ACV Public Program

Marianna Tsionki is a curator and educator working on alter-Institutionality through curatorial knowledge and aesthetic production at the intersection of art, ecology and technology. Her areas of interest include theoretical aspects of curating and the Anthropocene and curating as institutional critique with previous curatorial projects and writing focusing on globalisation, migration, digital infrastructures and networks, ecotechnology and climate change. She is currently the University Curator at Leeds Arts University.

Oleksii Chebotarov is a Postdoctoral research fellow at the New Europe College, Bucharest, and Research Associate at the Center for Governance and Culture in Europe, St. Gallen. His research
interests include migration and Jewish history, borderland studies, and environmental history of East- Central Europe. Currently, he is working on a research project on Zbruch as a border river.

Marianna Tsionki is a curator and educator working on alter-Institutionality through curatorial knowledge and aesthetic production at the intersection of art, ecology and technology. Her areas of interest include theoretical aspects of curating and the Anthropocene and curating as institutional critique with previous curatorial projects and writing focusing on globalisation, migration, digital infrastructures and networks, ecotechnology and climate change. She is currently University Curator at Leeds Arts University.

Denise Frazier is an educator, gulf south researcher, program coordinator, musician, theater worker and media analyst. She is a native Houstonian and is proud to call Bulbancha/New Orleans her adopted home where she currently works as assistant director at the New Orleans Center for the Gulf South at Tulane University.

Paul Merchant is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol, where he also co-directs the Centre for Environmental Humanities. He is the author of Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022) and co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (University of Florida Press, 2020). He is currently the PI on the UKRI-funded research project ‘Reimagining the Pacific: Images of the Ocean in Chile and Peru, c.1960 to the Present’.

I am an art historian specialising in contemporary art, with expertise and interest in curating, philosophy, literature and environmental studies. I am based at the University of Vienna, and affiliated with Vienna Anthropocene Network https://anthropocene.univie.ac.at/, Env Humanities Network at the University of Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/networks/ehn/ and The International Association of Art Critics. My interest in the Anthropocene is driven by my research in the field of art history, which focuses on ‘landscape’ as a form of picturing nature.

Daniel Gamito-Marques is a playwright, theater director, and historian of science based in Lisbon, Portugal. He experiments with storytelling techniques to discuss complex subjects within an ecofeminist approach, having written theater plays about the social and cultural impact of scientific racism and medical research. He is also a Research Fellow at the Interuniversity Center for the History of Science and Technology (CIUHCT) at NOVA University of Lisbon. His current research project analyzes how racist rhetoric, geographical knowledge, and diplomacy were used in the Portuguese colonization of Africa in the 19th and 20th centuries, and how they transformed the physical and social landscape of the continent, reinforcing the global North/South divide.

Academic work: https://ciuhct.org/en/members/daniel-gamito-marques

Artwork: Instagram @danielgamitomarques

Working both as an artist and as a landscape architect, Maud Canisius’ practice balances between speculative futures and tangible implementations. She currently works for the City of Rotterdam to make the city water resilient and future proof. Furthermore she finishes a poetry film about human-river relations along the Rhine in Dusseldorf. http://www.maudcanisius.com, https://www.rotterdam.nl

I joined Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW) as a curator in 2011. In this capacity and in cooperation with various partners I have been organizing Anthropocene related projects since 2012. In a variety of formats, we have explored the entanglement between human culture, natural environments and global technologies. To grapple with these multi-scalar, planetary challenges of the Anthropocene, a transdisciplinary approach is necessary. In my work, I especially aim to facilitate collaborative and experimental pathways towards the production of “situated” and “earthbound” knowledge.

Thomas is a geographer and historian, who sometimes describes himself as an ‘energy historian’. He is interested in the relationship between the imperatives of thermodynamics and their relation to politics and the human sciences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. He is a researcher at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin, where he is a member of the ‘Anthropocene Formations’ group. With the support of this group, he recently helped organise a large-scale and trans-disciplinary analysis of the Mississippi River Basin, an account of which will soon appear in The Anthropocene Review.

Pietro Consolandi is a researcher and artist with a background in Political Theory, based in Venice. His work unfolds through individual research and collective action in the field of contemporary art as part of the Barena Bianca collective, an environmentalist art group that aims to protect the lagoon of Venice, adopting the local saltmarsh as its emblem. Pietro has been TBA21–Academy’s Ocean Fellow in 2020, and continues to collaborate with them and ARTPORT_making waves. Since 2018 Barena Bianca works in synergy with local association We are here Venice, and was selected in 2021 as commissioned artist for the Venetian iteration of WE ARE OCEAN global program.

I am a graduate student in Cultural Anthroplogy at Ca’Foscari University with a background in Japanese studies and environmental sustainability. I am currently conducting an ethnographic study on biodiversity conservation in the Venetian lagoon. I am inspired by posthuman studies, queer and multispecies theories. https://unive.academia.edu/MargheritaTess

Hannah Strothmann is an architect and urbanist researching and writing on cities, their inhabitants, and multiple infrastructures–built and unbuilt ones, that are liquid, green or temporary. Her interest lies in unraveling micro-histories of places that uncover broader social dynamics and shifts. She works as a curatorial researcher for the Canadian Centre of Architecture in Montréal and is currently writing her thesis at the Center for Metropolitan Studies in Berlin, analyzing female rowing practices in 20th century Berlin to trace how notions of ‘gender’ and ‘class’ were (de)constructed on the city’s industrial waters.

My name is Chiara Spadaro, I am an italian anthropologist and environmental journalist. I am a PhD student in Historical, Geographical and Anthropological Studies at the Universities of Padova, Ca’ Foscari Venezia and Verona, with a research on food policies in “urban lagoons in the 21st century” (as Nowtilus called Venice: https://www.ocean
space.org/it/activities/nowtilus-storie-da-una-laguna-urbana-del-21esimo-secolo I am a member of the Italian Association of Oral History (https://www.aisoitalia.org/) and of the Italian Network for Local Food Policies (https://www.politichelocalicibo.it/). Here you can find my books for Altreconomia edizioni: https://altreconomia.it/author/chiara-spadaro/”

Léa Perraudin is currently 59% water. She works as postdoctoral research associate in Media Theory at the Cluster of Excellence »Matters of Activity. Image Space Material« at Humboldt University of Berlin. In her habilitation, Léa brings forward a media theory of phase transitions by investigating the ties of material and metaphor in contemporary technocapitalist media environments through transience, dispersal, abundance and solidification.

María Montero Sierra is an art historian and curator and holds the position of Producer and Program Coordinator of TBA21–Academy. Under the initiative of TBA21–Academy, she is currently developing Fishing Fly, a research project on the relationships between marine and human ecosystems from the eating prism. Among her curatorial projects are: Frequency Singular Plural, performance cycle, CentroCentro, Madrid (2019); En los cantos nos diluimos, Sala de Arte Joven de la Comunidad de Madrid (2017); besides having collaborated among others in Joan Jonas. Moving Off the Land, Tate Modern (2018); and TBA21–Academy The Current II (2018-20) and The Current III (2021–25). Graduated in Art History from the Complutense University de Madrid in 2006, she obtained the MA from the Bard College Contemporary Art Curatorial Studies Center, New York in 2013.

Zoé Le Voyer is an independant French curator and cultural coordinator born in Paris (1993). Over the past years, she worked for and collaborated with different organizations (Manifesta13 biennial, Jan van Eyck Academy, Mahal Art Space, Shuffle Festival London, la Friche Belle de Mai Marseille, Yes We Camp…) as a curator, cultural and research coordinator. She is co-founder of women-led collective Calypso36°21 and of Out.of.the.blue.map, an itinerant curatorial program exploring fluid and solid Mediterranean borderscapes. Zoé is currently a research fellow at the Ocean Space (TBA21, Venice), participant to The whole life Academy (Berlin) and is a member of Contemporaines, a French association committed to gender equality in contemporary art.

Camilla Bertolini, a Marie Curie post-doctoral fellow at the university of Ca’ Foscari working on project MAREA (MAtchmaking Restoration Ecology Aquaculture) – https://cordis.europa.eu/project/id/886037 . I have been previously involved in work package 5.2 of the CORILA Venezia 2021 project, investigating influences of extreme climate events on the haulietic resources of the lagoon.I am also involved with the association We Are Here Venice (https://www.weareherevenice.org) and in particular the project VITAL (https://www.v-i-t-a-l.org/en/)

Rossella Alba researches socio-ecological inequalities taking as lenses water, infrastructure and everyday governance practices. She is interested in environmental justice, (urban) political ecology, socio-technical interactions and in the potentials offered by inter- and trans-disciplinary collaboration to foster critical water geographies and just transitions. She studied and lived in Venice for several years before moving to the Netherlands and subsequently Germany. She holds a PhD in Geography and currently works as a postdoctoral researcher at the Hydrology and Society research group, IRI-THESys and Geography Institute, Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. https://www.iri-thesys.org/people-pages/rossella-alba-dr/

Claire Waffel is a visual artist working across photography, video and installation. Since 2019 she is undertaking a Ph.D. in artistic research at the Bauhaus University Weimar and she is currently a research fellow at the Ernst Ludwig Ehrlich Studienwerk (ELES). Her practice-based Ph.D focuses on communities that will be affected by sea level rise and aims to reveal the profound relationships between communities, architecture, politics and climate change.

I am an art historian specialising in contemporary art, with expertise and interest in curating, philosophy, literature and environmental studies. I am based at the University of Vienna, and affiliated with Vienna Anthropocene Network https://anthropocene.univie.ac.at/, Env Humanities Network at the University of Warwick, https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/ias/networks/ehn/ and The International Association of Art Critics. My interest in the Anthropocene is driven by my research in the field of art history, which focuses on ‘landscape’ as a form of picturing nature.

Steve Mentz is Professor of English at St. John’s University in New York City. He is author and editor of many books and articles in the blue humanities, including Ocean (2020), Break Up the Anthropocene (2019), Shipwreck Modernity (2015), and the collections The Cultural History of the Sea in the Early Modern Era (2021) and Oceanic New York (2015). He tweets @stevermentz and his personal website is stevementz.com.

Felicity Mangan is an Australian sound artist, composer and educator based in Berlin. Felicity works with field recordings to assemble imaginary sound works informed by transforming ecosystems influenced by interspecies relationships within semi-natural habitats and climate change. In 2020 Felicity was a resident artist for RIVERSSSOUNDS a platform for virtual sonic experiences and an online residence program.

Justine Daquin is an independent curator and architect. Her research and work is strongly related to liminal territories and she sees projects as means to research and question the city, as well as developing fine strategic answers to site-related issues. Since 2014, Justine has collaborated with international architecture and art offices and she recently was part of a pluri-disciplinary research group that developed a boat project for S.O.S Méditerranée. In 2018, Justine co-created the collective Calypso36°21 and co-directed its curatorial and research program Out.of.the.blue.map until 2021. She is now a fellow of TBA21 Academy’s Ocean fellowship

Joseph Campana is a poet, arts writer, and scholar of the literature and culture of early modern England, a time of climatic instability many refer to as the Little Ice Age. Recent projects consider early modern understandings of humanity, creaturely life, personhood, scale, affect, waste, and other concerns refracted through a range of arts and media, from poetry and theater to political theory and natural history. Campana serves as the William Shakespeare Professor of English, the Director of the Center for Environmental Studies and ENST minor, and a co-PI on the Mellon Foundation-funded Diluvial Houston grant at Rice University.

Robert-Jan Wille is a historian of science from Utrecht University. He focuses on the field sciences and did his Ph. D. on the history of ‘station’ biology in the Dutch Empire, including the political history of marine zoology. Now he works on the history of atmospheric science: his research is organized around German weather balloon work and the emergence of a European network of upper air meteorology before and between the World Wars. Recently he published an article on COVID-19 and the atmospheric humanities.

Christoph Rosol is research scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG, Berlin) where he leads the research group Anthropocene Formations. Furthermore, he is researcher and curator at Haus der Kulturen der Welt (HKW). Being a liaison between both institutions since 2012 he has co-developed a variety of research programs and interdisciplinary projects, amongst them the Anthropocene Curriculum, a global platform for experimental research and education.

Maarten Meijer is a doctoral candidate at the Department of International Relations at the University of Groningen. His doctoral research focusses on the history of soil as an institution of geo-biopolitical governance, drawing on histories of infrastructure, technology, (soil) sciences, colonialism, and fascism. In addition to his academic work, Maarten works together with Studio Inscape on a serious game in which players negotiate on the changing future of the Oosterschelde region for the Water Disaster Museum in the province of Zeeland.

Hi! I’m Joanne Cheung. I live and work in the San Francisco Bay Area; I teach design and systems change at UC Berkeley and Stanford University. My current research focuses on the role of timber in the growth and evolution of cities. Examples of my projects can be found here: https://joannekcheung.com/

Since its beginning in 2013, I have worked with the Anthropocene Curriculum (https://www.anthropocene-curriculum.org/) and co-developed Mississippi. An Anthropocene River (2018-19) from the side of HKW. Trained in comparative literature and philosophy in Berlin and Paris, my research interests on concurring concepts of nature and the human in different knowledge systems brought me to the notion of the Anthropocene, lately with a focus on water and river bodies.

Ellan Spero is a historian of science and technology working closely with scientists and engineers ( Instructor, MIT Department of Materials Science and Engineering), and social entrepreneur having co-founded a nonprofit institution (Co-Founder and Professor of the Practice, Station1) focused on socially-directed science and technology. Her research addresses the ways that people envision human progress through the materials, infrastructures, institutions, systems, and narratives that they create. Current research focuses on materiality of infrastructure, with an emphasis on water systems (recent paper Spero and Ortiz 2021)

I am a bio-geo-chemist and aquatic scientist. My research focusses on the chemistry and biology of freshwater environments, how they are affected by global change and how they may be positioned within the global carbon cycle. Maximilian Lau, Prof. Dr. (tenure track) at the Technical University of Freiberg; Faculty of Geosciences, Geoengineering and Mining (Germany)

I (Sam Grinsell) am a historian of the built environment, primarily interesting in the role of water in shaping urban space. I recently completed a PhD in Architectural History at the University of Edinburgh, for which I studied the Nile in colonial urban space in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; I am now a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Antwerp working on the port developments of Antwerp, London and Rotterdam in the long nineteenth century. As a member of the Global Urban History Project I am part of a team developing a themed conversation concerning global urban history and the Anthropocene; I am also a Fellow of the Royal Geographical Society (UK) and a member of Historians for Future.

I am currently a Ph.D. completion grant fellow in Art history at the University of Oslo, and a doctoral research fellow at the Oslo School of Environmental Humanities. I recently submitted my PhD thesis on how marine infrastructure operates as design interventions in ecosystem processes, with a focus on fishway design from the 1950s until today. My research interests include design history, hydraulic engineering and bio-engineering, infrastructure, critical animal studies, andtheories of the Anthropocene.

Sebastian De Pretto is a postdoctoral research fellow at the institute “Kulturen der Alpen” in Altdorf, Switzerland. In his research he investigates the history of reservoir construction and development-induced displacements of mountain communities in the Alps during the late 19th and the 20th century.

Bronwyn Bailey-Charteris is a Swedish/Australian curator, writer and lecturer based in Stockholm. She is a lecturer at Stockholm University in Department of Culture and Aesthetics and is a current doctoral candidate at the University of New South Wales in the Department of Arts, Design and Architecture, where she develops her curatorial theory of art and water in the climate crisis, entitled Ingesting the Hydrocene. Research interests are focused upon processes of watery thinking in contemporary art, ecology as social metaphor and feminist methodologies of curatorial practice. (Her work with water is central to her teaching and doctoral thesis where she has coined the term ‘Hydrocene’ as a curatorial theory. The Hydrocene argues for artistic methods of thinking with water in the age of accelerating climate crises. Embodied and relational it argues for unexamined perspectives on the interrelation of curatorial practice, art, climate, water and intersectional feminisms. The Hydrocene amplifies the pioneering methods groundbreaking artists and curators are employing towards ethical collaborations with water in these times of mass water crises. )