Abbey Shaine Dubin is an artist based in Selma, Alabama.
Aetzel Griffioen leads the development of the educational material at Rotterdam Vakmanstad / Skillcity and works as a part time lecturer in ecophilosophy at the Erasmus University Rotterdam. He was awarded the Young Van Praag Award for his work on the commons and education in 2013. In 2019, he was nominated for the national Berrie Heesen Award (NL) for his philosophy workshops with kids and teenagers.
Social sciences student. Originally from Bas-du-fleuve. Interested in writing from the margins using the I and the context of its production. Lives in Hull, Gatineau.
Alexandre Klein is a philosopher and historian of sciences specialized on contemporary conceptions of health. He sometimes teaches philosophy at Cégep André Leurendeau and otherwise an associated researcher at Ottawa University and CIRST.
Art historian and critic based in Amsterdam
Alice Rivières carries the gene for Huntington’s disease – a rare, neuro-progressive genetic disease that slowly transforms her body and soul. Since becoming aware of such an out-of-the- ordinary becoming, she devotes most of her time to observing what she calls “the long march of her neuroevolutionary metamorphosis”, notably through writing. She is a special correspondent of the Dingdingdong Institute in Huntingtonland. Founded in 2012, Dingdingdong is a collective of researchers in the human sciences and artists who work together to explore Huntington’s disease like a partially unknown planet (Huntingtonland), building up knowledge, complementary to medical knowledge, to help those who are affected by the disease (sick people, relatives, caregivers and researchers, etc.) Main contributions: The Dingdingdong manifesto (Editions Dingdingdong, Paris, 2013); Anouck, portrait dingdingdong n ° 1 (with A. Compain-Tissier, Editions Dingdingdong, Paris, 2013); As well as dozens of notes on the site www.dingdingdong.org. See also Absolute Beginners, a film by Fabrizio Terranova conceived and written with six huntingtonien.n.e.s including Alice Rivières.
Amber Berson is a writer, curator, and Ph.D. candidate conducting doctoral research at Queen’s University on artist-run culture and feminist, utopian thinking. She most recently curated Utopia as Method (2018); World Cup! (2018); The Let Down Reflex (2016-2018, with Juliana Driever); TrailMix (2014, with Eliane Ellbogen); *~._.:*JENNIFER X JENNIFER*:.~ (2013, with Eliane Ellbogen); The Annual Art Administrator’s Relay Race (2013, with Nicole Burisch); The Wild Bush Residency (2012–14); and was the 2016 curator-in-residence as part of the France-Quebec Cross-Residencies at Astérides in Marseille, France. She is a co-lead at Art+Feminism, a project that works for a more equitable Wikipedia and was the 2019-2020 Wikipedian in Residence at Concordia University. She is also the programming coordinator at articule.
Amélie-Anne Mailhot writes and researches in the form of investigations into the political depths of our relationships to living beings in all their forms, as well as our consequent ways of inhabiting space. She lives in La Pêche, in the Outaouais region.
Anna Khimasia is an independent curator and educator living in New York City. Often working collaboratively, her curatorial projects focus on under-represented bodies and voices. Recent curatorial projects include in the whirlwind or in the storm (Cuchifritos, NY); Holding (KATES-FERRI PROJECTS, NY); and Drawing on Our History (Carleton University Art Gallery, Ottawa). Anna is the co-founder of International Arrivals (IA), supporting artists from countries in conflict. The IA podcast can be found on most podcast platforms. She currently teaches courses on contemporary art and performance at both UCLA and Rutgers.
Anne Lardeux works with undefined materials to support non-professional gestures but carried by a formal desire. She arrives in an environment, settles there to activate herself with those who are willing and according to the means at hand. From one mesh to another, a hat to cover several heads, these are the (rather vague) principles of her involvement in different groups: KABANE77, ACTION INDIRECTE, Le Sémaphore. At the moment, it is at Club Ami, a therapeutic reception center located in the Côte-des-Neiges district of Montreal, that we find her. More at ease with writing, she has however, in the last few years, launched herself into filmmaking and the handling of this non-native language that are images. She is also one of the two girls in the band Prinkipissa.
Anykrystel Coppet is passionate about what makes each person unique. That’s why, in all the personal and professional projects she chooses, she pays specific attention to environments conducive to the creative, spiritual and emotional fulfillment of the people she interacts with. Developing one’s full potential in a space of well-being and benevolence: this is what drives and motivates her in the coaching approaches she offers. To achieve this, she dares to call on the five senses, using tools, materials, objects and moments that enable people to reappropriate their bodies, their experiences and their stories, to rediscover and project themselves.
Arantzazu Saratxaga Arregi holds a PhD in philosophy and aesthetics from the University of Art and Design Karlsruhe. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the Academy of Fine Arts (Vienna) and lectures at the University of Applied Arts (Vienna) on media theory and cybernetics. She approaches the question of the interior of environments (endomilieus) from a processual and matrixial perspective (see her article “Matrixiale Philosophie. Mutter – Welt- Gebärmutter: Zu einer mehrwertigen Ontologie”).
Between 2004 and 2009, the Artivistic collective organized thematic events four of which large transdisciplinary gathering at the intersection of art, information and activism which brought together a host of artists/organizers and other creatives of thought and action. Artivistic was born from the idea that conversations about art should not be left to artists alone and likewise, theory should not be left to academics. Artivistic looks to inspire, proliferate and activate (2012)
Bernard Aspe is a philosopher. He defended his thesis under the direction of Jacques Rancière, on the relation between the thought of individuation in Gilbert Simondon. His works, and numerous articles associated with them (published in the journals Futur antérieur, Multitudes, Alice, Attaques, Grumeaux, etc.) aim to re-articulate philosophical questioning (especially the relationship to ontology) and the demands of contemporary politics. He is the author of Les fibres du temps (Caen, Nous, 2018).
Bernard Schütze is an independent art critic and curator. His essays have been published in numerous art magazines and he has written various catalogue articles and artist monographs. He also has given talks at art-oriented events mainly in Canada and Europe. Originally from Germany, he has been living and working in Montréal since 1985.
Brian Massumi is the author of numerous books in philosophy, political economy, and arts and media, including What Animals Teach Us about Politics (Duke University Press, 2017); The Power at the End of the Economy (Duke University Press, 2015); Ontopower. War, Power, Perception (Duke University Press, 2015) and 99 Theses on the Revaluation of Value: A Postcapitalist Manifesto (University of Minnesota Press, 2018). He is the translator into English of A Thousand Plateaus by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Cecilia Chen cycles and lives in Montreal.
Charles Gute is a New York–based artist and book editor. After studying and performing classical music for many years, Gute shifted his focus to visual art, receiving an MFA in New Genres from the San Francisco Art Institute. His work has been exhibited at numerous venues internationally, including the Berkeley Art Museum, the ZKM Center for Art and Media, the UCLA Hammer Museum, Socrates Sculpture Park, and Manifesta 11. Gute has created specially commissioned projects for print publications such as Frieze, Flash Art, ArtLies, and Fillip. He has been awarded fellowships from the Rockefeller Foundation, the San Francisco Foundation, and the MacDowell Colony. He is represented by
Christoph Brunner is assistant professor in cultural theory at Leuphana University Lüneburg. In his research he deals with the intersections of media, activism and their affective politics. He is part of a publication collective that relays transversal texts aiming at multi-lingual encounters between social movements, theory and art and was involved in the FC/MC alternative international media centre during the G20-summit 2017 in Hamburg.
Dalie Giroux has been teaching political theory at the Institute of Gender and Women’s Studies and the School of Political Studies at the University of Ottawa since 2003. Her research proposes an anti-disciplinary theory and experimental design of the forms of articulation between space, language and power in contemporary America. As an essayist, she is renewing the Quebec pamphleteer tradition. She has published Parler en Amérique. Oralité, colonialisme, territoire (recipient of the 2019 Eva-Legrand Spiral Prize) and L’œil du maître. Figures de l’imaginaire colonial québécois (Montreal, 2020).
Daniel Colson is a philosopher and historian of anarchism. He is a professor of sociology at the University of Saint-Etienne and is one of the animators of the libertarian bookstore “La Gryffe” in Lyon. He is the author of A Little Philosophical Lexicon of Anarchism from Proudhon to Deleuze (Autonomedia, 2019) and Trois essais de philosophie anarchiste: islam, histoire, monadologie (Leo Sheer, 2004).
David Foster Wallace, (born February 21, 1962, Ithaca, New York, U.S.—died September 12, 2008, Claremont, California), American novelist, short-story writer, and essayist whose dense works provide a dark, often satirical analysis of American culture.
David Thomas (1979) lives and works in Aylmer, Québec. He is a member of Open Food Network, a global community of farmers, technologists, activists, and researchers, working together to build a new food system.
Dorian Nuskind-Oder and Simon Grenier-Poirier are Montreal-based artists working between dance, performance and visual arts. Their work has been supported by institutions including: Usine-C, Tangente, Circuit-Est Centre Choregraphique, Studio 303, the Goethe Institute, Quebec Council for Arts and Letters, Montreal Arts Council, Institute for Contemporary Art (Boston), Concord Summerstages, fabrikPotsdam, Mains D’Oeuvres (Paris), Summerworks Festival (Toronto), Live Arts Halifax, La Rotonde (Quebec), and as part of the 2012 Cultural Olympiad in Great Britain.
Edd Schouten is an interdisciplinary artist and choreographer originally from The Netherlands. In 2005 he graduated from the ArtScience Department at The Royal Academy of Fine Arts in The Hague. After graduation he worked mainly with dance and made independent projects as a choreographer tied to Korzo Theater in The Hague as well as other projects around Europe and in Asia. Moving away from dance to more conceptual choreographic approaches, He likes to find unconventional approaches to the artistic process exploring movement, time and space anchored within specific situations. Examples of these are, a six week choreographic performance picking flowers for “Choreography of Love and Labour;” a series of engaged walks as part of “Walking Hours” which he presented in Le Merle; and, a two month engagement with a 100 year old water tower as a fluid sculpture for #KarotsaWaterTowerProject. He currently finds himself in Riga where, beside exploring new work, he has been running a pilot for an Artist in Residence program.
Artist, writer and researcher, I’m interested in the discourses that shape and undo power, as well as political engagement across the spectrum—in particular within the field of art. Cultivating collective forms of practice, my recent projects have notably focused on entrepreneurial ethos, the political agency of artists and the act of speaking out in periods of social crises. Cofounder of the activist organization Journée sans culture, I’ve co-edited numerous publications at the intersection of art and politics (Going to, Making Do, Passing Just the Same, 2020; To Spoil the Party, To Set Our Joy Ablaze, 2017; Le Merle, 2015, 2017), as well as contributed to various magazines and books on art. I’m currently a doctoral student in political science at the University of Ottawa, where I investigate the adherence of artists to the idea of freedom.
Trynne and EJ pass the question from palm to palm. Their feet carve paths across. Trynne is the author of the half-drowned, A House Unsettled, and is quitting fiction-writing (for now). EJ is the author of VIO-LETS, co-creator of P8s, ORANGING, and CATCH.
Elizabeth de Samsonow is an artist, professor of philosophical anthropology and art history at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. Her artistic work includes sculpture, performance, painting, drawing and video. Her interests include the systematic and symbolic location of female sculpture/sculpture in the art canon and an ecological or geological aesthetic of the body. She is the author of L’anti-Électre: Totémisme et schizogamie (MetisPresses, Geneva, 2015.)
Émilie Bernier teaches political theory full-time, albeit as a part-time teacher, and that, at a number of academic institutions, including the University of Ottawa and HEC Montréal. She has written on Marxian, Heideggerian and Spinozian political thought, as well as on gift and debt, value and power.
Artistic Director of Onishka Productions (since 2011). Founder and Artistic Director of Scène contemporaine autochtone / Indigenous Contemporary Scene, an international platform for the dissemination of indigenous performing arts (since 2016). Member of Odaya, a group of Aboriginal singers who have performed at La Biennale d’art autochtone de Montréal, POP Montréal, 350e anniversaire de Québec, SATosphère, Présence autochtone, Fous de Dieu at Théâtre Maisonneuve (2008 to 2021), among others.
My practice is rooted in drawing and print media. My work is presented in various forms such as installations, artist books, relational art or other manoeuvres. I develops my work by way of projects, some of which have been unfolding in parallel for several years. My recent projects explore notions of space and territory, whether it be through their appropriation by individuals or communities (Une cartographie subjective, Les chemins de traverse, Trajectoires), their poetic and political resonance (Lieux communs: Commonplaces) or their imaginary dimension (La création de l’univers, Cartographies spontanées). I currently live in Montreal where I earned a BFA at UQAM in 2004. I have presented my work, given workshops and carried out residency projects in several Canadian cities.
Erik Bordeleau is a philosopher and research affiliate at the Art, Business and Culture Center of the Stockholm School of Economics. He has published and co-edited several books and articles in different languages at the intersection of political philosophy, contemporary art, film, blockchain finance and media theory. A German translation of his book How to Save the Commons from Communism was published earlier this year by Büchner Verlag (2021). He recently taught a series of seminars in critical cryptoeconomics at the School of Disobedience (Berlin) and together with Saloranta & De Vylder he is developing The Sphere, a web 3.0 p2p platform for performance artists. He is based in Berlin and occasionally enjoys the discreet charm of the precariat.
Faiz Abhuani is a residential real estate agent and has been working in the community sector for over 15 years on various issues ranging from access to healthcare, immigration and education. He co-founded Brick by Brick, whose mandate is to develop affordable housing for low-income residents who face discrimination in the rental market. Faiz is dedicated to building dynamic and creative living spaces. His vision is to nurture creative energy in the diverse communities that inspire him.
François Lemieux makes exhibitions, videos, images and books in an often collective and anti-disciplinary manner. His artistic collaborations include Going to, Making do, Passing Just the Same (2020-), Vases communicants (2020), Sur les soins (2020), Un Soleil Difficile (2017) On ne répond pas à la question — Contre toute attente, on procède (2017), Cuts Make the Country Better (2015), The Lesser-Known architecture of Canada (2011) and Le Merle (2011-). He is co-founder of the Journée sans culture collective and teaches visual arts.
François Thoreau is an anthropologist of techniques, ‘cultivator of possibles’ and sheep farmer in the region of Liège, Belgium.
Frédéric Neyrat is an associate professor in the Department of English at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (USA), where he also holds a chair in “planetary humanities. He hosts the electronic platform Alienocene and is a member of the editorial board of the journals Lignes and Multitudes. Recently, he has published Literature and Materialisms (Routledge, 2020), and The Unconstructible Part of the Earth: Critique of Geo-Constructivism (2016, translated by Fordham University Press in 2018).
Gaby Felten (1981 NL/PE) is a resident of The Hague and was an illustrator and later a video / performance artist for several years. Her artwork often referred to the interwoven nature of identity and occupation. Recently she entered a different field of work and is no longer active as an artist.
Besides their individual art practices, Ghislain Amar & Joost Nieuwenburg operate as curators and organizers. In both fields they have a strong emphasis on their surroundings and bringing people together.
Hans Haacke (born August 12, 1936) is a German-born artist who lives and works in New York City. Haacke is considered a “leading exponent” of Institutional Critique.
Heather Davis is an assistant professor of Culture and Media at Eugene Lang College, The New School, New York. Her book, Plastic Matter, argues that plastic has transformed the material world due to its incredible longevity and range, as it has also transformed our understandings and expectations of matter and materiality. She is a member of the Synthetic Collective, an interdisciplinary team of scientists, humanities scholars, and artists, who investigate and make visible plastic pollution in the Great Lakes. She was the co-curator of Plastic Entanglements: Ecology, Aesthetics, Materials (on view at the Palmer Museum of Art, the Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art, Smith College and the Chazen Museum of Art, 2018-2020). She is the co-editor of Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies (Open Humanities Press, 2015) and editor of Desire Change: Contemporary Feminist Art in Canada (MAWA and McGill Queen’s UP, 2017).
Isabelle Gauthier makes mosaics to change the world one piece at a time. She works alone and in groups, in small or large format, on the road or in her studio. Sometimes she rests. She lives in Bishopton in the Eastern Townships (Quebec).
Isabelle Pauwels is currently based in Montréal. She received a BFA from Emily Carr Institute of Art and Design (Vancouver) in 2001, and an MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2006. In 2009 she was the inaugural winner of the Brink Award, granted to an early-career artist working in Washington, Oregon, or British Columbia. In 2013 she was a finalist for the Sobey Award. In 2023, she used a bursary from the Periculum Foundation for Contemporary Art to explore the studio as a research space for improvisation. Using Max, a visual programming language, she worked back and forth between the mediums of text, sculpture and performance. Recently her work has been exhibited at AXENÉO7 (Gatineau), Dazibao (Montréal), the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal, Unit 17 Gallery (Vancouver), and at the Experimental Media and Performing Arts Centre at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, New York.
Jack Segbars (1963, NL) studied fine art at AKV/St.Joost Den Bosch. He is primarily engaged with the conditions and parameters through which the concept of art is created. To this end, Segbars has investigated the different forms and positions that shape artproduction and that are at play in the formation of the notion of art: autonomous visual art, art in public space (including the neon text, Van Alles Is Weer Waardeloos/ everything is worthless again), the role of language and theory in the art discourse and the role of the curator. The interconnections between the different positions (critic, writer, curator and visual artist) are explored as artistic investigation. In 2009 he produced the publication Rondom-All around the periphery (Onomatopee) that deals with the overlap of positions and domains. This publication was produced in conjuncuntion with an exhibition addressing the relationship between the visual image an it’s textual derivatives. In 2012 this was followed by Inertia, a travelogue of visits to Palestine in which the interrelations between art and politics are researched. Next to his praxis as visual artist, Segbars regularly writes reviews and articles on art and art-related subjects. Jack Segbars lives and works in Rotterdam.
Jacob Wren makes literature, performances and exhibitions. His books include: Polyamorous Love Song, Rich and Poor and Authenticity Is a Feeling. As co-artistic director of the Montreal-based interdisciplinary group PME-ART he has co-created performances such as: En français comme en anglais, it’s easy to criticize, Individualism Was A Mistake, The DJ Who Gave Too Much Information and Every Song I’ve Ever Written. His internet presence is often defined by a fondness for quotations.
Jeff Gibson is an Australian-born artist and occasional critic who has worked in a variety of media and contexts—photography, video, prints, posters, banners, and books for galleries and public spaces. A former senior editor of Art & Text magazine, Gibson moved to New York in 1998 to work for Artforum, where he is currently managing editor.
Josep Rafanell i Orra is a psychotherapist, traveling investigator and writer. He deserted the institutions of care and social work in which he worked for more than 25 years after fleeing university. He leads workshops around collective care practices, forms of reappropriation of techniques and reinvention of singular relationships with our living environments. Between 2016 and 2018, he organized a seminar at the Aubervilliers Laboratories (France) called “Pratiques de soin et collectifs“. For some time he has been coordinating the Les communaux project in Paris and its suburbs. He is preparing a new book, Le monde revient, to be published in early 2021.
Schwebel’s work takes the form of tactical interventions that show the symbolic and political contradictions of contemporary art. His work operates in response to the institutions in which he is hosted, using refusals and absences as tools for making structural limits visible. He often embeds his work within the administrative processes of the institution, blurring the boundaries between artistic and administrative tasks. His work engages with the various structures that construct the encounter with art (administrative, architectural, financial, bureaucratic, etc.), instituting situations for uncertainty, doubt, and self-reflection on the institutional border of art. These processes, and the decisions made by the personnel, consequently assimilated into the project, make visible the disjunctions that lie between the legitimating discourse of arts institutions and the actual working conditions and practices manifested by these institutions.
Juliana Driever is a curator and writer focused on collaborative practices, public space, and site specificity. Recent curatorial work includes The Let Down Reflex (2016-17, with Amber Berson at EFA Project Space, New York, NY and the Blackwood Gallery, University of Toronto Mississauga); Socially Acceptable (2015, Residency Unlimited/ InCube Arts); Art in Odd Places 2014: FREE (with Dylan Gauthier, New York, NY), and About, With & For (2013, Boston Center for the Arts). Her writing has been featured online with A Blade of Grass Foundation and Bad at Sports, in the print volume “Service Media: Is it ‘Public Art’ or Art in Public Space?,” and in a number of exhibition catalogues.
Kirsty M Robertson is an Associate Professor of Contemporary Art and Director of Museum and Curatorial Studies at Western University, Canada (London, Ontario). Her pedagogy involves curating large-scale speculative and experimental exhibitions with students. In her academic work, she has published widely on activism, visual culture and museums. She is a founding member of the Synthetic Collective, a group of artists, scientists and cultural researchers working on plastics pollution in the Great Lakes Region and project co-lead on A Museum for Future Fossils, an ongoing project focused on responding curatorially to ecological crisis.
Koen Brams (Turnhout (BE), 1964) is an independent researcher, curator and publicist. He is the former editor-in-chief of the magazine De Witte Raaf (1991-2000), the former director of the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht (2000-2011), and the initiator of The Mobile and Temporary Studio for Research and Production (2014-…). He compiled the Encyclopedia of Fictional Artists (JRP/Ringier, 2011). Recent publications: Opus 1. The Artist’s Beginnings (together with Ulrike Lindmayr and Dirk Pültau), Roma Publications, Amsterdam, 2015; Confusion of Tongues (together with buren [Melissa Mabesoone & Oshin Albrecht]), Posture Editions, Gent, 2017; Écran/Scherm (together with Charlotte Beaudry), Éditions du caïd, Brussel, 2017. Most recent exhibition: Jef Cornelis – TV works /Cornelis – Obras de Televisão (1964-1997), Galeria da Culturgest, Porto, 2015; ‘Have Faith in Your Times’ – Karel J. Geirlandt and the Society for the Museum of Contemporary Art (1957-1960) (together with The Mobile and Temporary Studio for Research and Production), S.M.A.K., Gent, 10 November 2018-10 February 2019.
«You know how a raft is made: tree trunks held loosely together, so that when mountains of water come crashing down, the water disappears through the gaps. A raft is not a boat. When questions come crashing down, we do not tighten the ranks —we do not join the trunks— to constitute a close-fitting platform. Quite the opposite. All that we are keeping of the project is that which holds us together. So you can understand the vital importance of bonds and the way things are attached, and the distance between trunks. The bond has to be loose enough without letting things fall apart.» — Fernand Deligny
Le Patio, a place of radical hospitality that tensions the boundary between private and public space. Le Patio is also an artist collective composed of Simon Brown, Pavel Pavlov, Marc A. Reinhardt and Maude Veilleux, born in the summer of 2022. Through visual art, musical improvisation, poetry and performance, we adopt experimental strategies, both playful and formal, as we intervene in the infrastructures of neoliberalism and art.
Lux is a poet who also practices improvised music and performance art. He leads writing workshops and performs on stage. Originally from Abitibi, he now lives in Quebec City. Lux co-founded the Collectif RAMEN, of which he has been a member since 2015. He declaims improvised poems. Performance art and poetry color his daily actions.
M.A. Marleau is an artist and cultural worker with a curatorial and editorial practice. Marleau holds a Studio Art bachelor’s degree with honours from Concordia University (Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal) with inter-university study terms at École multidisciplinaire de l’image, UQO (Tenàgàdino/ Gatineau) and École Supérieure de Mode, ESG UQAM (Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal). Marleau is a member of the Board of Directors of Résidence Celine Bureau (Tiohtià:ke/ Montreal). M.A. Marleau presents works and takes part in residencies and collaborative projects under several pseudonyms and various roles. Marleau joined AXENÉO7, an artist-run centre, in 2019, and was named to its programming committee in 2021. AXENÉO7 is located on unceded territories of the Omàmìwininì Anishinàbeg Aki (the ancestral territory of the Algonquin people).
Marc A. Reinhardt’s practice develops at the crossroads of writing, installation and performance, primarily using sound as a speculative and sculptural material. He has presented his works in Canada, Europe and South America, working with several collective entities, including ACTION INDIRECTE, Kabane77 and Le Patio. He lives and works in Gatineau, where he now runs Le Clinique, a small experimental publishing structure dedicated to the literary arts.
The work of interdisciplinary artist Marc Couroux is firmly rooted in experiences developed while active as a contemporary music pianist. Acclaimed by one writer as “the Glenn Gould of contemporary music”, Couroux won the OPUS Award for “Discovery of the Year” in 1998, attributed by the Conseil Québécois de la Musique for his work in disseminating Canadian piano music around the world (Amsterdam, Brussels, Cologne, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Ludwigsburg, Paris). As video/sound artist, Couroux is concerned with creating spaces where sociopolitical issues can be explored. Couroux founded and directed Ensemble KORE (1997-2010) in Montréal with composer Michael Oesterle in order to recreate a living relationship between the composer and the listener.
Marie-Christine Quenneville a des yeux qui captent les couleurs vibrantes, des mains qui dessinent des formes souples et un esprit qui se fixe sur des inspirations au croisement entre l’esthétique et l’anthropologie. Ceux-ci, ont donné naissance aux Enfants Sauvages (ES) qui évoluent depuis 2009, dans leur atelier de création de vêtements, basé à Montréal.
Marilou Craft has an academic background in theatre studies, law and creative writing. She has been the co-artistic director of the Jamais Lu festival, a mediator at the FTA, the director of communications at the OFFTA, an editorial intern for the magazine JEU and a freelance translator. As an artistic and dramaturgy advisor, she collaborates with the interdisciplinary feminist and queer creation company projets hybris and with the Centre des auteurs dramatiques (CEAD). She is currently a member of the editorial board of the literary magazine Mœbius. She also writes articles, columns and cultural commentaries on various platforms. She draws from these diverse experiences to develop a literary and performative practice at the intersection of the intimate and the political, which probes the porosity of grey areas. She lives, works and creates in Montreal.
mark was founded in 2008 as a collective of five artists. All members pursued studies at the University of the Arts in Bremen and now are based in Berlin, Bremen and Düsseldorf. The artistic practices of mark derives from fields such as architecture, fine art, design and social services. As a collective they collaborate to develop ideas, conceive, and execute their projects. Together mark formulates a singular artistic position regardless of individual contributions and influences. In the work mark starts from a concrete context and develop the projects based on the conditions of a place and social or institutional context. They focus particularly on developing an expanded collective authorship and the potential of working collectively. Artists’ books and artists’ publications the collective understands as an extension of the exhibition space. Teaching practice at University of the Arts Bremen and University Bremen since 2011, University of the Arts Saar 2011/12, University Salzburg, department of art and science, 2012/13.
*1971, 1974, 1975, 1979, 1982 lives in Berlin, Bremen and Düsseldorf.
Maude Pilon is a writer working in collaborative, epistolary, artistic, academic, union and medical contexts. Her work stems from undisciplined ways of reading. She is interested in disorder of the social, mental, filial, material, memorial, nervous, amorous, theoretical and immunological kind. Her texts and contributions to research-creation have been published by publishers and in journals in Québec, France and the United States. À midi, une joie is his most recent work, published by Herbes rouges (2024).
Maurizio Lazzarato is an independent Italian sociologist and philosopher living in Paris. His research focuses on immaterial labour, the fragmentation of the wage economy, labour ontology and cognitive capitalism. He is also interested in the concepts of biopolitics and bioeconomics. He was a member of the editorial board of the journal Multitudes, of which he is a founding member. His publications include Wars and Capital (Semiotext(e), 2018, with Éric Alliez); Governing by Debt (Semiotext(e), 2013); The Making of the Indebted Man (Semiotext(e), 2012.
Maxence completed a transdisciplinary master’s thesis on care and political practices. He is a psycho-social worker at Club ami, a therapeutic day center located in Côte-des-Neiges. He likes to skate in a skatepark and to feel collective. He is currently taking refresher courses in science and trying to learn to live while living.
Merijn Oudenampsen (1979, Amsterdam) is a sociologist and political scientist. He works as a post-doc researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA) on the political history of neoliberalism. He pursued his at PhD Tilburg University, focused on the intellectual backgrounds of the swing to the right in Dutch politics around the turn of the century. He was guest editor of the 20th edition of the art journal Open, titled the Populist Imagination (NAi 2010). He edited a volume titled Power to the People, een anatomie van het populisme (Boom | Lemma 2012).
Metahaven is a research and design studio founded by Vinca Kruk and Daniel van der Velden based in Amsterdam. Metahaven’s work – both commissioned and self-directed – reflects political and social issues in collaboratively produced graphic design objects and media. In addition to international presentation of design and research projects, Metahaven has written and edited numerous publications such as ‘Uncorporate Identity’, a design anthology for our dystopian age, ‘Can Jokes Bring Down Governments’ and a forthcoming book ‘Black Transparency’. The studio was awarded the CoBRA Art Prize 2013. Select exhibitions include ‘Islands in the Cloud’, MoMA PS1, New York; Gwangju Design Biennale 2011, Gwangju, Korea; ‘Graphic Design: Now in Production’, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Manifesta 8, Murcia, Spain.
Eddy holds a M.F.A from the Staedelschule Frankfurt (DE) and a B.F.A (Interdisciplinary) from the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD University) in Halifax. He participated in many residencies in Canada, Italy, China and Japan. He has been working in collaboration with Knowles Eddy Knowles (since 2004) and co-organized the HomeShop space and collaboration in Beijing (2010-2013). His texts were published in many catalogues and magazines, including Esse arts+opinions and Peripheral Review.
Michael Nardone is the author of The Ritualites (2018) and Transaction Record (2014). Co-editor of the Documents book series and the critical journal Amodern, his writings on poetics, media, and sound are collected at
névé dumas is a white Franco-Keb poet, herbalist and community worker. She lives on the unceded lands of the Algonquin Anishinaabeg people, and her work focuses on trans experiences in relation to the more-than-human, ecosexuality and survival in a radically changing world. Her writing has appeared in magazines, an anthology and she has published four books of poems: au monde – inventaire, animalumière, pourritures terrestre and poème dégénéré.
Oriol Vilanova is a Catalan artist living in Brussels. By rummaging through flea markets, his favorite places for research, he has built up a collection of postcards to create a “thinking machine” that provides the conceptual foundations for his plays, installations, and performances. The compulsive collecting in which Vilanova indulges every Sunday excavates the ruins of the society of the spectacle, which was responsible in the first place for the enormous production and circulation of images. As the artist imagines, ‘flea markets are now sanctuaries’ in which an object as banal as the postcard continues to glow brightly in the dust. His works have been exhibited at several institutions as Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona; M – Museum Leuven; Albright Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; CA2M in Madrid; NMNM in Monaco, Centre d’Edition Contemporaine in Geneve; l’Appartement 22 in Rabat; Palais de Tokyo in Paris; FRAC Champagne-Ardenne in Reims; MACBA in Barcelona, among others.
German philosopher Peter Sloterdijk (b. 1947) has controversially celebrated wealth and property as the source of an ethos of generosity and creativity opposed to the “miserabilistic International” that suppresses the truth of its own prosperity. Sloterdijk is best known for his debut, “Critique of Cynical Reason” (1983), and more recently for his “Spheres” trilogy (1998, 1999, 2004). Influenced first of all by the “glad tidings” of Friedrich Nietzsche, he takes as one of his leading themes the relief of guilt. In his early work, this takes the form of “kynicism”: discursive and nondiscursive performances of parrhesiastic cheekiness that function as immune strategies against omnipresent cynicism, i.e., the moralizing split between thinking and doing which puts “ressentiment” and bad conscience at the core of late capitalist culture. More recently, “thymos” or “stout-heartedness” is the basic affect by which Sloterdijk explores alternative modes of valuation and citizenship. Throughout, his aim is a philosophical “retuning” of today’s all-pervasive “dissimulation of lack,” due to which modern emancipation has degenerated into religious, political and economical routines of compensation.
RERC is made up of educators and people interested in education, who work in a variety of settings and with a range of age groups in and outside of classrooms.We meet every three or four weeks around a tableful of food and conduct and share research into alternative and creative education practices. RERC is Deanna Bowlby, Micah Donovan, David Field, Nicole Klement, Gabriel Levine, Leslie McBeth,Velvet Schein, Malcolm Sutton, and Amber Yared.
Richard Ibghy & Marilou Lemmens make installations, videos, sculptures, and artist books, amongst other things. Their collaborative practice combines a concise approach to the form and construction of the art object with a desire to make ideas visible. For several years, they have examined the history of scientific methods, including the language of economy, the magic of statistics, the capacity for models to impact the future, the aesthetics of data visualization, and the performance of animals in laboratory experiments. Their work tends toward the re-sensualisation of abstractions through objects and actions. They live in Durham-Sud, Quebec, Canada.
Rune Peitersen, born in Denmark in 1971, lives and works in Amsterdam (NL) and Brussels (BE). In 1999 he received his BA from the Royal Academy in The Hague and in 2001 his MA from the Frank Mohr Institute in Groningen. Peitersen’s work has been exhibited internationally and he has received awards from the Mondriaan Foundation. Next to his artistic practice, Peitersen teaches at the St. Joost Art Academy, regularly lectures on his work and is a cofounder of several artists’ initiatives among which the think-tank Platform Beeldende Kunst (Platform for Visual Arts).
Sabu Kohso is a writer/translator/activist; native of Okayama, Japan, living in New York since 1980. He has been active in the global anti-capitalist movement for a long time. He has published several books on urban struggles and anarchism in Japan and Korea, and translated books between Japanese and English by Kojin Karatani, Arata Isozaki, David Graeber and John Holloway. He is a cofounder of jfissures.org, a website for theoretical analyses of the post-Fukushima disaster world, and one of the organizers of a Japan-based project conceived in 2016 to facilitate encounters among autonomous struggles across the planet. His most recent book, Radiation and Revolution (Duke University Press, 2020) and in French (Les Éditions Divergences, 2021).
Sarah lives and works in the Outaouais region. We’ll see what happens next.
Simon Brown (he/they) is an interdisciplinary artist, poet, and translator from southwestern New Brunswick (Peskotomuhkati traditional territory) based in the Quebec City area (Wendat and Abenaki traditional territory). Simon’s texts have been presented in collaborative performances, media artworks, experimental readings, poetry journals, operettas, and vacant lots. His artist books, chapbooks, and collections are published by Vanloo, Moult, Le laps, squint press, Frog Hollow, and above/ground press.
Sjoerd van Tuinen is associate professor of philosophy at Erasmus University Rotterdam. He publishes on metaphysics, aesthetics, political theory and the history of contemporary philosophy. He is the author of Sloterdijk. Ein Profil (Fink/UTB, 2006) and editor of more than a dozen books including Die Vermessung des Ungeheuren. Philosophie nach Peter Sloterdijk (Fink 2009) and two volumes that include interviews with Sloterdijk: Giving and Taking. Antidotes to a Culture of Greed (V2/NAi, 2014), and The Polemics of Ressentiment. Variations on Nietzsche (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians) was born and raised in Ferndale, Washington and spent a number of years in Palm Springs and Riverside, California, Portland, Oregon, and Milwaukee, Wisconsin. In Portland he studied and taught chinuk wawa, a language indigenous to the Lower Columbia River Basin. His video, photo, and text work centers around personal positions of Indigenous homeland and landscape, designs of language as containers of culture expressed through personal, documentary, and non fiction forms of media. He received his BA from Portland State University in Liberal Arts and his MFA in Film, Video, Animation, and New Genres from the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and currently teaches at Bard College in Film and Electronic Arts.
Suzanne Beth’s practice spans research, writing and working with images. Following a Ph. D. dedicated to the films of Japanese director Ozu Yasujirō, her projects now take place in the hinterlands of the university. With Japan in mind and duration as an abiding interest, her current work focuses on the upkeep of material and immaterial worlds that can stem their devastation. The book L’impuissance du cinéma. Une étude des films d’Ozu (2018, PUS) is based on her doctoral dissertation. The jointly edited issue of Le Merle on care is the fruit of a long-term collaboration with Anne Lardeux, which includes the film On Care (2020).
Thomas Grondin is an artist, curator and educator based between Val-David and Gatineau. He teaches art history at Cégep de l’Outaouais. He founded Fait Maison (2005), project he is still taking part of. He holds a bachelor’s degree in visual arts from UQO and a master’s degree in Art History from UQÀM. Thomas’ work focuses on collaborative process, community and domesticity in an effort to be part of a more inclusive and complex vision of art.
Vincent Duclos is a professor in the Department of Social and Public Communication at the Université du Québec à Montréal. As an anthropologist, his research focuses on the effects of digital technology on health care infrastructures, inhabited space, and the management of health care. His work has been published in various journals, including ‘Cultural Anthropology’, ‘Medical Anthropology Quarterly’ and ‘New Formations: a journal of culture/theory/politics’.
