A Brazilian artist currently working in Rome (Italy), she studies the links between globalisation and biodiversity in a very unique way. In her projects “Seeds of Change” and “Wake”, like an archaeologist-anthropologist, she studied the plants found in travellers’ clothing and the ballast of merchant ships. This historical research allowed her to map the development of globalisation. She sees her art as research into life: working on things that are still unknown means heading down an unpredictable path. Cofounder of the Brazilian Partido Verdo (green party) in São Paulo, Maria Thereza Alves works closely alongside local Indian populations.

A theatre director and researcher, Frédérique Aït-Touati’s work sits at the crossroads between theatre and the history of science. After graduating from the Ecole Normale Supérieure, she then studied at the ADC Theater in Cambridge in 2001. Three years later she founded her own company, AccenT, which performs on both sides of the Channel in English and in French.

This Swedish artist has dedicated his life to a fragile material: ceramic. He enjoys working on repulsive, ugly or even terrifying shapes that evoke excitement or fear, a reaction against the “luminous” Scandinavian design of his origins and the romantic notion of the craftsman. As a member of the Swedish Arts and Crafts group ‘We Work In A Fragile Material’, he has exhibited in New York, London, Oslo, Stockholm and Goteborg.

www.linusersson.com

An architect and professor of architecture at the University of Thessaly, his work centres around social aspects and social critique. He was strongly influenced in his quest for new forms of urban cohabitation by Antonio Negri and his concept of “singularities”. City residents are singularities that must live in shared spaces, which includes the soil (crops). “Plethodome” is a new building model for plethos (multitude) in a city in crisis like Athens.

www.kotionis.com

A Norwegian artist based in Bergen, Toril Johannessen mixes photography, texts, drawings and installation. For many years, she has conducted an empirical and theoretical investigation into the links between art and science. Her “Words and Year” series identifies recurring words in academic journals, like logic, love, expansion, joy or reality, tracing lines and navigating between science and poetry. At dOCUMENTA(13), she presents “Extraordinary Popular Delusions”, an installation exploring energy and economic cycles from the perspective of sun, oil and image production.

This Turkish choreographer and dancer is a renegade. Originally destined for a career in electronic engineering and telecommunications, today he is one of the most acclaimed performers on the Mediterranean dance scene. He discovered dance in different workshops about dance and theatre when he was going to university. After dancing with the Modern Ballet Company from 1989 to 1992, he then spent ten years with the Istanbul Metropolitan Municipality Theatre. He is one of the founders of the Yesil Uzumler Company, Dance Factory, Taldans Company and CATI Studio.

www.taldans.com

Through her performances, drawings, sculpture, architecture and installations, this iconoclastic artist reveals an obsession with the word “pause”. She pursues the moments when viewers suspend their daily lives and take a momentary vacation from their world to reconsider the significant parts of their lives.

An associate professor of photography at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an artist in multiple media (writing, drawing, photography and installations), she explores the institutional structures that organise and control knowledge.

Fernando García-Dory ´s (b. 1978) work engages specifically with issues affecting the relation between culture-nature now, embodied within the contexts of landscape, the rural, desires and expectations related with identity aspects, crisis, utopy and social change. He studied Fine Arts and Rural Sociology in Madrid, Spain. Interested in the harmonic complexity of biological forms and processes, his work addresses connections and cooperation, from microorganisms to social systems, and from traditional art languages such as drawing to collaborative agroecological projects, actions, and cooperatives.

www.fernandogarciadory.com

Åsa Sonjasdotter is a Swedish-born artist based in Tromsø, Norway and Berlin, Germany.

Sonjasdotter’s practice focuses on questions of diversity, power and knowledge. Her projects often unfold over time, following the conditions of the involved participants and investigated subject. In the long term project “A Potato-Perspective” Sonjasdotter investigates the cultural, political and economic implications of humans’ domestication of the potato plant. In Sonjasdotter’s projects the exhibition often operates as a site for the real exchange of goods, knowledge and power positions as well as functioning as a metaphor for societal conditions.

www.potatoperspective.org

www.kunstakademietitromso.no

From his childhood fascination with comic books, graffiti and linocuts, Swiss artist Aurélien Gamboni now works with drawings, models and installations. One example is his “Into the Maelström”, which raises social, political and environmental questions through drawings, images and a scale model of the imaginary Assembly of Catastrophes (“Assemblée des catastrophes”). Inspired by an Edgar Allan Poe novel, Aurélien Gamboni invites negotiators, architects, the sociologist Norbert Elias, illustrator Fritz Eichenberg and Edgar Allan Poe himself.

This ongoing project includes several collaborations, in particular with author and researcher Sandrine Teixido.

This British artist and curator creates social spaces in the public realm and brings people together to share food and conversation. She was an artist in residence for Friends of the Earth and is the curator of Feast on the Bridge, an annual communal harvest meal that takes place on a central London bridge as part of the Thames Festival.

Sculpture, photography, architecture and ecology intersect in the work of this pair of British artists, whose central focus is on the temporal nature of processes of growth and the passage of time. They often work in public spaces and grass grown from seed is one of their materials of choice. In 2007 they collected and germinated hundreds of acorns from the 7000 Oaks planted by Joseph Beuys, and now have 250 surviving saplings. Dialogues and research are integral to their artwork Beuys’ Acorns and their objective is to care for these descendants with great resolve, embracing Beuys’ call for cities and towns to be “forest-like”. They have received the NESTA Pioneer Award, the Wellcome Sci-Art award and the L’Oreal Grand Prize for their photographic images created using chlorophyll’s sensitivity to light.

www.ackroydandharvey.com

Erik Samakh has been creating interactive sound installations with natural and/or electronic materials since the 1980s. His “acoustic ecology” is a dialogue between man and nature where images lose their power over space, which becomes a place for listening. Many of his works have been performed in natural sites such as regional parks or geological reserves.

A graduate of the Bologna Academy of Fine Arts, this young Italian artist explores relationships between man and nature, links between the art market and politics, and the cultural dynamics stemming from the international circulation of people and goods. In “Wood Songs” (2002) for example, a series of thin slices of wood are played on a record player, translating the wood’s history into sound. Similarly, she has taken seismograph recordings of major 20th century Italian earthquakes and turned them into music.