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.

CLIMAVORE

CLIMAVORE is a research platform and an agency that questions how to eat as humans change climates. New humanmade “seasons” are blurring the lines between spring, summer, autumn and winter, or yearly monsoon events. Instead, periods of polluted seas, soil exhaustion or fertiliser runoff are more influential on our foodscapes. CLIMAVORE, a term coined by Cooking Sections in 2015, is a call to rethink a truly broken food system, and move beyond a carnivore, omnivore, locavore, vegetarian or vegan diet to tackle these new seasonalities, while addressing the extractive and intensive practices that lead to them. CLIMAVORE collaborates long-term with marine biologists, botanists, farmers, chefs, fisherfolk, anthropologists, geneticists, environmentalists, oenologists, chemists, soil scientists, conservationists, herders, among many others living on the frontiers of the climate emergency. With bases in London, Skye, Palermo, Istanbul and Madrid, CLIMAVORE facilitates the space and necessary action to transform food production, distribution and consumption in order to reimagine new horizons that can grow food while cultivating habitats.

Caro Verbeek

Caro Verbeek is an embedded researcher of olfactory heritage at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, the Rijksmuseum and International Flavours & Fragrances. Trained as an art historian she specialises in sensory art and education in museums, art academies and universities. She has 10+ years of experience curating exhibitions and conserving collections (prints, drawings and scents). Verbeek creates olfactory tours and interventions for museums (Rijksmuseum, Van Abbemuseum, Bijbels Museum, Amsterdam Museum) and is determined to alter the way we think about and document ephemeral history and to create a language and sensory skills to do so. Her PhD project "In Search of Lost Scents - Reconstructing the Aromatic Heritage of the Avant-garde' was widely discussed in (international) media during the exhibition "Aromatic Art (Re-)constructed" dd. 23.02.2017 - 23.05.2017 where people were able to smell the Battle of Waterloo, an 18th century canal house, medieval prayer nuts (all created by IFF), and Futurist and Surrealist olfactory works of art. She also teaches the course 'The Other Senses'at the Royal Academy of Arts The Hague and is the curator in chief of the olfactory culture program 'Odorama' at Mediamatic Amsterdam. Finally she is an advisor for immaterial heritage projects at Mondriaan Fonds.