Aleksei Borisionok is a curator, writer, and organizer who currently lives and works between Minsk and Vienna. He is a member of the artistic-research group Problem Collective and Work Hard! Play Hard! working group. He writes about art and politics for various magazines, catalogs, and online platforms. His writings were published in pARTisan, Moscow Art Magazine, Springerin, Hjärnstorm, Paletten, syg.ma among others. The focus of his current research is the temporalities of postsocialism.
Lives and works in Minsk, Belarus. He graduated from the Gymnasium-College of Arts named after I.O. Akhremchik in 2009 and the Department of Graphics at Belarusian State Academy of Arts in 2015. Hramovich has been a member of Problem Collective since 2016. In his art he addresses memory, history of art and architecture, and their influence on politics.
Sjamme van de Voort is a memory studies scholar, born in the Netherlands, grown up in a forest in Denmark, who over the last decade has been taking his work from Denmark, through the US, Cuba, the UK to Sweden. Trained as a historian (Aarhus University, BA 2011 & MA 2015), he is currently working on a PhD project at the Centre for Research on Cuba at the University of Nottingham (2015-). In this work, he investigates the cultural memory that provides the mnemonic framework for Cuban-American population of Miami Dade County, aiming at developing a methodological approach to engage with diaspora memories in order to understand perceptions of the future.
He has taught courses on memory studies and approaches to traumatic memories at BA and MA level at universities in Denmark and Sweden. Besides academia, Sjamme has worked as a political risk analyst with a focus on the Caribbean, while also providing expert knowledge to human rights organisations working in countries related to his specialism. Since he became a partner in The Imaginary Agency, a platform established by Moniek Driesse, these interests and expertises became an integrated fixture of the ongoing exploration of the relations between cultural memory, human rights and environmental justice. The most recent exploration of Sjamme’s work within The Imaginary Agency is the current establishment of a cultural exchange project with established Danish and Cuban hip-hop artists, including students from Silkeborg Højskole.
Moniek Driesse is a design researcher, who was born in a tiny village in the Netherlands, but has been wandering through the megalopolis Mexico City for quite some years, before moving to Sweden. Trained as a designer (Design Academy Eindhoven, ba 2007) and architect (Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México, ma 2013), she is currently working on a PhD project at the Department of Conservation of the University of Gothenburg (2017-). This research is carried out within the framework of the CHEurope Research School, a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions Innovative Training Program focused on Critical Heritage Studies and the Future of Europe and embedded in the Curating the City work cluster.
Besides academia, Moniek established The Imaginary Agency as a platform to explore the subjective nature of human experience in order to understand it in its context and to promote socio-cultural change through the agency of imaginaries. In situated flux, she has collaborated with fellow professionals, foundations, cultural institutions, universities, and, most of all, inhabitants, working on diverse projects focused on public space in vulnerable urban areas (mostly in the Netherlands and Latin America) and the development of tools for dialogue and knowledge exchange. Memory studies scholar Sjamme van de Voort has recently become a partner in the Agency. Moniek and Sjamme will continue to explore the relation between cultural memory, human rights and environmental justice, through the analysis and interweaving of various modes of knowledge production and diverse creative practices.
Frida Klingberg is a contemporary artist based in Gothenburg, Sweden. She currently holds a position as the process leader for public art in Gothenburg City. She is a board member of Index – The Contemporary Art Foundation in Stockholm. She has been the head teacher at the art school Gerlesborgsskolan Bohuslän. Frida Klingberg holds a BFA from the School of Photography, Valand Academy (Gothenburg) and an MFA from Konstfack University of Crafts and Design (Stockholm).
Elisabeth Kovtiak is a PhD student at Charles University in Prague. In her studies, she is focusing on the role of arts in citizen activism, collective memory, trauma and identity in Belarus other post-Socialist countries. Apart from doing scholarly research, she experiments with artistic techniques such as video making, installations and embroidery, addressing social issues and cultural challenges in her works. Prior to starting her work as a researcher, she worked as a columnist and journalist, writing on Culture and Visual Arts. She also worked as a project manager at the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Minsk and on a range of independent cultural initiatives. Her academic interests include collective memory, digital scholarship in social studies, memory studies, nostalgia, popular culture, public spaces, sociology of forgetting, vernacular memory, and visual studies.
Anton Barysenka is a researcher. He lives and works in Minsk, Belarus. He graduated from the Belarusian State University with a degree in information and communication. He studied philosophy within the frame of Erasmus Mundus program for academic mobility, Philosophy of Emotions at Orta Dogu Teknik Universitesi (Ankara, Turkey), and in the program Philosophy and Literature and Cultural Analytics in Belarusian Collegium (Minsk). He received a Master degree from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) in Integrated Social Analysis – with a defended thesis The Social Sleep Waking Routine, Students’ Timing. He has published articles with pARTisan, Bookster, Kalektar, and Sociology of power. His research interests include: sociology of knowledge, visual and cultural studies, and anthropology of sleep.
barysenka(at)gmail.com
Antonina Stebur is a curator and researcher. She graduated from EHU (Vilnius) with a degree in Contemporary Visual and Cultural Research, and from Chto Delat? School of Engaged Art. Field of interests: community, horizontal communication, fem-criticism, history, social choreography.
Chiara Valli is a postdoc researcher at the
Denis Romanovski is an artist and