Participants

Filipa Ramos

Filipa Ramos, PhD, is a Lisbon-born writer and curator whose research investigates art's relationship to ecology. She is Lecturer at the Art Institute at the FHNW Academy of Art and Design, Basel, and Artistic Director of Loop, a Festival dedicated to artist’s films, spread out across the cultural and artistic venues of Barcelona. Ramos curated BESTIARI, the Catalan representation at the 60th Biennale di Venezia (2024). She co-founded the online artists’ cinema Vdrome. She runs the art and science festival The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish with Lucia Pietroiusti, with whom she also curated Songs for the Changing Seasons for the 1. Klima Biennale Wien (2024) and Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdëina, 2022). In 2021, she co-curated Bodies of Water, the 13th Shanghai Biennale. Ramos was Editor-in-chief of e-flux Criticism (2013–20), Associated Editor of Manifesta Journal (2009–11) and contributed to Documenta 13 (2012) and 14 (2017). She edited Animals (Whitechapel Gallery/ MIT Press, 2016). Her upcoming book, The Artist as Ecologist (Lund Humphreys, 2025), discusses the ways in which contemporary artists embrace environmentalism.

Lucia Pietroiusti

Lucia Pietroiusti is a curator, programmer and strategist, working at the intersection of art, ecology and systems. As Head of Ecologies at Serpentine, London, Pietroiusti founded General Ecology in 2018 and the Ecologies department in 2023, to further ecological research and experimentation in thought, infrastructure and practice. Pietroiusti is the curator of Sun & Sea (Golden Lion at the 58th Venice Biennale and tour). With Filipa Ramos, she is the curator of Songs for the Changing Seasons (Vienna Klima Biennale, 2024) and Persones Persons (8th Biennale Gherdeïna, 2022). Pietroiusti is a curator of Sites of… Practice (E-WERK Luckenwalde, since 2024), Back to Earth (Serpentine, 2020-22) and Court for Intergenerational Climate Crimes: The British East India Company on Trial by Radha D’Souza and Jonas Staal (2025). Recent publications include More-than-Human (with Andrés Jaque and Marina Otero Verzier) and The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish (with Filipa Ramos).

Prof. Dr. Michael Ohl

"I studied biology at the University of Kiel (zoology, marine biology, with parallel studies in philosophy) and completed my doctorate at the University of Göttingen (zoology with a minor in the history of science). In 1997, I was appointed to a curatorial position at the Museum für Naturkunde Berlin. In 2010 I habilitated in zoology and in 2020 I was appointed Associate Professor at the Humboldt University of Berlin. In addition to my research activities, I have been writing popular science non-fiction books. I am involved in a variety of public formats such as exhibitions (e.g. Darwin exhibition 2009), film and literature events (“Filmwelten der Wissenschaft”). I am very interested in interdisciplinary perspectives on natural history."

Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Elizabeth A. Povinelli is an academic, artist and filmmaker. She is Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology and Gender Studies at Columbia University, a founding member of the Karrabing Film Collective, and Correspondiong Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She is also the receipt of doctorate honoris causa from the University of Antwerp/Antwerp Research Institute for the Arts Her eight academic and books include Geontologies, A Requiem to Late Liberalism, winner of the Lionel Trilling Prize, and The Inheritance, a graphic nonfiction memoir. She has made over ten films with the Karrabing Film Collective. The Collective has received multiple prizes including Eye Award, Eye Filmmuseum, Amsterdam, The Visible Award, and the Cinema Nova Award Best Short Fiction Film, Melbourne International Film Festival. Povinelli’s individual drawings have been shown in multiple galleries, including a collection on permanent display in the Museo della Civiltà, Roma.

Antoine Bertin

Antoine Bertin weaves together science and sensory immersion, field recording and sound storytelling, data and music composition. His creations take the form of listening experiences, immersive moments and audio meditations exploring relationships in the living world, and sculpting conversations between humans and other species. His work has been presented at Tate Britain,with Google Arts & Culture, at Centre Pompidou, with Serpentine Gallery, at KIKK or STRP festival, as well as permanently installed in Kielder Forest (UK) and Sferik Art (MEX). He produces a quarterly show called “Edge of the Forest” on NTS radio, bringing together recordings, sonifications and voice into science inspired speculations. Studio Antoine Bertin is located in Paris (FR) and Alicudi Island (IT).

Alejandra Pombo Su

Alejandra Pombo Su holds a PhD in Fine Arts, with a thesis on the paradoxes and effects of introducing the notion of performance in contemporary art practices. She has undertaken residencies in international institutions, including the Atlantic Center for the Arts, Florida, Pact Zollverein, CA2M and Tabakalera, among others. Her work has been presented widely at festivals, museums, and art centers moving between the fields of visual arts, cinema, and the performative arts, such Museo Reina Sofia, Galeria Municipal do Porto, Artium Museoa and Fundação Serralves. This year she is holding the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin-Program in the field of visual arts.

Aslak Aamot Helm

Aslak Aamot Helm works on building alliances, experiments and organizations across art, science, advanced technologies and industry. He is the co-founder of Diakron, a studio for transdisciplinary research and practice, and Primer, a platform for artistic and organizational development housed in the global water- and biotechnology company Aquaporin. Aslak has recently (2025) completed a postdoctoral research project with Medical Museion (DK), Diakron (DK) and Serpentine Galleries (UK). In the project titled “Re-energizing art institutions at the intersection of art, science and technology” he worked to study and develop para-organizational missions and strategies across contemporary art, biotechnologies, biomedical sciences and natural history. This has led to a recent body of work around the concepts under-determination, uncertainty and unknowability.

Maria Inés Plaza Lazo

Maria Inés Plaza Lazo is a writer, editor, and curator whose work moves between art, politics, and collective publishing. As the co-founder and editor-at-large of Arts of the Working Class, together with Paul Sochacki she has built a platform that rethinks cultural production through an economic and social lens, fostering artistic discourse beyond institutional boundaries. Her curatorial and editorial projects navigate the intersections of music, performance, and visual arts, exploring how the arts shape community, memory, and resistance.

Staci Bu Shea

Staci Bu Shea (b. Miami, 1988) is a curator, writer and death doula based in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Broadly, they focus on aesthetic and poetic practices of social reproduction and care work, as well as its manifestations in interpersonal relationships and daily life, community organizing and institutional practice. Bu Shea’s latest publication Solution 305: Dying Livingly (Sternberg Press, 2025) is a collection of short essays written in the first few years of the author’s holistic deathcare research and practice. With a focus on the truth of impermanence and the material cultures of death and dying, the writing reaches toward a future of compassionate, community-centered deathcare. Bu Shea was curator at Casco Art Institute: Working for the Commons (Utrecht, 2017-2022). With Carmel Curtis, they co-curated Barbara Hammer: Evidentiary Bodies at Leslie Lohman Museum of Art (New York City, 2017). Bu Shea holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College (2016).

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen

Revital Cohen and Tuur Van Balen (UK/BE, b.1981, based in London) work across objects, installation and film. Their work looks at materials, processes, behaviours and feelings formed by mass production of objects and animals. Recent exhibitions took place at Mostyn Gallery, Llandudno; Ghost 2565, Bangkok; Serpentine, London; Bodies of Water, 13th Shanghai Biennale; Palazzo delle Esposizioni, Rome; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; The Renaissance Society, Chicago; Para Site, Hong Kong; HKW in Berlin and Congo International Film Festival, Goma. Their work is in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York and M+ Museum, Hong Kong, among others.

Giles Round

Giles Round (b. London) lives and works in London and St Leonards-on-Sea. Round’s ongoing exploration The Art Direction of the Noguchi Museum (2018–ongoing), enquires into the role of the artist as an integral part of institutional and design teams, and of society’s infrastructures and organisations at large. Rethinking and actualising Isamu Noguchi’s creative spirit and the questions that drove his practice, The Art Direction considers space, form, environment, mood and purpose as equally fundamental coordinates for an artistic outcome.

Claudia Rankine

Claudia Rankine is the author of five books of poetry, including Citizen: An American Lyric and Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric; three plays including HELP, which premiered in March 2020 (The Shed, NYC), and The White Card, which premiered in February 2018 (ArtsEmerson/ American Repertory Theater) and was published by Graywolf Press in 2019; as well as numerous video collaborations. Her collection of essays, Just Us: An American Conversation, was published by Graywolf Press in 2020 and her most recent project TRIAGE is forthcoming with them in 2026. She is also the co-editor of several anthologies including The Racial Imaginary: Writers on Race in the Life of the Mind. In 2016, Rankine co-founded The Racial Imaginary Institute (TRII). Among her numerous awards and honors, Rankine is the recipient of the Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, the Poets & Writers’ Jackson Poetry Prize, and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Lannan Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, United States Artists, and the National Endowment of the Arts. A former Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, Claudia Rankine joined the NYU Creative Writing Program in Fall 2021. She lives in New York. This year, she is participating in the DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program in the field of literature.

Jenna Sutela

Jenna Sutela is a Finnish artist based in Berlin. In her work, Sutela explores biological and computational processes, from the human microbiome to planetary ecosystems to language and code. Her sculptures, installations, and sound pieces frequently include chance elements and evolving structures: they are both live and alive. Often working in dialogue with scientists, she is interested in moving beyond individualism and anthropocentrism to consider interrelationships at all scales. Her work has been presented internationally, including at the Castello di Rivoli, Turin (2025); Centre d’Art Contemporain Genève (2024); Swiss Institute, New York (2023); Helsinki Biennale (2023); Haus der Kunst, Munich (2022); Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki (2022); Scheringstiftung, Berlin (2022); Shanghai Biennial (2021); Liverpool Biennial (2021); Kunsthall Trondheim (2020); Serpentine Galleries, London (2019); and Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2019). Sutela has been a visiting artist at La Becque, MIT, and Callie’s Berlin. She will exhibit in the Finnish Pavilion at the 61st International Venice Biennale 2026.

Jovana Maksić

Jovana Maksić is a researcher focused on the evolution of language and cognition. Raised in Serbia, she studied neuroscience in Shanghai, New York, Berlin and Frankfurt, gaining experience in human, rodent and primate brain research. She has also conducted primatological fieldwork in the Caribbean. Jovana is currently a doctoral candidate investigating the neural correlates of Paleolithic tool-making and early hominin cognition at the University of Zurich.