Chiara Valli is a postdoc researcher at the department of Conservation at Göteborg University, Sweden. Her research interests include critical urban studies, urban and social geography, political theory, and critical heritage studies. Her current postdoctoral research investigates issues of cultural heritage, urban change, neoliberal urbanism, gentrification, marginalization, and resistance, with a focus on Göteborg, Sweden. She received her PhD degree in Social and Economic Geography from Uppsala University in 2017 with a thesis titled “Pushing borders. Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities.” Her doctoral research critically explored the agency and positioning of cultural workers in the restructuring of contemporary cities, in relation to processes of gentrification, precariousness, and political resistance by studying New York City and Milan as empirical cases.

Selected publications: Valli, C. (2017). “Pushing borders: Cultural workers in the restructuring of post-industrial cities.” PhD Dissertation, Uppsala University. Valli, C.(2016). “A sense of displacement: Long-time residents’ feelings of displacement in gentrifying Bushwick, New York.”International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 39(6): 1191-1208, Wiley. Valli, C. (2015). “When cultural workers become an urban social movement. Political subjectification and alternative cultural production in the Macao movement, in Milan.” Environment and planning in SAGE Journal: A, 47(3): 643-659

Denis Romanovski is an artist and organiser based in Göteborg. As an organiser, he has been running and producing numerous international and local art events, festivals, and exchange projects such as: Net Art Meetings (Minsk, 2001), RAM7 (2005), international performance festival Navinki (Minsk, 1999-2008), PALS – Performance Art Links festival in Stockholm. His artistic practice ranges from performance art to interactive and technology based art, artistic investigations, and other similar tactics. His performances often focus on dynamic relations between the members of the audience, creating situations for individual expressions and experience of collective awareness. Denis Romanovski is actively involved in several artist run organisations: Gallery54, Konstepidemin, Fylkingen, and other.

Linda Tedsdotter is a visual artist based in Göteborg, Sweden. Her works have been displayed since 1998 in several museums of Modern Art, festivals and galleries, such as the Kaohsiung International Arts Festival in Taiwan (China, 2003), the Museum of Contemporary Art in Zagreb (Croatia, 2004), Moderna Museet in Stockholm (Sweden, 2006), Palais de Tokyo in Paris (France, 2013), and OFF Biennale Cairo (Egypt, 2018).

Tedsdotter’s artworks are site-specific or related in some way or another to the situation and the context they make up. Using small-scale, visual means her sculptural installations entice the viewer to participate in a way that is perceptibly controlled. Her interventions in the environment have their origins in the artist’s close relationship to the northern countryside, and they grab the viewers senses and attention.

Besides being an artist, Tedsdotter also works as an independent curator and is the International Coordinator at the residence program at Konstepidemin in Göteborg, Sweden. Tedsdotter has been a board member of several art institutions such as Röda Sten, which is the main organization behind GIBCA, Göteborg International Biennial of Contemporary Art, Göteborg, the art magazine Paletten, and the artist run gallery Box.

Maxim Sarychau is a photojournalist and visual artist, based in Minsk, Belarus. Sarychau works on long-term visual projects where he refers to the topics of violence of various forms and levels, both from authoritarian societies or within traditional society. He focuses on political and human dimensions of collective memory and history. Sarychau graduated from various photography educational courses and programs in Belarus, Lithuania, Latvia, and Russia.

He has been exhibited internationally: Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland), Art Museum of Chóngqìng (China), Museum of Genocide Victims (Lithuania), Contemporary Art Space (Georgia), Tbilisi History Museum (Georgia), Gallery of Classic Photography (Russia), Pavlov’s dog gallery (Germany).

Ingrid Falk is an artist with a pedagogical interest towards society who is based in Stockholm, Sweden and Barcelona, Spain. She works with participatory, Contemporary Art in public space. She holds a Ph Mag from Stockholm University Department of Education in Arts and Professions and is a tutor at Konstfack University of Arts, Crafts and Design. She is a co-creator of FA+ where the sign + stands for collaboration and collective making. Her project, THE UNIVERSAL LIBRARY, is an ongoing endless street art project.  Falk has made reports for the Swedish national board for culture and for the Stockholm City Cultural Department and has initiated education programs for artists to work in schools and with public art. FA+ is represented in collections in Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Austria, Argentina and Cuba.

Alina Dzeravianka is a cultural manager based in Brest, Belarus. She is a project director at Brest Fortress Development Foundation, lecturer at the European College of Liberal Arts in Belarus and teacher the course Art and Social Change. She was a coordinator of the  artist in residency program in 2018 at the independent cultural venue, Prastora KH. Dzeravianka worked as a Country Coordinator for Belarus for the EU project Culture and Creativity (2015-18), she was a project manager at Association of Cultural Managers in Moscow, Russia (2010-13), a coordinator at the architectural festival Archstoyanie in Russia (2011-12), and a coordinator at the international art residency program in Nikola-Lenivets, Russia (2012), among others. Dzeravianka holds a MA degree in Cultural management from MSSES (Moscow, Russia) and a MA in Comparative History from EHU (Vilnius, Lithuania). She is a member of ICOM Belarus, Association of Cultural Managers (Russia).

Nils Claesson is an artist based in Stockholm, Sweden. Claesson works with animation, text, film and contemporary art. Since 2011, he participated in the building of an environment for artistic research in Sweden. In September 2011, he received his PhD in Fine Arts from The Film and Media Department at Stockholm University of the Arts. For the moment he is employed as a researcher at the Royal Institute of Art in a project named Workawork: a cross-disciplinary research about the role of work in a society where machines and artificial intelligence is challenging the traditional form of work.

Claesson has a history in making projects in dialogue with Eastern Europe. Between 1998-2009, he led several projects with the aim of bringing artists together and creating a dialogue between artists from the Baltic states, Belarus, Russia, and the Ukraine. He participated in a group-show at the gallery of The Art Academy in Minsk with a work named The Contract, where he hired a Belarusian artist for one month who was tasked with not making art.