develops and implements projects within the framework of employment promotion and education policy at local, regional and European level.
Since the association was founded in 1988, female craftsmen, planners and designers have been working together to develop projects in the fields of sustainable construction and climate protection, education for sustainable development (ESD), the design of learning and living spaces, participation, interculture and lifelong learning.
Till Baumann
Till Baumann got to know Theatre of the Oppressed at CTO in Rio de Janeiro at the end of the 1990s. Since then he has been working with Boal’s theatre methodology in Europe and Latin America, especially in contexts of human rights work and conflict trans-formation. He has been artistic director of numerous prison theatre projects with youth and adults and has edited and translated the latest German version of Boal’s Games for Actors and Non-Actors (2013). Besides being a Kuringa, he is also a musician and a sound artist. Together with Bárbara, he has been investigating the Aesthetics of the Oppressed – Sound and Rhythm. He is member of KURINGA’s masculinities lab.
Daniel Bax
Daniel Bax is a journalist and author. He has worked (with some interruptions) for the daily newspaper taz since the late 1990s, as well as writing for other media outlets about politics, culture and society in Germany. He lectures on journalism and freedom of expression, as well as on migration and religious policy. He is a member of the board of Neue deutsche Medienmacher (NdM) and is on the advisory board of CLAIM – Allianz gegen Islam- und Muslimfeindlichkeit. His publications include two books: Angst ums Abendland (2015), which focuses on anti-Muslim racism, and Die Volksverführer (2018) which addresses right-wing populism in the contemporary moment.
Anaïs Beaulieu
French artist Anaïs Beaulieu learnt the craft of embroidery from her grandmother, a practice passed on through multiple generations of women in her family. She explored children’s books and art education by working at the publishing house Les Trois Ourses in France. Anaïs’ work is also informed by her travels, especially in Africa, which strengthened her interest in craft and the links it can create between people. It was also here that she resumed her childhood love for embroidery, and where the idea for this book was germinated.
Ararat Kollektiv Berlin
Ararat Kollektiv Berlin is an Armenian antifascist collective founded during the Artsakh war in 2020
Oksana Bila
Oksana Bila, June 13, 1981 Lviv, Ukraine. Teacher in the area of choir conducting and choir artist, music teacher. She is also an assistant music teacher area specialist in basic education and director of music in a children's educational institution. She worked as a music director in children's educational institutions in Lviv, Ukraine (children 3-6 years old). For almost 2 years she was a choir director in a Greek-Catholic church. Last years before traveling to Mexico she worked in schools (children 15-18) as music director. She carried out different arts activities with students such as choir, dances, music.
Cana Bilir-Meier
artist, filmmaker and art educator, co-editor of “My name is foreigner / Benim Adım Yabancı” (poems by Semra Ertan)
Samie Blasingame
Samie Blasingame (she/her) is a social justice facilitator with a background in environmental policy, intercultural studies, and creative communications. She regularly curates, hosts and facilitates events on topics related to sustainability, environmental justice, anti-racist decolonization, and ecosystem mapping. She is the Creative Director of Food in my Kiez, sits on the board of Greenbuzz Berlin with who she runs the #FeedingBerlin series, and organises with the Berlin-based climate and environmental justice collective, Black Earth. Her work and political ethos revolves around community building and collective imaginations toward a just and resilient future.
Melina Borčak
Melina Borčak is a filmmaker, journalist and media critic. She was born in Bosnia and fled to Germany in 1992 during the genocide against Bosniaks, until she had to go back to a country she didn't even know. After almost 20 years in Bosnia, she returned to Germany in 2015 and works for CNN, ARD, Deutsche Welle and funk, among others.
Leila Boukarim
Leila Boukarim is a children’s book author, born in Lebanon, raised around the globe, and now based in Berlin. She writes picture books and graphic novels and believes there’s no such thing as books only for children.
Leila Boukarim
is a children’s book author, born in Lebanon, raised around the globe, and now based in Berlin. She writes picture books and graphic novels and believes there’s no such thing as books only for children.
Candice Breitz
Candice Breitz is a Berlin-based, South African artist who has lived in Germany since 2002. In November 2024, the Saarlandmuseum canceled an exhibition of Breitz’s work abruptly (and in the absence of due process) in response to her criticism of Israel’s far-right governing coalition. Previously, a symposium titled ‘We Still Need to Talk’ (which Breitz co-curated with Michael Rothberg) was prevented from taking place with the support of German state funding on two separate occasions (first by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste in December 2022; then by the Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung in mid-October 2023).
Sofia Burchardi
Sofia Burchardi is an illustrator and art teacher. She grew up in Nepal and received her M.A. at the Royal Danish Art Academy in Denmark. She is a co-founder of the collective “Blue Boat Books”, where she works as an author, illustrator and educator. Currently, she also teaches at the M.I.N.T. “Green Classroom” and at the Rütli Campus.
Rüzgâr Buşki
ist ein*e in Berlin lebende*r Künstler*in, Regisseur*in und Produzent*in aus Istanbul. Rüzgârs künstlerische Praxis umspannt Druckgrafik, Performance, Video und Film. Rüzgârs Arbeiten thematisieren Körper und Identität als soziale Konstrukte, das Selbst als futuristische Landschaft und die conditio humana als Gegenstand der Dekonstruktion.
Regina Carolina Caamal Yah
Meliponiculturist of Peanut. She works in her melipon farm "Las abejas de mi abuelo" (My grandfather's bees); she is part of the UYK meliponculturist network.
Edgar Calel
Edgar Calel works in a variety of media, exploring the complexities of the Indigenous experience, as seen through the Maya Kaqchikel cosmovision, spirituality, rituals, community practices, and beliefs, in juxtaposition with the systematic racism and exclusion that the Indigenous People of Guatemala endure on a daily basis.
Carolina Camacho Villa
Carolina Camacho Villa has an interdisciplinary profile in agronomy, genetic resources and rural sociology. She studies topics such as traditional farming systems, agrobiodiversity and technological change in agriculture.
Daniela Esther Cano Chan
Daniela Esther Cano Chan, is a writer in the Mayan language, a reading promoter, a teacher for informatics and a graduate in primary education for the indigenous environment, originally from Tipikal, Maní, Yucatán.
María José Cárdenas Portillo
Isadora Cardoso
Ana Cecilia Carrasco Quintana
Ana Cecilia Carrasco Quintana is a professional in visual arts specializing in engraving and printing. Since 2020, she has been working on community art, textile art, and cultural heritage promotion projects in indigenous communities.
Juan Casillas Pinto
Alejandro J. Castilla Pinto
Fátima Castillo
Marisol Castro
Graduate in Visual Arts. Her work fuses the anthropology and graphic aesthetics of cities. She has been selected in the biennials of Arte Joven (Aguascalientes, Mexico) and Pequeña Estampa (Quito, Ecuador). She has exhibited at the Museo Nacional de la Estampa (CDMX) and, more recently, at the Museo de Arte Moderno Ceniceros, Durango.
Atilano Ceballos Loeza
Atilano Ceballos Loeza is one of the founders of the Escuela de Agricultura Ecológica (School of Agroecology) U Yits Ka'an in Maní, Yucatán. He is a Catholic priest and part of the Regional Office of Mayan Theology. He advises schools of agriculture and was part of Yakanal, a space for cultural exchange between Maya and other Indigenous communities in the United States of America. He is a Melipona beekeeper himself and coordinates Project Kuxan Suum, which works to raise endemic pigs and Melipona bees in 16 communities in the region. He is an enthusiast of agroecology and the rights of mother earth.
Ceni e.V.
The Kurdish Women's Office for Peace CENÎ e.V. was founded in May 1999 by Kurdish and Turkish women living in Europe with the aim of strengthening the international solidarity of women for peace processes in Turkey and Kurdistan, in the Middle East and worldwide. For us, commitment to peace does not only mean opposing wars and all forms of oppression. Rather, the commitment to a free and ecological society based on social justice and a rejection of the patriarchal system of rule is an essential part of our peace work.
Omar Said Charruf
Omar Said Charruf (Mexico City, 1980) lives and works in Mérida, Yucatán. He is a visual artist and photographer. He studied art education at the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán, at the Escuela Activa de Fotografía, at the Centro de la Imagen and at the Escuela de Cine Arte 7. His works have been exhibited in various national and international museums, galleries and public spaces. He has received several awards for his works.
María Elisa Chavarrea Chim
María Elisa Chavarrea Chim is a Mayan language speaking poet, radio host, teacher and anthropologist from Chumayel Yucatán. Her work has focused on the revitalization of Mayan language and Mayan community organizing processes in Yucatán.
Chepita
Chepita
is a person from Abya Yala who has been learning about plants and food since early childhood as part of life and family interactions. Likes being around nature and enjoys sharing spaces with people getting involved in topics around food and collective knowledges. Also interested in community care, health, climate and social justice and the interconnectedness of this topics in the network of life. Working in playfull ways on recovering health sovereignity through small actions in our daily lives.
Chepita is part of the health collective Casa Kuà in Berlin
José Chi Dzul
José Chi Dzul, originally from Dzan, Yucatán, Mexico, holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán. His multifaceted practice includes works ranging from large-scale drawings, text-based works and installations, often reading between the lines through clever wordplay and objects. "I work with the Mayan language as a tool for cultural decolonisation, as identity, conservation and political interference. It is a clear expression of contemporary Mayas, exercising the inheritance and the knowledge of our grandparents. Where the legacy becomes present."
POC art Collective
Collective Care Berlin
Collective Care Berlin is a group of facilitators and activists that emerged through the “Regenerative Cultures Community of Practice” of the CitizensLab e.V. We bring a regenerative approach into the field of social justice, societal transformation and citizen engagement, integrating the cognitive, the emotional and the physical body as we seek to rewrite current narratives of democracy.
Mauricio Collí Tun
Mauricio Collí Tun is a visual artist and teacher, interested in the processes of artistic creation and research as spaces for reflection and collective learning. His work explores human nature and the different species with which we share places, affections and dreams. Based on his research of Yucatecan peninsular fauna and its symbolic representations he creates multi-species hybridizations of old and contemporary identities. His drawings and engravings deal with different notions of time, memory and permanence. He is based in Yucatan, living and working from within the identity, knowledges and practices of this region.
Abrahán Jesus Collí Tun
Intercultural manager, researcher and teacher. He has developed and led research projects and facilitates programs for the dissemination of knowledges. He collaborates with Spore Initiative mainly in the Yucatan Peninsula for the development and coordination of projects and supports in ongoing tasks.
Emilio Cordero Checa
Lighting designer, sound artist, and creative technician, dedicated to the production and creation of light-sound installations and interdisciplinary performing art pieces. His work focuses on the interaction between live performances and new technologies using light and sound to conjugate mechanics and human interaction on stage. He holds a Master´s degree with Honours in Contemporary, Technological and Performing Arts from the Basque Country University. His work has been shown in various theaters and festivals in Ecuador, Spain, United States, and Germany and he has also collaborated with international events like Fête des lumières (Lyon – France), Fiesta de la Luz (Quito- Ecuador), BAD (Bilbao- Spain), VAQ (Quito- Ecuador), Land Art Biennal (Andorra), Berlinale (Berlin - Germany), among others. Currently, he lives in Berlin where he is collaborating with different art collectives and spaces, as well as dance, performance and theater companies. Emilio is also a co-producer and lighting designer for Culiner Creative Circle, an audiovisual production company focused on classical music in its various branches.
María (Doña Neby) Cruz Torres Tzab
María Cruz Torres Tzab, or Doña Neby, from Maní, Yucatán, has been a Melipona beekeeper for twelve years and works at the agroecological school U Yits Ka'an. Her work focuses on informing and educating children, young people and adults from different communities in the region about the care of Melipona bees and their vital importance for the environment.
Yasmeen Daher
Yasmeen Daher is a political philosopher, feminist author and community organizer. She holds a Doctorate in Philosophy from the University of Montreal. Her thesis, The Art of Living Together: On Political Engagement and the Ethics of Companionship, explores how direct political participation can reshape not only the public sphere, but also redefine our ethical and political relationships. Yasmeen has previously taught at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Canada and Birzeit University in Palestine. Currently, she serves as the Director of the Febrayer Network, a Berlin-based organization dedicated to promoting independent Arab media in the MENA region.
Yasmeen Daher
Yasmeen Daher is a political philosopher, feminist author and community organizer. She holds a PhD in philosophy from the University of Montreal. Her dissertation, entitled The Art of Living Together: On Political Engagement and the Ethics of Companionship, explores how direct political participation can not only reshape the public sphere, but also redefine our ethical and political relationships. Yasmeen previously taught at the Simone de Beauvoir Institute in Canada and at Birzeit University in Palestine. She is currently the director of the Febrayer Network, a Berlin-based organization that promotes independent Arab media in the MENA region.
Santiago da Silva
Stoodio Santiago da Silva works on book design, printed/digital matter, communication, and display systems within the cultural and contemporary art context. During the last 10 years, research, experimentation and dialogue, have led to a varied visual vocabulary and a specialisation in manufacturing processes which inform the work.
The studio’s infrastructure is based on an extended network of fellow designers. For the project at Spore Initiative, the team is conformed by Cecilia Breña, Mona Mayer, Moritz Appich, Otso Paresaari and Santiago da Silva.
Fátima del Carmen Castillo Torres
Fátima del Carmen Castillo Torres, originally from Maní, Yucatán, built, motivated by her former studies at the U Yits Ka'an School of Ecological Agriculture and based on her own health problems, together with her family the Solar Maya "U Lu'umil Kuxtal", which takes up ancient Mayan traditional practices as a self-sustainable source of food, natural products and energy, in a responsible way with the environment.
Tobias den Haan
Tobias den Haan is a Monitoring officer who documents repression, erasure, and silencing of Palestine solidarity in Germany with a particular interest in colonial history and decolonial political theory.
Daniela de Paulis
Daniela de Paulis is a media artist and a licensed radio operator. Her artistic practice is informed by Space in its widest meaning. She is currently Artist in Residence at the SETI Institute (California) and
Artist in Residence at the Green Bank Observatory (West Virginia), with the support of the Baruch Blumberg Fellowship in Astrobiology. She is the recipient of the Art of Neuroscience Prize 2022 with the project Mare Incognito, and the winner of the Europlanet Prize for Public Engagement 2023.
Fatim Selina Diaby
Fatim Selina Diaby (she/they) is a poet, writer, and political educator of German-Guinean descent. In their work, Fatim Selina deconstructs centers of power to work towards a feminist decolonial present and future. She challenges binaries while exploring the beauty and pain in the often hidden and violently concealed in-between spaces. She writes about death, belonging, grief, climate justice, and Germanness.
Dillar Dirik
Dilar Dirik was born in Antakya and grew up in Offenbach am Main. She is a researcher and writer. She holds a PhD in Sociology from the University of Cambridge. From 2019-2023, she worked as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Oxford. Her book ‘The Kurdish Women’s Movement: History, Theory, Practice’, is an in-depth ethnography of the autonomous women's struggle in Kurdistan and was published with Pluto Press in 2022. Dilar has left academia and now focuses on political education and internationalist alliance-building work.
Emily Dische-Becker
Emily Dische-Becker is a writer, organizer, curator, director of Diaspora Alliance’s Germany branch, and a researcher for Forensis and Forensic Architecture.
Mama D Ujuaje
Mama D Ujuaje
(Overall and intrasensory facilitator and event co-design)
Mama D is a distributed being who acknowledges the more than human as sites of power, peace and pleasure. She works as a Community Researcher and Facilitator whose background is in nourishment praxis and embodied and art-based advocacy towards Socially Transformative Justice. She currently curates, within Community Centered Knowledge, Learning Journeys, exploring the internal interfaces and edges of community, legacies of colonialism/ality and the modernity which is constituted by it and systems of justice - via art, culture and other than human lenses. She is an earth advocate supportive of environmental justice from the perspective of our belonging to and continuity with the Earth. She is a planet whisperer.
Julián Dzul Nah
Intercultural manager, researcher and teacher. He has coordinated and led various research and participatory action research projects. He works with the Spore Initiative in the areas of process development, workshop facilitation and coordination, and acts as contact person and interface between various local and supra-regional actors and partners. During his academic career, he has already published several papers and received awards for his scientific work. He is passionate about ethnographic photography.
Jasmin El Hussein
Jasmin El Hussein is a lawyer dedicated to defending the rights of vulnerable groups and amplifying the voices of those who are facing repression.
Haytham el-Wardany
Haytham el-Wardany is an Egyptian writer and translator. He lives and works in Berlin, and writes short stories and experimental prose. His praxis focuses on fiction, especially short stories, and nonfiction formats, like essays, and fragmental prose.
Bilge Emine Arslan
Shelley Etkin
Shelley Etkin is a transdisciplinary artist, educator, gardener, and herbalist. Her work engages with relations between bodies and lands through the plant world and intersections of place-based, (multi)local, migratory, and ancestral knowledges. Her practice integrates somatics/embodiment, herbal medicine, and ethnobotany with decolonial, queer feminist pedagogies in community-engaged processes to address questions of social-ecological change and land stewardship. Shelley has studied gender, ecology and contemporary performance, permaculture, and homeopathy. Working with plants as allies informs her practices of solidarity as a queer anti-zionist Jewish woman, of an Israeli family from the land of historic Palestine, raised in the U.S.-Turtle Island, and living in Berlin since 2012.
www.shelleyetkin.com
Mario Euán Chan
Farmer, works the land under the milpa agricultural system, is a traditional Mayan doctor.
Yekmal e.V.
Der Verein der Eltern aus Kurdistan in Deutschland – kurz Yekmal – wurde 1993 in Berlin gegründet. Seit sei- ner Gründung hat unser Verein mit seinen vielfältigen Projekten im Bereich mehrsprachige Eltern- und Fami- lienarbeit Aufmerksamkeit auf sich gezogen.
Emet Ezell
emet ezell uses poetry to explore questions of place and place-lessness. Winner of the Gloria Anzaldúa Poetry Prize, they are the author of Between Every Bird, Our Bones and the guidebook to Liberation Tarot. Born and raised in Texas, ezell now lives in Berlin, Germany, where they, write, edit, and teach poetry.
Front of Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Cistem Queers FACQ
Front of Anti-Colonial, Anti-Capitalist, Anti-Cistem Queers
FACQ is a radical queer political collective, with a determined intersectional triple C! We gather and organize as queers to create safer settings for taking fierce action together. We are united in the radicalism of our queerness, in our transfeminism, and in our anti-colonial, anti-capitalist and anti-cistem fight. We work to bring queer perspectives, voices and visibility to the various struggles for social and political transformation, and to the fights against all forms of structural and systemic oppression, racism, discrimination and exploitation. We strive to challenge economical, political, historical and cultural supremacy in its global and local manifestations. We believe that liberation must be intersectional and internationalist, and that radical solidarity should be at the center of our fight. While our group is exclusively for queer people, our work and our solidarity are not."
Nafis Fathollahzadeh
Fathollahzadeh works at the intersection of artistic research, video art and photography.
They were a fellow researcher in the Rosa Luxemburg scholarly program on Authoritarianism and Counter strategies and affiliated with EUME: Forum Transregionale Studien in Berlin. They are art director and co-editor of Momentography of a failure, a multidisciplinary artistic and urban research platform for collaborative thinking, artistic collaborations, digital mapping and publishing.
Lucas Febraro
Lucas Febraro is a Brazilian-born activist and political content creator based in Berlin. He has served as communications director for DiEM25 as well as for the BDS movement. Febraro is actively involved in various social and political causes, including Palestinian rights, and often critiques misinformation in global conflicts. He regularly writes and speaks about issues such as media manipulation, propaganda, and social justice.
Dr. Isabel Feichtner
Dr. Isabel Feichtner is a Professor of Public Law and International Economic Law at the University of Würzburg.
Deborah Feldman
Deborah Feldman is an American-born German writer living in Berlin. Her 2012 autobiography tells the story of her escape from an ultra-Orthodox Jewish community in Brooklyn, New York.
María José Ferrada
María José Ferrada is a writer and journalist. His children's books and novels for adults have been published in several languages.
Foresta Collective
Foresta Collective is a fluid collective of humans and other species, exploring entanglements between personal and relational ecologies. Our work finds expression through collective practices and learning formats, rooted in embodied culture, multispecies care, thinking-through-making, and ongoing apprenticeship with the wild.
Frauendorf Jinwar
Lara Friedman
Lara Friedman is the President of the Foundation for Middle East Peace (FMEP). She is a leading authority on the Middle East, with particular expertise on U.S. foreign policy in the region, on Israel/Palestine, and on the way Middle East and Israel/Palestine-related issues play out in Congress and in U.S. domestic politics, policies, and legislation. Lara is also a preeminent subject-matter expert in the area of anti-Palestinian legislation and “lawfare,” including the weaponization and instrumentalization of the definition of and concerns about antisemitism.
Gabriela Galván
Gabriela Galván is a visual artist, radio producer and Djane. Her practice takes place between the intersections of sound, drawing and fiction as a detonator of possibilities, insinuations and questions. She is currently doing multidisciplinary work at Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y expresión de la Naturaleza and the Chakanais collective.
Emilio Gálvez y Fuentes
Is a music productor and sound engineer. In addition to his multidisciplinary work with various artists and musicians, he heads the recording studio, sound projects and field expedition logistics of the Laboratory of Research in Resonance and Expression of Nature. (Currently based in Berlin).
Vanessa Gamboa González
Vanessa Gamboa González is a nutritionist that works with food and health sovereignty. She has been working for over a decade on different initiatives involving Mayan families and communities in the Yucatan peninsula.
Alejandro García "Ilho"
Alejandro García is director of composite, 3D and motion graphics at Llamarada. He has worked in the making and post production of multiple short films and animated projects. Passionate about bitcoin and master of rendering.
Alejandro García "Male"
Alejandro García is animation director at Llamarada. He has directed various animated short films such as Santolo, El Jardín de las Delicias, Mi brother Luca or Las tardes de Tintico. The latter, winner of Best Animated Short at FICM Morelia 2012.
Racha Gharbieh
Racha Gharbieh has a degree in interior architecture and worked in the field of architecture from 2001 to 2015. Since moving to Berlin in 2015, she has collaborated with artists on various projects in visual art, theater, and music. She co-founded the collective Smallest Functional Unit, is co-editor of Graphème, and co-curates Making Waves, a monthly series of talks and screenings. Additionally, she is a co-publisher of Headache Comics, a publishing house for alternative books and comics.
Donatila Girón
Donatila Girón is originally from Marcala, La Paz, Honduras. She began her organizing work at the age of 15, focusing on combating violence against women. Since then, she has mobilized Indigenous communities for their rights and advocated for a fair economy and shared responsibilities. With extensive training in Agroecology and Food Sovereignty, she currently coordinates the organization Women Indigenous Leaders of La Paz (MURILPAZ).
Alexander Gorski
Alexander Gorski is a Berlin-based Migration and Criminal Defense Lawyer. He is also a partner lawyer with the European Legal Support Center (ELSC).
SoliSur grassroots organization committed to environmental, migrant, gender, ethnic minority, sexual and disability struggles
About SoliSur
As a grassroots organization committed to environmental, migrant, gender, ethnic minority, sexual and disability struggles––always with the interest of the civilian population of Abya Yala in mind––, SoliSur sees in the Community Exchange Weekend on Ecocide, Collective Grief and Land defence an opportunity for the formation of critical audiences on the present extractivist project in the territory of the Southern Cone. The workshop is thus presented as an opportunity to provide a critical look at green capitalism, understood as a new mutation or evolution of neoliberal capitalism, and that violates not only against the population of Abya Yala, but also against the fauna, flora, land and all subjects of environmental rights. That is why the workshop also seeks to expose the different collective struggles and resilience that has been formed from the exercise of resistance against these extractivisms in the recognized area of the lithium triangle.
Gerda Gruber
Gerda Gruber is a visual artist who has lived and worked in Mexico since 1975 (in Yucatán since 1988). In 2001 she founded the Fundación Gruber Jez, Educación y Promoción en Artes Plásticas (Gruber Jez Foundation, Education and Promotion of Plastic Arts) with the aim of providing research and experimentation residencies for visual artists. In 2004, she was part of the founding project of the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán (ESAY), where she has since directed the sculpture workshop.
Pedro Guerra
Pedro Guerra (Pedro Guerra Jordán) (geb. 1857, gest. 1917) war ein Pionier der Fotografie in der Region Yucatán in Mexiko. Sein Atelier befand sich vom letzten Viertel des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts bis 1917 in Mérida. Er fotografierte das gesellschaftliche und berufliche Leben, die Henneken-Industrie, die Zeit der Revolution und archäologische Maya-Stätten in Mérida und anderen Teilen Yucatáns.
Tuline Gülgönen
Tuline Gülgönen is a popular educator and filmmaker. She has participated in numerous collective short films and artistic research projects with children and adults.
Şermin Güven
Şermin Güven is a cultural and social anthropologist with a focus on environment in the Euphrates – Tigris river basin and its inhabitants. As a researcher and regional consultant she focuses her work on ecology, water, river, floods and drought on the one hand and crisis and politics on the other hand. She is currently a doctoral candidate at the Disaster Research Unit/Freie Universität Berlin with a focus on multilayered crisis lead by water scarcity and following the solution agenda of local corporations in Kurdish regions. She is involved in Ceni e.V Women's Office for Peace, Kurd Akad - Kurdish Academics Association. As a board member of the city partnership Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg - Dêrik e.V., Şermin is responsible for projects related to humanitarian crisis and secure water access. She is a member of WYPW-World Youth Parliament for Water and Gender CC - Women for Climate Justice.
Ariel Guzik
Ariel Guzik is a Mexican musician, draftsman and designer of machines and instruments. He is dedicated to the study of nature, physics and traditional Mexican herbal medicine. He is the founder of the Laboratorio de Investigación en Resonancia y Expresión de la Naturaleza (Nature Expression and Resonance Research Laboratory).
Abed Hassan
German-Palestinian Abed Hassan survived 34 days of war in Gaza. Back in Germany, he shares his experiences in major media and campaigns for peace. He wants to finance a field hospital for civilian victims in Gaza with donations from his cycle ride to Jordan.
Nadine Hattom
Nadine Hattom (b. 1980, Baghdad, Iraq) grew up in Abu Dhabi, UAE, before migrating to Australia. Hattom studied Photomedia at the College of Fine Arts, Sydney, and is now based in Berlin.
Taking a reading of landscape as a cultural process as her starting point and working with photography and sculpture, Hattom’s work is an exploration of space and place, unravelling narratives of migration, region, representation, and landscape.
“We can’t deny that the landscapes we produce are embodied within the identities we assume.”
Hanno Hauenstein
Hanno Hauenstein is a Berlin-based independent journalist and author. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Berliner Zeitung, The Intercept, and Haaretz, among others.
Kristin Helberg
Political scientist and journalist Kristin Helberg spent seven years reporting from Damascus on the Middle East for German, Austrian and Swiss radio programs as well as various print and online media. Today she works as an author, Middle East expert and presenter in Berlin. Herder Verlag has published her book “Verzerrte Sichtweisen - Syrer bei uns. Von Ängsten, Missverständnissen und einem veränderten Land” (2016) and ”Der Syrien-Krieg. Solution to a world conflict” (2018). As a Mercator Foundation scholarship holder, she researched the Syrian diaspora in Germany.
Gustavo Hernández-Calderónis
Gustavo Hernández-Calderónis a Colombian German researcher and activist focused on LGBTIQA+ rights and environmental struggles in the Global South. He is currently part of the research group at ReportOut, contributing to reports on Bangladesh, Nigeria, and Mexico. Additionally, he is part of the research team for the KommuNE project of GIZ, which focuses on decentralized cooperation projects. He is the author of the text Im Stuttgarter Schlossgarten: Schnittstelle von zwei Marginalitäten for the book Vom Scheitern, Zweifeln und Ändern, kritische Reflexionen von Männlichkeiten, and has also written articles on the human rights of sexual and gender minorities for Open Global Rights.
Shir Hever
Shir Hever is a political economist who studies the economic aspects of the Israeli occupation of the Palestinian territory. He is the manager of the Alliance for Justice between Israelis and Palestinians (BIP), and the military embargo coordinator for the Boycott National committee (BNC). He published two books and gives talks on various topics related to his research.
Matías Hoil Tzuc
Matías Hoil Tzuc is from the Mayan village of Chechmil, Chemax, Yucatán, and is a freelance researcher and native Yucatecan Mayan speaker who writes and translates in his mother tongue. He leads cultural projects and works with youth and students to promote Maya-Milpa and his own culture (language, traditional medicine, rights, gender, etc.). He is a farmer in the Maya-Milpa system, has recently taken up beekeeping and participates in projects on agroecology and ecological production systems.
Ingrid Hora
Ingrid Hora (born 1976, Bolzano, South Tyrol) is an italian artist who lives and works in Berlin, Germany. Through a multidisciplinary artistic production, Hora stages experiments on socio-political conditions examining i.e. the common action of a collective in an altered context. At the same time,she poses the question of the extent to which acting in constantly reshaping interconnected, interactive networks is a fundamental and integral part of the human being, or whether in our age of individualism we have already forgotten the ability to act flexibly together.
Berivan Ibin
International Women* Space (IW*S)
Nicolás Jaar
Nicolás Jaar, 34, was born in NY to Chilean parents and raised between Santiago and New York. Since 2008, he has released music under various guises spanning shades of pop, ambient, noise, and club music. Since 2013, he has curated the Other People label, releasing the visual & audio work of artists Maziyar Pahlevan, Africanus Okokon, Jena Myung, and the music of Aho Ssan, Saint Abdullah, Dienne, Pierre Bastien, and Lydia Lunch among others. In recent years, Nicolás has mainly focused on education, teaching sound-editing and listening workshops to emerging musicians and non-musicians alike in institutions such as the Museo de la Memoria in Santiago, Chile, AdBK in Munich, Germany, free.wav in Attappadi, India, Festival 4x4, Chiapas, Mexico, Dar Jacir and Alrowwad in Bethlehem, Palestine, among others. His latest project is called "Archivos de Radio Piedras". It's a 3h 1/2 long radio play set in the near future in Chile. His debut collection of stories "Isole" was released by Timeo, an Italian publishing house, in February 2024. Nico is also part of the "Shock Forest Group", "Darkside", and was one of the founders of "Musicians for Palestine".
Pauline Jäckels
Pauline Jäckels is a political journalist at the German daily newspaper nd. Her recent reportage has focused deeply on how the war in Israel and Palestine resonates internally in the German context (among other topics). She heads public relations for the Bildungsverein and the magazine dis:orient. In the context of her master's degree in ‘Global Diplomacy in the MENA Region’ at SOAS University (London), Jäckels examined the topic of silence and silencing—in relation to Israel and Palestine—as a public diplomacy instrument of German politics.
Yasmin Jahan Nupur
Yasmin Jahan Nupur is a visual and performance artist whose work is influenced by the ecological and community driven aspects of life. Depicting human relationships from various points of view, her work explores class distinctions and the social discrepancies people face, particularly women and migrants of South Asia, in an effort to increase understanding between people of different backgrounds. Her recent work has engaged deeply with architecture and textile, with a particular focus on Jamdani (a form of hand-woven textile), creating soft sculpture exploring the physical and social constructs affecting her psyche.
Miguel Jara
Miguel Jara is a multidisciplinary artist, animator and cultural researcher born in Colombia and based in Mexico City, actually working mainly on alternative educative approaches to train foundational aspects of learning and comprehension, and by other side, on artistic approaches to promote critical and empathic thinking of different social and environmental subjects. Chief director of Estudio Pneuma (Art animation and video studio) and Submarina MX (environmental education platform).
Marcel Jean-Baptiste
Marcel Jean-Baptiste is the coordinator of the Permactivie association. Its aim is to set up activities focusing on environmental issues in Martinique. To this end, ecological, artistic and educational experiments are carried out in order to better understand, love and protect Martinique's fragile ecosystem. Marcel is also known as Mawongany, a new cell that he integrates into his creative ecosystem. Here, he experiments as a composer and set designer, working with live performances, sound, image, and art installations.
Iván Jiménez
He is part of the group U neek' ts'íib, a community epigraphy youth group dedicated to the community interpretation of glyphs from their own cosmovision.
Roseli Jiménez Balam
Mayan youth. From the Xtak'anil group she gives workshops to young people, children and adults for the preservation of memory and care of the land.
Catalina Juárez
Works in the fields of art, environment, ecology, psychoanalysis, pedagogy and philosophy. She is in charge of management, dissemination, production and logistics of projects, expeditions and exhibitions at the Research in Resonance and Expression of Nature.
Dr. Mwatima Juma
Dr. Mwatima Juma is the Chairperson of Tanzania Organic Agriculture Movement (TOAM) and one of the founders of Msonge Organic Family Farm and the Practical Permaculture Institute of Zanzibar. She is one of the leading voices for organic agriculture in Tanzania and Zanzibar. She is on a quest to make Zanzibar 100% organic in all its aspects; to transform local production systems to a permaculture system, becoming regenerative, sustainable and most importantly devoid of all chemical toxins. Juma holds a PhD. in Agronomy and Crop Science from University of London Wye College.
Aurélia Kalisky
Aurélia Kalisky is a French literary scholar who worked for many years in Berlin at the Leibniz Centre for Literary and Cultural Research and the Centre Marc Bloch, where she participated in and co-directed projects on the cultural history of testimony and on literary practices and modes of writing in the aftermath of genocide and extreme forms of political violence. She is currently a fellow at the KHK Saarbrücken Cultural Practices of Reparation, working on a project on the complicity of the French state in the Tutsi genocide and on reparative forms of justice and art practices. Her work focuses on literary testimonies, forms of memory, the history of historiography and, more broadly, the production and transmission of knowledge about the experience of political violence.
Hadas Emma Kedar
Hadas Emma Kedar (moderator) - PhD student in Communication Studies at Hamburg University, art teacher, social news moderator, climate communication blog coordinator, film critic and a dedicated advocate for Palestinian rights.
Mazen Kerbaj
Mazen Kerbaj is a Lebanese comics author, visual artist, and musician born in Beirut in 1975. He also works on selective illustration and design projects and has taught at the American University of Beirut. Kerbaj is the author of 15 books translated into more than ten languages and his work has been shown in galleries, museums and art fairs around the world. Mazen Kerbaj is widely considered as one of the initiators and key players of the Lebanese free improvisation and experimental music scene. As a trumpet player, he pushes the boundaries of the instrument beyond recognition.
Yazan Khalili
Yazan Khalili is a visual artist, architect, and cultural activist, working in and out of Palestine, currently based in Amsterdam, Netherlands, where he is a PhD candidate at Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis (ASCA), University of Amsterdam. In 2022, Khalili participated in documenta 15, Kassel, as part of the Question of Funding collective.
Munira Khayyat
Munira Khayyat is an anthropologist whose research revolves around life in war, intimate genealogies of empire, and theory from the South. Her book A Landscape of War: Ecologies of Resistance and Survival in South Lebanon (University of California Press 2022) examines resistant ecologies in a world of perennial warfare. Drawing on long-term fieldwork in frontline villages along Lebanon’s southern border with Israel, she examines war not only as a place of death and destruction, but also necessarily, as an environment of living.
Khayyat’s research has been supported by the Wenner-Gren Foundation, the Arab Council for the Social Sciences, the Rachel Carson Center. Her writing has appeared in American Ethnologist, Public Culture, JMEWS, Cultural Anthropology, Anthropology News, HAU, and a number of edited volumes. Khayyat was a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton (2018-2019). Before joining NYUAD, she taught at the American University in Cairo (2013-2023) and the American University of Beirut (2011-2013). She holds a PhD in Cultural Anthropology from Columbia University (2013), an MPhil in Social Anthropology from Cambridge University (1998) and a BA in history (1997) from the American University of Beirut.
Martina Kolarek
Martina Kolarek is a biochemist, soil scientist and artist. Since 2010 she has been implementing the hot compost process in home, small and community gardens. In 2014 she founded DIE BODEN SCHAFFT as a platform for a new soil culture. Her book "Kompostieren! Biologisch, einfach, schnell" was published by Ulmer Verlag in 2018 and in French translation in 2019.
Karuana Kollektiv
The Karuana is a collective of indigenous women, musical group of artists and activists from the Borari, Kumaruara, Tupinambá, Munduruku and Tapajó ethnic groups in the Baixo-Tapajós region of the Amazon. Protagonists in the fight for climate justice in the territory through art, the collective emerged in 2018 with the mission of echoing the voice of indigenous women to the world in defense of rivers, forests and the rights of indigenous peoples, as well as cultural resistance and the fight for good living. The name Karuana pays homage to the protectors of rivers and forests, the enchanted ones from the bottom of the rivers and the bowels of the forest. The forest is our school of art, which inspires our musical compositions, sung in our indigenous language, nheengatu, and to the rhythm of carimbó, a musical genre of Afro-indigenous origins. Next to the singing praxis the Karuanas promote the occupation and creation of spaces for discussions and experiences, with lots of knowledge, exchanges, listening and respect, with plural issues on territory, indigenous rights, spirituality, contemporary indigenous art and gender.
Davi Kopenawa
Davi Kopenawa is a shaman and spokesperson for the Yanomami people of Brazil and a prominent Indigenous leader and thinker. For 25 years he tirelessly led the long campaign to secure Yanomami land rights for which he gained recognition around the world. Davi Kopenawa has played a key role in uniting many Yanomami communities to resist miners and powerful interests, which covet their land. In 2004 he founded the Yanomami association, Hutukara. Today, a new invasion of over 20,000 illegal gold miners and criminal gangs has engulfed the Yanomami territory, one of the world's largest rainforest areas under indigenous control. Davi Kopenawa has set off on a journey around the world to defend his people against endless colonization.
Nadezda Krasniqi
Nadezda Krasniqi is a queer Roma who lives and works in Berlin. Her research focuses on issues of social justice, especially decolonisation and critical reflection on knowledge production. She lives and practices radical solidarity with the most marginalised and oppressed.
She places particular emphasis on building intersectional, activist-collective alliances between communities that have been forcibly separated. As a queer feminist Roma, she not only understands but also takes pleasure in embracing her role as a ‘Killjoy’ to expose societal injustices, initiate critical discourses on norms, and challenge hegemonic structures.
Julian Kreidelman
Julian Kreidelman, activist, yoga teacher in training and co-creating the CitizensLab Community of Practice. He continuously explores what it means to embody decolonial and intersectionally aware ways of being, connecting to self, nature, and others.
Ángel Rafael Kú Dzul
We, Ángel Kú and Valiana Hernández, lead a collective (Colectivo Suumil Mookt'an) of young people who are part of a generation that is returning to the land. We are going back in order to reconnect with our Maya ways of building, cultivating the milpa, caring for the seeds and the native bees, so that together we can reinvent our ways of inhabiting the territory.
Simone Lagrand
Simone Lagrand (Martinique) is a poet, spoken word artist, and creative writing workshop facilitator. Her work is a long conversation with her motherland Martinique. As a yich déwò (illegitimate child from abroad) she constantly intends to build a creative biotope which shelters her dual relationship with language (Creole and French) through the observation of intimate bonds such as love dialogues, eroticism, but also motherhood. Her poetry uses various medium such as embroidery, sonic landscaping, or video. She lives between Paris and Martinique.
Lara Laila
Lara Laila is a Palestinian/ German moderator and activist.
Elad Lapidot
Elad Lapidot is Professor for Jewish Thought at the University of Lille, France. Holding a PhD in philosophy from the Paris Sorbonne university, he has taught philosophy, Jewish thought and Talmud at many universities, such as the University of Bern, Switzerland, and the Humboldt Universität and Freie Universität in Berlin. His work is guided by questions concerning the relation between knowledge and politics. Among his publications: State of Others. Levinas and Decolonial Israel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, forthcoming 2025), Politics of Not Speaking (Albany: SUNY Press, forthcoming 2025), Jews Out of the Question. A Critique of Anti-Anti-Semitism (Albany: SUNY Press, 2020), Hebrew translation with introduction and commentary (with R. Bar) of Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes, Vol. 1 (Tel Aviv: Resling Publishing, 2020), Heidegger and Jewish Thought. Difficult Others, edited with M. Brumlik (London/New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2018), and Etre sans mot dire : La logiqe de ‘Sein und Zeit’ (Bucarest: Zeta Books, 2010).
Diana Lara
Diana Lara (she/her) is a Honduran Somatic educator, choreographer and performer, who completed an MS. in Kinesiology with emphasis in movement science based in San Francisco U.S. She has presented her work in venues in the San Francisco Bay Area including NohSpace, Dance Mission Theater, Counterpulse, the Mission Cultural Center for Latino Arts, Moment’s Notice, TheOffCenter, The Garage, and the Safe House Arts. She has facilitated contact improvisation and dance workshops based on Body-Mind Centering principles in Berkeley, the Performatica Festival at the University of the Americas in Puebla Mexico, the Department of Arts at the National Autonomous University of Honduras. Diana’s role will be to choreograph, organize and lead the production of the piece in San Francisco, identifying public space and venues for the piece presentation, engaging other performers, local artists and representatives from Indigenous organizations in the bay area.
Marcelo León
Farmer, promoter of U yits Ka'an in southern Yucatan, member of the Comerciando como Hermanos network.
Anne Lindner
Anne Lindner works as a sleeping car conductor in the post-reunification period and studies art and art education. She founds a voluntary educational mentoring project, works for social organizations and in psychiatry. As a class teacher in a language learning class, she completed a degree in social work in 2017 and trained as a trauma educator in 2019.
Llamarada
Mexican animation studio strongly influenced by local artistic expressions, Mexican popular culture, animation and contemporary cinematography. His work, recognized nationally and internationally, is based on author, culture and advertising short films.
Rodrigo Llanes Salazar
Rodrigo Llanes Salazar is a PhD in Anthropological Sciences, and a full-time researcher at the National Autonomous University of Mexico. His research focuses on the history of anthropology in Mexico, ethnicity, indigenous movements and the anthropology of human rights. His publications include the book „De la reforma multicultural a los megaproyectos: los derechos humanos del pueblo maya de Yucatán”.
Felicita Lopez
Felicita Lopez is an esteemed Iindigenous leader from Opatoro in La Paz, Honduras. Throughout her life, she has dedicated herself to empowering rural and Iindigenous women, advocating for their active participation in the local economy and cooperativism. Her efforts have not only aimed at economic inclusion but have also focused on fostering community solidarity and resilience. Felicita has played a vital role in promoting the cultural heritage of her ancestral indigenous community. She believes that preserving and celebrating this heritage is essential for empowering future generations. By organizing cultural events and educational initiatives, she has helped to raise awareness about the importance of indigenous traditions and values. She is an active member of the organization MURILPAZ.
Asaf Luzon
Asaf Luzon has lived and worked as an illustrator in Neukölln, Berlin, for the last 10 years. In his work, he translates any new emotion that comes into his life. He believes in god as a manifestation of non-violence. Vegan for life and tries to help the voices of the unheard be heard. Born and raised in Jerusalem, coming from love anyway.
Asaf Luzon
has lived and worked as an illustrator in Neukölln, Berlin, for the last 10 years. In his work, he translates any new emotion that comes into his life. He believes in god as a manifestation of non-violence. Vegan for life and tries to help the voices of the unheard be heard. Born and raised in Jerusalem, coming from love anyway.
Mikhail Lylov
Mikhail Lylov is an artist, filmmaker, researcher and gardener. In his work he develops practical, theoretical and artistic interpretations of what “ecology” could mean, if we look beyond the notion of “system”. He is interested in stories, histories, travels and pathways of plants, animals and tools to trace how material relationships of things and bodies in movement interact with social relationships in their becoming. Mikhail studied gardening and engaged with the topics of landscape ecology while working in Japan. For a number of years he collaborated on an experimental gardening and orchard project in the Madonie mountains of Sicily.
Ewa Majewska
Ewa Majewska is a feminist theorist of culture and associate professor at the SWPS University in Warsaw. Her research focuses on archive studies, dialectics of the weak, feminist critical theory, and antifascism.
Saboura Manpreet Naqshband
(they/she) is a political scientist, cultural anthropologist, intersectional educator and PhD researcher at the Department of Elementary School Pedagogy and Arts Education at the Berlin University of the Arts. They focus on theories and practices of postcolonial aesthetic education, materialist) intersectionality theory, practice and criticism of racism, anti-Muslim racism, migrant self-organization, Muslim decolonial (queer) feminism. Saboura is also a performer, dance and body movement empowerment trainer and member of the postcolonial bildungsLab*.
Barbara Marcel
Barbara Marcel is a visual artist, filmmaker, curator and researcher interested in the cultural roots of nature, in the epistemological crossroads between Brazil and Germany, and in the various colonialities that to this day extractively pervades the territory of Latin America. Marcel graduated in Film Studies in Rio de Janeiro, holds an MA from the Art in Context Institute at the Universität der Künste Berlin (UdK) and was a PhD candidate at the Bauhaus-Universität Weimar between 2015-2021 as a research fellow of the Heinrich Böll Foundation. Parallel to her individual research, she works regularly with other artists, researchers and activists on projects around ecological relations and processes of thought and practice in times of environmental collapse and increasing social Inequalities.
Sara Mardini
Sirkhane Volunteers,former competitive swimmer and human rights advocate. She worked as a migrant rights defender and volunteered in search and rescue operations on the Greek island of Lesbos.
Tania Eulalia Martínez Cruz
Tania Eulalia Martínez Cruz is an indigenous Ëyuujk researcher with an interdisciplinary profile in agricultural engineering, water and irrigation management and social sciences. She has more than 10 years working with different NGOs on international development issues in a wide range of topics, from sanitary engineering to social inclusion.
Patricia Martín Morales
Maya artisan and calligrapher from Muna, Yucatán. Together with her husband, Julián Magaña, and their sons, Adrián and Julián, they reproduce pre-Hispanic Maya ceramic pieces and codices in their workshop using Maya techniques and materials. Her work is recognized worldwide by archaeologists and universities, and has been exhibited in different museums and institutions of international stature.
Daniel Marwecki
Daniel Marwecki is a political scientist and historian. He currently works at the University of Hong Kong. He completed his doctorate at SOAS University of London and previously worked in Jerusalem.
Miguel Mejía
Specialist in the management of beneficial microorganisms for ariculture. He is currently in charge of the "Bernardo Xiu Uc" Laboratory at U Yits Ka'an, an institution where he has been collaborating for 14 years.
Melissa Meléndez
Melissa Meléndez studied Communication Sciences at UVM. She has been a producer at Llamarada for 10 years, participating in various animated projects of a cultural, educational and advertising nature.
Helena Michalke
Helena Michalke (We Smell Gas) is part of WeSmellGas, a collective of organizers, researchers and film-makers based in Northern Europe focused on environmental justice and energy politics.
Dr. Sandrine Micossé-Aikins
Dr. Sandrine Micossé-Aikins manages Diversity Arts Culture and consults the cultural department of the Berlin Senate. She is a cultural studies scholar, curator and equity manager whose work focuses on racism and empowerment in the arts. Her work also examines the power and effects of colonial imagery, politics of the body, and representation and equality in the German speaking arts and cultural sector.
Mira
Mira is a South African student activist with the Stand Up for Palestine collective at the University of Potsdam.
Avi Mograbi
Avi Mograbi - Israeli documentary filmmaker, known for his unwavering commitment to social, cultural and political justice in the Middle East, as well as his experimentalism and innovative contribution to cinematic language. He is a co-founder of Breaking the Silence.
Hani Mojtahedy
Hani Mojtahedy is a well-known Kurdish artist from Sanandaj, a small city in the Iranian province Kordestân. Mojtahedy studied traditional Persian music after which her professional singing career started in 2000. Despite the obstacles imposed by religious laws in Iran, Mojtahedy tried to live her life the way she wanted and gave several concerts, limited in number and for solely female audiences. She recognized that the lack of artistic and personal freedom was preventing her from truly being able to express herself and moved to Berlin in 2004. Ever since, she has brought out two albums, more than twenty singles, and several music videos. Moreover, she has performed in TV shows, concerts and festivals all over the world with a mix of traditional and original repertoire in which she brings together traditional Persian vocals and Kurdish lyrics. Mojtahedy has developed herself into a household name in Kurdistan and a rising star in the world music scene.
Jerzy Montag
Jerzy Montag was a member of the German Bundestag for the Green Party from 2002 to 2013, serving as the legal policy spokesperson for his parliamentary group and as the chair of the German-Israeli parliamentary friendship group. His political activities focused on legal policy, European justice and home affairs policy, as well as promoting German-Israeli relations and combating right-wing extremism. From 2013, Jerzy Montag was a special investigator on behalf of the Bundestag and various state parliaments in the field of the protection of the constitution and the Federal Criminal Police Office. He has investigated right-wing extremist incidents in the Hessian police force for the Hessian state government as part of a commission of experts, as well as the death of Oury Jalloh in the Dessau police station for the state parliament of Saxony-Anhalt. Jerzy Montag is an attorney and a judge at the Bavarian Constitutional Court.
Cecilia Moo
Cecilia Ivonne Moo Pérez has a degree in Fine Arts from the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán, specialising in drawing, painting and scientific illustration. She is a teacher and cultural manager. She works in different disciplines, combining her artistic vision with the elements of nature and the regional life that surrounds her. She lives and works in the Yucatan Peninsula.
Francisca Moo
Traditional physician, melipon breeder, promoter and member of the UYK network of melipon breeders in the eastern part of the state.
José Daniel Morales
José Daniel Morales studied Design and Visual Communication at the Faculty of Arts and Design at UNAM. He's an Art Director at Llamarada, a cartoonist and a full-time dad (all at the same time).
Alia Mossallam
Alia Mossallam holds a PhD in Political Science. Her dissertation explores a popular history of Nasserist Egypt through stories told and songs sung by people behind the 1952 revolution. She has taught at the American University in Cairo (AUC), the Cairo Institute for Liberal Arts and Sciences (CILAS), and holds the series of workshops ‘Reclaiming Revolutionary Histories’ with students, activists and artists in governorates all over Egypt, an experiment in history-telling. In the spirit of making histories more accessible, she also worked – e.g. in the case of the play Hawwa al-Hureyya (Whims of Freedom) – with a number of theatre practitioners to document revolutionary experiences of the present, explore alternative histories of the past, and recreate them on stage. She continues to look for these stories and songs in an attempt to recover and document a lost history of popular movement in Egypt.
Nabil
Nabil is a Palestinian student activist with the NotInOurNameTU student collective at the TU Berlin.
Brusco Nando
Nando Brusco is a singer, drum player and storyteller. Having been involved in the field of popular music for years, his artistic research revolves mainly around the drum and its evocative capacity, its “voice.” In his performances, Nando merges the cultural, narrative, and literary aspects of this local culture, that is most of all present in the oral memories, whose bearer he is. v
Juan Nasra
Juan Nasra is an Argentinian image and sound designer and documentary filmmaker. He has predominantly worked within the cinematography domain, contributing to a diverse array of projects spanning fiction, documentary, dance, and music videos.
Abhishek Nilamber
Abhishek Nilamber (1987, India) works with projects and products which catalyse democratisation of knowledge. He is a researcher and curator with SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin and creative consultant at Backyard Civilization, Kochi, India. Nilamber has been working in Berlin since May 2016. His specific interest lies in contemporary community circulation practices in the Global South with audio-visual culture as specificity. One of the forms in which this interest manifests is the research, exhibition and networking project titled United Screens, which inquires into the challenges and opportunities in South-to-South circulation of cinema and video art, decoupled from its dependance on both state and capital-based markets.
Fanny Nitsche
Fanny Nitsche has been working in power-critical educational work for 5 years and has been trained as a multiplier for Theater of the Oppressed by Kuringa Berlin since 2022. Fanny offers anti-discrimination workshops for young people and adults and works on gender and sexual orientation. Fanny is interested in how oppression and power structures are inscribed in the body and how space can be created to unlearn them.
Fanny Nitsche
Fanny Nitsche has been working in power-critical educational work for 5 years and has been trained as a multiplier for Theater der Unterdrückten by Kuringa Berlin since 2022. Fanny offers anti-discrimination workshops for young people and adults and works on gender and sexual orientation. Fanny is interested in how oppression and power structures are inscribed in the body and how space can be created to unlearn them.
Camila Nobrega
Camila Nobrega is a Brazilian transmedia journalist, feminist/queer decolonial researcher based between Brazil and Germany since 2015. Ph.D Candidate at the Otto-Suhr Institute of Political Science at the Free University of Berlin as part of the Gender Division. Her Ph.D work brings a feminist decolonial lens on transnational power relations behind the construction of hydropower dams in the Brazilian Amazon. Since 2009, Camila has covered many United Nations Climate Change Conferences (COPs) and in 2012, in Rio de Janeiro, she was the official Youth Mediator of the conference for the transdisciplinary dialogues on Forest. Camila takes part in Brazilian and international networks that work for media democracy and right to communication, as well as social-environmental justice.
Tamar Novick Novick
Tamar Novick is a historian of science, technology, and the environment. Her research focuses on agriculture, technology, animals, bodily waste, and fertility research in Palestine/Israel. Her book, Milk and Honey: Technologies of Plenty in the Making of a Holy Land (MIT Press, 2023), won the 2024 George Perkins Marsh Prize for best book in environmental history, and was a finalist for 4S’s Rachel Carson Prize. Novick is also the editor a special issue on Bovine Regimes in the journal Technology and Culture, co-editor of a special issue on Animal Mobilities in Osiris, and co-editor of a special issue on Vital Waste in the Journal of Material Culture. Novick holds a PhD in History and Sociology of Science from the University of Pennsylvania, and was a research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where she led a working group on animals and knowledge. She is currently a Gerda Henkel Foundation fellow and a visiting scholar in the Department of Musicology and Media Studies at Humboldt University of Berlin and will soon be joining the faculty of the STS department at TU Munich.
Tonny Nowshin
Tonny Nowshin (The Sunshine Project) is a Degrowth and Climate Justice activist who grew up in Dhaka Bangladesh. Currently, she is working with the international NGO the Sunrise Project focusing on cutting fossil finance to tackle the climate crisis.
María Alexandra Ocque Silva
María Alexandra Ocque Silva, Absolventin der Kunstfakultät der UCV (Zentraluniversität von Venezuela) mit einem Aufbaustudium in Ernährung und Kultur an derselben Universität, beschäftigt sich seit über 20 Jahren mit der Yekuana-Kultur. Sie hat einen kulinarischen Ansatz entwickelt, der die Aromen der Vorfahren mit modernen Techniken verbindet, um den Reichtum des Erbes der Yekuana aufzuzeigen. Mit ihrer Arbeit lädt sie dazu ein, die kulinarischen Traditionen der Yekuana und ihre Beziehung zur Welt kennenzulernen. Wie der Schamane Velásquez ihr einst sagte: „Das Glück liegt in der Einfachheit“, ein Konzept, das in den kulinarischen Vorschlägen ihres Buches „Eine Yekuana-Perspektive“ stets präsent ist.
Adenike Oladosu
Adenike Oladosu (Fridays for Future Nigeria) is an agricultural economist and the founder of Fridays for Future Nigeria. She worked at Hamburg-based New Institute’s Black Feminism. She is currently an International Climate Protection Fellow on the Panel on Planetary Thinking at Justus Liebig University Giessen.
Berivan Omar
Berivan Omar was born in Rojava, NE Syria, where the women's revolution is developing ecological initiatives to tackle climate change. She studied agricultural engineering and has been working in local government since 2015 in the executive office and also the women’s department. She is now co-president of the Local Administration and Environment Authority in the region and responsible for the Department of Environment and Women.
Giulia Orlandi
Giulia Orlandi, an urban planner focused on urban sociology, is deeply involved in social-political processes and regenerative activism. As a part of Collective Care Berlin, they explore alternative learning through unlearning. Passionate about creating change and connecting struggles they work to build inclusive, sustainable communities.
Uriel Orlow
Uriel Orlow’s practice is research-based, process-oriented and often in dialogue with other disciplines. Projects engage with residues of colonialism, spatial manifestations of memory, social and ecological justice, blind spots of representation and plants as political actors. His multi-media installations focus on specific locations, micro-histories and forms of haunting. Working across installation, photography, film, drawing and sound his works bring different image-regimes and narrative modes into correspondence.
Inés Ortiz Yam
Inés Ortiz Yam holds a PhD in history from El Colegio de México. Her research interests are the political, social and agrarian history of Yucatán in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She is the author of the book "De milperos a henequeneros. Yucatán, 1870-1937" (2013). Currently she works as a professor-researcher at the Social Sciences Department at the Centro de Investigaciones Regionales "Dr. Hideyo Noguchi" of the Universidad Autónoma de Yucatán.
Adriana Otero Puerto
Adriana Otero Puerto is an audiovisual producer and works currently as a director at the production and distribution company ABEJAS CINE, and as an independent editor, sound recordist and post-producer. Among her works are "El Valor de la Tierra" (2014), "¿Qué les pasó a las abejas? (2019) and "Boca de Culebra" (2020).
Riad Othman
Riad Othman, a historian of Eastern Europe with a Dutch Master's degree in Humanitarian Aid, worked in and on various crisis regions before heading the medico office for Palestine and Israel from 2012 to 2015. He has been working as a Near East Advisor from Berlin since 2016.
Anthony Owosekun
Anthony Owosekun is a social worker and experiential educator with over 10 years of experience in supporting young people in the education sector. In 2019, he founded the non-profit organisation EMPOCA, which connects Black children and young people with nature. Since 2022, he has been co-founder of the DE_CONSTRUCT Academy, a digital training platform for raising awareness of racism among specialist and management staff in the corporate, education and healthcare sectors. As an educational consultant, he regularly leads training courses on racism-sensitive and empowering learning spaces for educators in schools, youth welfare and leisure facilities.
Asiye Özer
In 2008 Asiye completed her undergraduate studies at the State Conservatory of Dicle University with first degree honors. She has worked as a singer, an instrumentalist and a music teacher. In 2015, upon completing her master's degree in musicology at the Institute of Social Sciences of Erzurum Atatürk University, she began her doctoral training. Her main fields of activity in Turkey have been youth welfare and social work and teaching.
She has always accompanied the people living in Kurdish areas with music and learning, and along the way often had the opportunity to support and encourage them in solving their sociopolitical issues.
Pädagogische Werkstatt
The Pädagogische Werkstatt is a socio-spatially oriented, institutionalized support system for educational actors in the Reuter and Donau neighborhoods of Neukölln, which emerged in 2007 from the program Ein Quadratkilometer Bildung (One Square Kilometer of Education). Its goal is to work toward equitable educational opportunities for all children and young people by building local educational networks.
Diogo Passarinho
D_P_S is a research-based design studio, founded in 2015 by Diogo Passarinho, investigating how emotional contexts can be brought into shaping spatial memories. The work of the studio has been showcased at the Venice Biennale, Gwangju Biennale, Baltic Triennial, Hayward Gallery, Palais De Tokyo, Pirelli Hangar Bicocca, Oslo National Museum, Van Abbemuseum, to name a few examples.
Team for exhibition at Spore: Gonçalo Reynolds and Diogo Passarinho.
Severiana Pat Tun
She is originally from Tekom, Yucatan. Dedicated to the rescue of the melipona bee, soil improvement for orchards, and handmade products derived from native bee honey. Her site has a sanctuary of honey trees and a botanical garden with medicinal species.
Isadora Paz Taboada
Isadora Paz Taboada (She/they) is a Honduran-Argentinian choreographer and performer, co-founder of DA escenica, an independent collaborative project based in Tegucigalpa, Honduras. She has been a resident artist at ADF Durham, NC and the National Choreographic Center in La Rochelle, France. She explores community narratives, practices and performances promoting collective inquiry and intercultural dialogue through dance and performance. Isadora’s role will be to organize the visit to the Lenca communities, that will include observation and/or participation in ceremonies and rituals, and movement exchange between Lenca women and us. Isadora will create contemporary dance movement material and choreographic structures inspired in the exploratory sessions for performance, and she will be a performer.
Adolfo Pech
Promoter of U Yits Ka'an, School of Ecological Agriculture, at the eastern headquarters in Valladolid.
Venuri Perera
Venuri Perera is a Colombo based choreographer, performance artist and movement facilitator. Her works inhabit a space between dance, live art and theatre, and have dealt with issues of violent nationalism, patriarchy, borders, colonial inheritance, class and power dynamics of gaze. Primarily trained in Kandyan dance, Venuri was a member of Chitrasena Dance Company for 13 years.
Catalina Pérez
A Mexican librarian, curator and art historian, she has been involved in various editorial and curatorial initiatives, as well as in the organization of exhibitions. Her practice is linked to the development of tools for the community of her childhood and the accompaniment of artists from her region.
Dharmendra Prasad
Dharmendra Prasad is an artist based in Guwahati, with a practice spanning across mediums of installation, video, painting, photography, performance. Dharmendra’s practice takes the Harvest as a ‘philosophical take-off’, where his artistic intention lies in cultivating and re-configuring understandings around Agrarian practices, rural memory and knowledge, and in extension, the ecologies that foreground and inform the dividing ‘digital/ technological psyche’. The accumulation of meaning in this rich metaphor is also evident in his use of hay and other forms of ‘harvest material/ waste’ as recurring material and medium. There is a running engagement with indigenous knowledge systems and farming practices, bringing a solid grounding to his artistic practice.
Alice Priori
Alice Priori, activist, community and process facilitator, Art of Hosting practitioner, dancer. Co-founder of the CitizensLab e.V. She is passionate about creating experiential learning formats that center relationality, embodiment, and decolonial thinking to nourish new radical imaginations and cultures of care.
Alice Priori
Alice Priori, activist, community and process facilitator, Art of Hosting practitioner, dancer.
Co-founder of the CitizensLab e.V.
She is passionate about creating experiential learning formats that center relationality, embodiment, and decolonial thinking to nourish new radical imaginations and cultures of care.
ADIRA queer Arabic-pop party series
"ADIRA" is a slang term in Arabic used in Levantine queer cultures, signifying someone with a strong presence who is capable. Founded in 2023 by Hassandra and xanax_attax, ADIRA is a queer Arabic-pop party series that challenges orientalist stereotypes and celebrates the diversity of queer Arab* identities. Our mission is to revive the nostalgia of 80s, 90s, and early 00s Arabic-pop music. ADIRA is committed to organizing community events that foster individual growth and support emerging and established Arab* talents in Berlin and beyond.
In June 2024, ADIRA collective launched the first ever Arab* Drag Festival, a historic event featuring over 30 Arab* artists from Berlin and other cities. The one-day festival welcomed more than 700 attendees from across Europe and receiving extensive media coverage, marking a significant milestone for the queer Arab* community.
*Note: Arab* denotes a diversity of identities and ethnicities within Southwest Asia and North Africa.
Isabel Raabe
Isabel Raabe is a curator and cultural producer who lives and works in Berlin. She studied contemporary dance and later cultural management and has curated numerous interdisciplinary international art and cultural projects. She is interested in decolonial curatorial and artistic strategies that break through Western perspectives and traditions of thought. Isabel Raabe is the initiator of TALKING OBJECTS – Decolonizing Memory and Knowledge and a member of the curatorial team.
Nora Ragab
Nora Ragab is German-Palestinian migration scholar based in Berlin with a research focus on the intersections of diaspora mobilization, conflicts, and socio-political dynamics of displacement.
Alejandro Ramírez López
Alejandro Ramŕez López is of Mixtec origin and born in the state of Oaxaca. He is an independent researcher with more than 20 years of experience in international development, in the implementation of agricultual projects in Latin America, and as a teacher. He has been a consultant, partner and asistent researcher in the Centro Internacional de Mejoramiento de Maíz y Trigo (International Center for the Improvement of Maize and Wheat), where he participated in a variety of social researches in several regions in Mexico and Latin America.
David Ranan
David Ranan (born in Tel Aviv in 1946) is a political scientist and non-fiction author. He is a fellow of the Center for Research on Anti-Semitism at the Technical University of Berlin and the Birkbeck for the Study of Anti-Semitism, University of London. He has published studies on attitudes of young Israelis to military service and attitudes of young Jews in Germany. He examines the anti-Semitism discourse in Germany and its politicization, as well as the problem of equating criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism, especially among Arabs and Muslims. Anti-Semitism among Muslims is the subject of his study published in 2018: Muslim Anti-Semitism: A Danger for Social Peace in Germany?
Mariam Rasheed
Born in Alexandria, Mariam Rasheed is an artist and scientist based in Berlin. Through poetry, she echoes the absurdities of life in a politicized, abused body, dedicated to an emancipation project. Her art is characterized by secret codes and ciphers meant to be understood by those, who like her, are in search of a language for the untranslatable.
Carolina Riaño Gómez
Carolina Riaño Gómez is a Colombian singer, born in Bogotá, Colombia, began her studies in Classical Singing at the "Pontificia Universidad Javeriana" in Bogotá and then moved to Germany to continue her opera studies at the Folkwang University of the Arts in Essen, where she completed her Masters in Opera Singing. She has been part of several Latin American music projects among others the women's vocal quartet Chocolate com Laranja and the Afro-Colombian fusion jazz band Ambrodavi with whom she has released two albums "Cuentero" (2020), "Coraza" (2022). In 2022, during her residency at Cordillera Space for Bodies and Utopias, she developed her solo performance Canto Crudo about field songs. Since the fall of 2022 she has been the director of the Female Latin Choir "Canto Diáspora".
ManuEla Ritz
ManuEla Ritz is a Black East German mother, qualified social pedagogue, team leader, coach and author. She has been active in political education work against discrimination and for power-critical diversification for twenty years.
Vanessa Rivero
Vanessa Rivero is a multidisciplinary artist who lives and works in Yucatán, Mexico. Using different media such as sculpture, photography, video and book publishing, she conceives site-specific installations and visual essays that explore ways of perceiving nature from individual and collective experience, power structures and the possibilities of coexistence between diverse species. She has exhibited her work in national and international venues, and holds a Master's degree in Production and Teaching of Visual Arts from the Escuela Superior de Artes de Yucatán.
Michael Rothberg
Michael Rothberg teaches English, Comparative Literature, and Holocaust Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is the author of Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation, Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization, and The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators. A new paperback edition of Multidirektionale Erinnerung (the German translation of Multidirectional Memory), has just appeared from Metropol Verlag.
Bärbel Rothhaar
The multifaceted work of Bärbel Rothhaar is interwoven with thematic "red threads". They provoke questions about the riddles of existence, about the relationship of man to nature. In her encaustic works with heated, pigmented wax, she achieves a multi-layered painting style in which the wax embeds various elements - drawings, found objects, or even human hair - in its soft, relief-like structure. Since 1999 she also works directly with bee colonies in her art. This work focuses on the dialogue of her own artistic intention with natural processes that are not always controllable. Bee researchers and beekeeping communities have contributed to various projects, such as the Bee Camera Studio or the Pollen Maps.
Kriss Rulifson
Kriss Rulifson (they/them): dancer/choreographer/organizer/housing advocate. Their work is influenced by their aquatic practices of free diving, aquatic therapy, and aquatic dance as well their land-based practices in contact improvisation, axis syllabus, and contemporary dance. Kriss’s current research engages with life cycles involving grief, decay, and rebirth. They are a Co-Director of Twin Moons Productions, a process-oriented and nomadic collective that merges aquatic and somatic practices into immersive performance experiences. Kriss is invested in queer emergent practices, fantastical metamorphosis, and disintegrating colonial imprinting. Their performance work and teaching expand between SF Bay Area (USA), Berlin (Germany), and Bordeaux (France).
Sami Rustom
Sami Rustom: Born 1988 in Halab (Aleppo), lives in Berlin. They are interested in the disappearances and reappearances movement of the publishing archives and private libraries due to political transformations in the Eastern Mediterranean. Their passion in the artistic career of Fayrouz and Rahbani Brothers plays an essential role in deepening their knowledge about Arabic cultural history. Sami co-founded Fehras Publishing Practices in 2015 and Fayrouz Library in 2012.
Serbest Salih
Artist and Fotographer, Sirkhane Darkroom
Serbest Salih, hailing from Kobani, Syria, is a distinguished photographic artist and the director of Sirkhane DARKROOM.
Salih is deeply committed to nurturing creativity in young minds through Sirkhane DARKROOM, the analog photography project for children near the Turkish-Syrian border. His unwavering dedication to both art and community stands as a beacon of inspiration in the realms of photography and humanitarian efforts. Salih named ‘Man of the Year’ 2024 by GQ Middle East magazine.
Rasha Salti
Rasha Salti is a researcher, writer, and curator of art and film. She lives between Marseille and Beirut.
Nahed Samour
Nahed Samour is a research associate at Radboud University, Nijmegen. She has studied law and Islamic studies at the universities of Bonn, Birzeit/Ramallah, London (SOAS), Berlin (HU), Harvard and Damascus. She was a doctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for European Legal History in Frankfurt/Main. She clerked at the Court of Appeals in Berlin and held a Post Doctoral position at the Eric Castrén Institute of International Law and Human Rights, Helsinki University, Finland and was Early Career Fellow at the Lichtenberg-Kolleg, Göttingen Institute for Advance Study. She has taught as Junior Faculty at Harvard Law School Institute for Global Law and Policy from 2014-2018. From 2019-2022, she was Core Emerging Investigator at the Integrative Research Institute Law & Society, Humboldt University Berlin.
Rafiki Sánchez
Rafiki Sánchez works in the context of Mérida, Yucatán. Using a variety of materials such as found objects, textile tapestry, natural fibres, earth, ashes and others, Sánchez’s practice is often linked to the question of residues and wastes, examining the wastelands and dump yards, where he delves into poetics from decaying objects. Starting from drawing and often moving on to a performance, his work explores the possibilities of weaving, clothing, and its convergence with body, incorporating the materials and landscape typical of his region.
A. Sasil Sánchez Ch
A. Sasil Sánchez Ch is a poet, translator, editor and host in the Mayan peninsular language. Dedicated to creative writing and the revitalization of language and early childhood education in the southern Yucatan region.
Bárbara Santos
Director, author, actress, performer and Kuringa, Bárbara Santos is artistic director of KURINGA and Madalena-Berlin theatre group. She is one of the creators and an active disseminator of the Feminist Theatre of Oppressed. Founder of the Ma(g)dalena International Network composed by feminist theatre groups from Latin America, Europe, Africa and Asia. She is member of ITI Germany, editor of METAXIS magazine and author of Roots & Wings of Theatre of the Oppressed (Portuguese, 2016; Spanish 2017; Italian, 2018 and English, 2019), Aesthetic Paths, original approaches on Theatre of the Oppressed(Portuguese, 2018) and Teatro das Oprimidas(Portuguese, 2019), translated into Spanish in 2020, and finally into English in 2023 as “TEATRO DE LAS Oprimidas: feminist aesthetics for political poetics”.
Bruno-Taut Schule
Elementary School in Berlin, Neukölln.
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum
Stefanie Schüler-Springorum, Prof. Dr., Director of the Center for Research on Antisemitism at the TU Berlin and member of the Board of Directors of the Center for Jewish Studies Berlin-Brandenburg. Main areas of research: German-Jewish history, history of National Socialism, Spanish history, gender history in the 19th and 20th centuries; publications include: Gender History of German Jews: A Short Introduction. New York City 2024; Hans Litten – Anwalt gegen Hitler. Eine Biographie, revised and supplemented new edition, Göttingen 2022 (with K. Bergbauer and S. Fröhlich); Krieg und Fliegen. The Condor Legion in the Spanish Civil War, Paderborn 2010.
Gabriela Manda Seith
Gabriela Manda Seith is a researcher and curator. In her dissertation Sarajevo's 'War Art': On Globalization, Representation and Balkanism (Freie Universität Berlin, 2023), she contrasts Sarajevo’s wartime art, locally creating a communal space for hope, mourning, preservation, self-representation and resistance, with its international perception in the wake of globalization and resurgent Balkanism. Her curatorial projects include Kunst im Untergrund (neue Gesellschaft für bildende Kunst, 2019), Up in Arms (Kunstraum Kreuzberg/Bethanien, 2019), Pollution Palette (Historical Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2021), Traumblasen – Balončići od Snova (Goethe-Institut Sarajevo, 2022), False Clouds (National Museum of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 2022), and Memory Movers (Neues Museum Nürnberg, 2024).
Alfredo Serralta
Farmer, Melipona-beekeeper, Citriculturist in the village Dzan, Yucatan. Promoter and former administrator of the Escuela de Agricultura Ecológica U Yits Ka'an.
Mihir Sharma
Mihir Sharma is a postdoctoral fellow with the Chair of Epistemologies of the Global South at the University of Bayreuth, Germany. His research interests include social movements, antiracism, activism, race/racism, work and labor, environmental movements, and public health. He teaches courses on political and medical anthropology, social theory, and ethnographic writing. In general, he is interested in thinking and writing about inequalities, difference, ambivalence, causality, subjectivity, political economy, and (in)commensurability.
Dr. Vandana Shiva
Dr. Vandana Shiva has obtained her Ph.D. as physicist from the University of Western Ontario in Canada. She conducted inter-disciplinary research in science, technology and environmental policy at the Indian Institute of Science and the Indian Institute of Management in Bangalore. In 1982 she found the Research Foundation for Science, Technology and Ecology in Dehra Dun dedicated to independent, high-quality research to address the most significant ecological and social issues of our times, in close partnership with local communities and social movements. In 1991, she founded Navdanya, a national movement to protect the diversity and integrity of living resources, especially native seed, and the promotion of organic farming and fair trade. In 2004 she initiated Bija Vidyapeeth, an international college for sustainable living in Doon Valley, in collaboration with the Schumacher College, U.K.
Harjeet Singh
Harjeet Singh (Fossil Fuel Treaty) is an activist advocating for climate and social justice globally. He is currently the Global Engagement Director at the Fossil Fuel Treaty Initiative. He has co-founded a social enterprise, Satat Sampada, dedicated to promoting sustainable environmental practices, such as organic food and farming in India.
Werner Sonne
Werner Sonne worked for German broadcaster ARD for more than forty years as a radio and TV correspondent, during which time he covered the German government while living in Bonn and Berlin. He was also based in Washington, DC, and the former Eastern Bloc in Poland. He started to travel the Middle East extensively in 1973 when he reported on the Yom Kippur War in Israel and kept returning to the troubled region’s front lines―including during the Afghanistan conflict. From 2004 to 2012, he hosted ARD’s Berlin-based Morgenmagazin show. Since then, he has written about foreign and security policy for daily newspapers and magazines and has penned nonfiction books on similar topics. He is also the author of several political thrillers and historical novels, including “Where the Desert meets the Sea”, a novel about the battle for Jerusalem and the founding of the state of Israel in 1948.
Anni Spies
part-time teacher at Leo-Lionni Elementary School, organized in various activist contexts that primarily fight against racism and fascism, also artistic focus on dance as empowerment: 2023/24 participant in the Futur Move program.
Ronice Stratton
Ronice Stratton (she/they) is a dance artist living on Ohlone land in Oakland, CA. Dance has become her highest expression—releasing what she holds within, in connection with others and the Earth that holds her. Part of that work includes Ro's continued exploration of her Honduran identity, digging up its pain and joy, finding lost lines through her dance. Ronice is currently a company artist with Dancing Earth–a BIPOC dance company centering humans’ connection with ecology, led by the artist director Rulan Tangen. They debuted the production “Eco Elegies - Ritual of Re:Mix” in September 2023 in Yelamu (SF) at the Dance Mission Theater and had community performances of the work at SNAG Magazine's anniversary celebration and the multicultural Mosaic Festival in San Jose. Ronice will partake in the company’s teacher training and artivist program in 2024, which includes a tour in Mexico.
Roger Laureano Súarez Serralta
Artisan, potter from Ticul, Yucatan. He has been distinguished as Grand Master of Mexican Folk Art. He excels in the creation of Maya ceremonial plates and vases with natural pigmentation based on products of the region.
Angel Suub
Angel Sulub from the from the Mayan community of Noj Kaj Santa Cruz Xáalam Naj K'ampokolche is part of the Community Center U Kúuchil K Ch'i'ibalo'on. He is also a delegate to the National Indigenous Congress (CNI) and co-organizer of the caravan "El Sur resiste", the South resists. This year, this mobilization was used by various indigenous groups in the impacted areas to draw attention to the fatal consequences of the various megaprojects and of neocolonialism.
Randa Toko
Randa Toko is a land worker, seed keeper, independent researcher and artist. She is Sardinian and currently resides in the waterways of London. Their practice is situated at the confluence of agroecology, food, ritual, healing and community. They are passionate about practices that interrupt notions of individualism and separation from nature to grow towards symbiotic and collaborative futures.
In her work, she seeks to weave the connection between ecological practices and a sense of belonging and reciprocity with the land, especially for global majority communities. By engaging in alternative pedagogies, they create moments for renewed connection, enchantment and belonging to local landscapes, while drawing from the land, human and more-than-human kin as companions for learning.
Randa is currently the southern coordinator for the Seed Sovereignty Programme at the Gaia Foundation. As a writer and photographer, she explores the intricate relationship between people and plants, focusing on intersectional land justice.
Özlem Topuz
Emilio Torres
Farmer, meliponiculturist, deputy director of U yits Ka'an.
Carol Turizo
Psychologist, Language Teacher, activist on Human Rights.
Active Member of Bloque Latino and SoliSur. I’ve been part of the Latin Bloc for 6 months, and I actively participate in creating workshops and tools for the community to invite more people to join our struggle for a less precarious life and the guarantee of our basic rights. I believe this can only be achieved through the creation of popular power. That's why I am committed to participating in and creating activities that help us reach this goal"
Marta Uc
Marta Uc, originally from Yucatan, is an independent film editor, mainly of documentaries.
Pedro Uc Be
Pedro Uc Be is a Mexican writer in Mayan language, poet, storyteller, translator and activist.
Valiana Alejandra Aguilar Hernández
Valiana Aguilar and Ángel Kú. We lead a collective of young people who are part of an eneration that is returning to the land. We are returning to reconnect with our Mayan ways of building, cultivating the cornfield, caring for the seeds and the native bees, so that together we can reinvent our ways of inhabiting the territory.
Gabriel Vallecillo Márquez
Gabriel Vallecillo Márquez, is a Honduran multidisciplinary artist. He started as a poet then moved onto video poetry, video-jockey, 3d projection mapping, live cinema, video and VR installation, documentary film and video performance. His video art installations have been featured at Biennials in Ecuador, Panamá, Nicaragua and Honduras. His artworks have also been exhibited in Cuba, Italy, USA and Germany. Gabriel is currently based in Berlin.
Willem van den Hoek
Willem van den Hoek works with wood. He creates functional and artistic big scale structures, furniture and minimal objects. Sustainability is fundamental in each project that van den Hoek undertakes; through the reuse of materials and the salvatage/re-invention of existing wood constructions he has designed and developed works for Savvy Contemporary, Berlinale´s Forum Expanded, HAU & Hamburger Bahnhof among many other institutions, as well as community engaged projects such as collaborations with Kotti-Shop Project Space, Netzwerk Nachsorge (NeNa e.V.) & Trial and Error. His most personal work is framed as Still.Re.mains.
Pieter Van Eecke
Pieter Van Eecke is a filmmaker based in Brussels. He lived many years in South America and is engaged in social and environmental struggles. His first feature length documentary SAMUEL IN THE CLOUDS (2016) was awarded worldwide, a.o. Gold Hugo Award at Chicago Film Festival, Gold Gentiano at Trento Film Festival & the Full Frame Environmental Award. Recently, his film PLANET B, about two climate youngsters joining Extinction Rebellion, premiered at Visions du Réel 2023 in the Grand Angle competition. And his solidarity with the Yanomami struggle resulted in the film HOLDING UP THE SKY which premiered at the FIFDH 2023 in Geneva.
Mayur and Tushar Vayeda
Artists and siblings from a Warli community in Ganjad, Western India, Mayur (b.1992) and Tushar Vayeda (b. 1987) practice Warli art, weave ritual practices, contemporary impressions, elements of daily life, cultural legends, myths and folklore into a unique way of storytelling.
Mónica Vázquez
Mónica Vázquez is an editor and graphic designer. For more than 25 years she has been dedicated to the research and creation of children's and youth literature in Mexico and Venezuela.
Saúl Villa
Saúl Villa, born in 1958 in Mexico City, studied graphic techniques from 1976 to 1982 with Frank Connelly, Mark Balakjian and Juan José Torralba in London and Barcelona. He has participated in numerous group exhibitions in museums and private galleries. His research deals with painting, art education and public policies related to art and culture.
Sandra Vollus
Ahmed Wafik
Ahmed Wafik, philosopher, activist, content creator and director, dancer of Arabic and Islamic descent. Living through discriminatory events on an individual & collective level, he is highly inspired to reflect on creating better societal living conditions with a focus on minority groups. By pondering both inner reflection and societal transformation, he seeks to inspire action and encourage others to engage in this process of personal and collective change.
Ahmed Wafik
Ahmed Wafik Philosopher | Activist | Content creator and director | Dancer with Arab and Muslim descent. Living through discriminatory events on an individual and collective level, he is highly inspired to reflect on creating better societal living conditions with a focus on minority groups. By pondering both inner reflection and societal transformation, he seeks to inspire action and encourage others to engage in this process of personal and collective change.
Fiona Watson
Fiona Watson is Research and Advocacy Director at Survival International, the global movement for indigenous peoples' rights. She has been with Survival since 1990 and worked on many campaigns for indigenous peoples’ rights, notably with the Yanomami, Guarani, and Awá in Brazil. She has visited many indigenous communities in South America and is a specialist on uncontacted tribes in the Amazon. She also works with the Bushmen of the Central Kalahari in Botswana from where she is now banned from entering. She carried out fieldwork with a Quechua indigenous community in the Peruvian Andes for her MA and lived in the Brazilian Amazon for two years. She has also visited tribal communities in Asia. She works on Survival's Tribal Conservationists and Uncontacted Tribes campaigns.
Caspar Weimann
Caspar Weimann (they/er/sie) is co-initiator of the internet theater onlinetheater.live, the app "Loulu" and numerous intermedia projects; leads seminars and workshops on post-digital and hybrid theater strategies, on participatory theater on the net and on the theatricality of social media; is an honorary professor and mentor for acting at the ADK Baden-Württemberg, where he is also an equal opportunities officer with a special focus on queer empowerment.
Eyal Weizman
Eyal Weizman is the director of Forensis and Forensic Architecture, sister research agencies conducting investigations into rights violations and state violence from their offices in Berlin and London.
Charlotte Wiedemann
CHARLOTTE WIEDEMANN is a foreign correspondent who writes for Le Monde Diplomatique, is a columnist for taz and a speaker on memory culture and postcolonial ethics. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Zentrum Moderner Orient and a public fellow of the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies. Her seven books include Der lange Abschied von der weißen Dominanz (2019) and Den Schmerz der Anderen begreifen. Holocaust und Weltgedächtnis (2022).
Charlotte Wiedemann
Charlotte Wiedemann is a foreign correspondent who writes for Le Monde Diplomatique, is a columnist for taz and a speaker on memory culture and postcolonial ethics. She is a member of the scientific advisory board of the Zentrum Moderner Orient and a public fellow of the Leuphana Institute for Advanced Studies. Her seven books include Der lange Abschied von der weißen Dominanz (2019) and Den Schmerz der Anderen begreifen. Holocaust und Weltgedächtnis (2022).
Minelia Guadalupe Xiu Canché
Mayan woman, meliponiculturist and biologist. Her career has been based on the rescue, promotion and promotion of the xunáan kab bee, promoting the identity of Mayan women in this activity.
Vazira Fazila Yacoobali Zamindar
Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar is Associate Professor of History at Brown University and works on decolonization, displacement, war, nonviolence, and the visual archive. This talk draws on her forthcoming digital humanities book that intervenes in images of art history and war from the Indo-Afghan borderlands of British India.
Özge Yaka
Özge Yaka has received her PhD in Sociology from Lancaster University. She has been working and writing on environmental struggles, gender and environment, environmental and socio-ecological justice, feminist theory, phenomenology, water, body, and subjectivity in the last decade. Her latest book Fighting for the River: Gender, Body and Agency in Environmental Struggles was published by the University of California Press in 2023.
Siegmar Zacharias
Siegmar Zacharias is a performance artist and trained death doula. At the intersection of art, radical pedagogy and activism, her work addresses the ethical dynamics of transformation in ecologies of artistic and social practice through a queer feminist lense. She collaborates with uncontrollable materials such as smoke, slime, saliva, the human nervous system, and grief. In somacoustic listening sessions she explores the materiality of sound as metabolic entanglements in intimacy and alienation. She was born in Romania and lives in Berlin.
Daniela Zambrano Almidón
DANIELA ZAMBRANO ALMIDÓN is a Quechua artist, researcher, and intercultural mediator based in Berlin. She holds a Master's degree in Art in Context. Her work focuses on postcolonial memory, community activation, and other decolonial practices and experiences..
Ola Zielińska
Ola Zielińska works as an artist, designer and curator. Within these practices she places her focus on “supported structures” - the infrastructures for silenced matters and voices, urgent questions and foremost - embodied ideas. She is interested in formulating (a)new models of collaboration by combining knowledges from different fields. Author of scenographies, sound projects, radio pieces and performances. She is a member of SAVVY Contemporary, part of Otucha Collective, co-founder of Duchini Bei duo and Nuvola sound project. Based between Poland and Berlin.
Zumunchi e.V. Zumunchi e.V.
The purpose of Zumunchi e.V. is to promote education and thereby achieve social improvements in the Zongo communities in Ghana. The goal is to promote self-organization among the local people, facilitated through extracurricular educational opportunities provided by the association. This is particularly realized through the establishment of a community center with a library and educational space in Nima, Accra. The center serves various aspects of community life, including youth work, children's programs, adult education, and senior engagement. It acts as a social hub for the local community, fostering exchange and making educational opportunities accessible. Through lectures, workshops, and cultural events, the center empowers individuals to work together as a community, promoting dignity, peace, and environmental sustainability. Additionally, Zumunchi e.V. advances mutual intercultural exchange between Germany and Ghana through language courses, cultural events, project organization, and fostering international partnerships and public relations efforts.