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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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”
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.
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
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 South African artist who has lived in Berlin since 2002. In November 2024, the Saarlandmuseum cancelled 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 public funds on two separate occasions (the symposium was initially blocked by Berlin’s Akademie der Künste in December 2022, and then cancelled by the Federal Agency for Civic Education in mid-October 2023). Breitz has put together this one-day symposium partially as a parting gift to her past and present students at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Braunschweig, as she steps back from a professorship that she has held at the university for eighteen years. ‘The Big Chill’ is funded by the HBK Braunschweig, with immensely generous support from Spore Initiative.
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
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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).
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.”
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
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).
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.
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.
Zilan Sarah Kößler
The Amed-born youth psychotherapist and children's book author Sarah Zilan Kößler works as a bridge builder between Europe and the democratic women's self-administration structures in North and East Syria (Rojava). For years she has been working closely with JINWAR (a women's village in the Autonomous Administration of North and East Syria) and WJAS (WJAS, Foundation of Free Women in Rojava). She is active both as a member of KONGREYA STAR (association of women's organizations in North and East Syria) in Germany and in civil society women's projects in Europe such as Women defend Rojova, Jineoloji Committee.
Sarah Zilan Kößler works in the health center GEKO Neukölln as a psychosocial counselor for refugees and gives workshops in Germany and Europe for various initiatives, associations and organizations on democratic structures in North and East Syria, JINWAR, JINEOLOJI (science of women), feminism, ecology, art and creates art and performances in the context of art and resistance. She has professional experience working with women's initiatives worldwide such as:
Oidho (a human rights organization of indigenous peoples) Oaxaca/Mexico, the Research Center against Violence against Women, La Paz/Bolivia and the Maxmur refugee camp in Erbil/Iraq, JINWAR AND WJAS , series of events and Jinwar exhibitions in Barcelona, Sicily Performance on the Kurdish Women's Movement at the Art Academy, Bergen/Norway
Zilan's son reminds her every day of the potential for a better world.
With her unwavering commitment to innovative ways of creating a vibrant and harmonious future, she wants to protect children without creating barriers around them. Her mission is to help the rising generation grow up resilient and courageous in a world characterized by uncertainty.
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.
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.
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”.
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.
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*.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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 & Tashur Vayeda
Artists and siblings from a Warli community in Ganjad, Western India, Mayur and Tushar Vayeda practice Warli art, weave ritual practices, contemporary impressions, elements of daily life, cultural legends, myths and folklore into a unique way of storytelling.
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
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.
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.
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.