Paula Nerlich

Dr Paula Nerlich is an experimental designer, researcher, educator, and facilitator whose practice explores how we can work with living systems as collaborators rather than simply as materials. As a biodesigner, she engages with sensory materials and living systems to investigate how biological processes can shape the ways we design, make, and experience the world. Working across biomaterials, sensory experience, and more-than-human design, she brings together creative practice, scientific research, and hands-on experimentation. Originally trained in textile design, Paula's practice has evolved to focus on living, responsive, and time-based materials, including bacterial cellulose, mycelium, and food-surplus biomaterials. She is interested in biological processes as dynamic systems that shape materials and artefacts over time, inviting new ways of thinking about care, ecology, and our relationships with the living world. Paula completed her PhD at the Hub for Biotechnology in the Built Environment, where she explored living textiles and human–microbial relationships. She is an Academic and Artistic Associate at the Circular School, HfG Karlsruhe, and an Associate Lecturer at the MA Biodesign, Central Saint Martins. Across her teaching and facilitation, she creates environments where making, experimentation, observation, and critical reflection become methods for exploring materials, processes, and emerging ideas. Her practice spans research, exhibitions, public engagement, and collaborations with scientists, designers, artists, and cultural organisations. Whether working in the studio, laboratory, or exhibition context, Paula develops participatory experiences that encourage close engagement with sensory, living, and responsive materials, fostering curiosity, material inquiry, and new perspectives on designing with living systems. https://www.paulanerlich.com/

Onome Ekeh

Onome Ekeh, born and raised on both sides of the Atlantic, OE started out as a painter, transitioned to design, fell in love with cinema, and somewhere in the collusion, went digital. Along the way she picked up an AI habit. She presides over a diverse body of work that encompasses film, video, theater, literature, and radio. She is the recipient of numerous awards and fellowships including the Jerome Foundation, the Greenwall Foundation Fellowship, a Turbulence Media Award, and the Künstlerhaus Büchsenhausen Fellowship.Exhibitions include shows at Museo Moderno, Buenos Aires ( Especulaciones ); the House of Electronic Arts Basel (HEK); Basel Social Club (Art Basel), Kunsthaus Baselland; Kunsthaus Aarau (upcoming). She is featured in the Serpentine Gallery publication, The Shape of the Circle in the Mind of a Fish. During Berlin Art Week 2024, she curated The Glittering Field, a showcase featuring 16 international artists for AOA;87 Contemporary. OE is a frequent speaker and panelist on the cultural dynamics of technology and nature and currently lectures on Speculative Culture in the Masters and Bachelors program of the Basel Academy of Art & Design in Switzerland.

Kulagu Tu Buvongan

Kulagu Tu Buvongan is a collective of majority Manobo and Tinananun lumad people from the Central Cordillera region of Mindanao. Their projects focus on environmental justice and the indigenous struggles in the Pantaron Mountain Range. Their projects have been exhibited at SAVVY Contemporary (Berlin), Estación Terrena (Bogota), Para Site (Hong Kong), FONTE (São Paulo), 421 (Abu Dhabi), and Colomboscope 2024.

Eva Fotiadi

Eva Fotiadi (PhD) is a historian of contemporary art based in the Netherlands. She is a researcher at the Avans Centre for Applied Research in Art, Design and Technology and a lecturer at St. Joost School of Art & Design. Her current research focuses on multisensory experiences in art exhibitions, with an emphasis on disability art and activism. This work builds on her previous research into interdisciplinary, participatory, and public art, as well as exhibition histories.

Cooking Sections

Cooking Sections investigates the systems that shape the world through food, tracing the spatial, ecological, and political legacies of extractivism. Founded in London in 2013 by Daniel Fernández Pascual and Alon Schwabe, Cooking Sections uses food as both a lens and a tool to trace the metabolic relations behind industrialised systems. Since 2015, they run CLIMAVORE, a long-term, site-responsive project, exploring how to eat as humans change climates and how to metabolise climate breakdown. Alon and Daniel are Readers in Architecture and Spatial Practice at the Royal College of Art, London, and Fellows at the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research. Their work has been exhibited internationally, including at Tate Britain, Serpentine Galleries, SALT, Centro Botín, 58th Venice Biennale, Istanbul Biennial, Performa17 among others. They have authored four books: The Empire Remains Shop (2018), Salmon: A Red Herring (2020), Offsetted (2022), and Waves Lost at Sea (2026).

Caro Verbeek

Dr. Caro Verbeek (1980) is specialized in sensory art history including smell, touch, dance and synaesthesia. She is known for her embodied and out-of-the-box approaches to curatorship and scholarship. She has developed academic and artistic tools and courses to engage with art and history on a more embodied level, including ‘the Multi-Sensory Gaze’ for the Rijksmuseum Amsterdam and ‘Knowing by Sensing’ for Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where she is an Assistant Professor and researcher. Over the past twenty years she has co-created numerous olfactory (re-)constructions of historical objects and events also as part of her PhD-project “In Search of Scents Lost” (with Rijksmuseum Amsterdam), which became the blueprint for the Odeuropa project on European smell heritage. In 2021 Verbeek became a curator at Kunstmuseum Den Haag, where she is working on the multi-sensory research and education project ‘Clapping to the Beat of Piet’ on visual rhythm in the work of Piet Mondrian. More recently she curated ‘Base Line – Music Meets Art’ where multinsensory curation and staging merge. Finally, Verbeek recently published the book ‘On the Nose – a Brief Cultural History’ which will appeared in four languages.

Gabriella Patera

Gabriella Patera is the Apulia Project Coordinator at CLIMAVORE x Jameel at RCA, London. She holds a law degree from Roma Tre University in Rome, with a specialization in immigration and gender law, and a Master’s degree in Human Resources from RCS Academy in Milan, with a focus on sustainability, inclusion, and diversity. Her research and professional interests lie at the intersection of law, social justice, and cultural practices of sustainability. She is also a member of the editorial board of Rivista Contadina, which documents and analyzes peasant farming practices, rural communities, and peasant movements in Italy and abroad.