melanie bonajo

melanie bonajo is an artist, filmmaker, sexological bodyworker, somatic sex coach and educator, cuddle workshop facilitator and activist. Through their videos, performances, photographs, and installations, they examine current conundrums of co-existence in a crippling capitalist system, and address themes of eroding intimacy and isolation in an increasingly sterile, technological world. 

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg

Orlando Maaike Gouwenberg is a curator with a love for projects that hover between film, theater and visual art, and she's based in several places. Recently she was the co-curator for melanie bonajo’s presentation for the Dutch Pavilion at the Venice Biennale 2022, and artistic director at Jester in Genk, BE, where she pushed for a more international and outspoken focus for the organisation.

Adina Pintilie

Artist and filmmaker Adina Pintilie was born in 1980 in Bucharest and lives between Bucharest and Hamburg. Her decade-spanning artistic multi-platform research on intimacy, contemporary body politics, and the aesthetics and ethics of expanded moving images production spans installation, performance, film, and virtual reality and is nurtured by long-term collaborations and trans-disciplinary research.

Maaike Bleeker

Maaike Bleeker is a playwright, publicist and professor of theatre and dance studies at Utrecht University. She will speak about Corporeal Literacy: these abilities of the body to perceive, read and make sense. It is a strategic term, with which we want to make a space for interaction and collaboration between researchers approaching questions of bodily meaning making from various backgrounds.

Beatriz Janicas

Beatriz Janicas is gallery assistant at VU ART SCIENCE gallery and student of the Master's Cognitive Neuropsychology. Living in a fast-paced and increasingly digital world can be stressful, leaving us feeling like our bodies are not our own or like the world around us is not real. We have a tendency to neglect the relationship between our mind and body, forgetting that our mental health is affected when we don’t use our bodies as a means for direct experiences and connections. The VU ART SCIENCE gallery decided to explore this issue together with the curators of the Amsterdam UMC. 

Angelo Custodio & Jules Sturm

Angelo Custódio is a research based artist experimenting with voice and performance. He creates sonic based experiences from a crip/queer perspective, informed by critical theory and embodied knowledge. Trained as a classical singer, Angelo explores the relations between poetics and techno-somatic ways of voicing. Through listening, he develops sonic encounters with the vulnerable, opening ’cracks’ to wild(er) spaces that utterly invite other freer ecologies of living. 

Jules Sturm is a researcher and lecturer at Zurich University of the Arts (ZHdK), currently holds a position as visiting professor in Art Education at Universität Duisburg-Essen, and works internationally as a collaborator in artistic research projects with a special focus on critical pedagogy, artist teaching, embodied theories and alternative knowledge production in contemporary culture and education. Jules is originally trained in cultural analysis (PhD) and aims to re-train academic practices of writing and teaching towards committed forms of learning from, within, and beyond diversity.

Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss

Sara Morais dos Santos Bruss is a cultural and media theorist, researcher, and curator. She works on intersections of feminist and anti-colonial art and political practices, digital technologies, and narrations of (human and non-human) subjectivity. Her recent publications include: Queere KI: Zum Coming-out smarter Maschinen, co-edited with Michael Klipphahn-Karge and Ann-Kathrin Koster (2022).

Sarah Ahmed

Sara Ahmed is an independent feminist scholar and writer. Her work is concerned with how power is experienced and challenged in everyday life and institutional cultures. She has recently completed a book Complaint! which is forthcoming with Duke University Press in September 2019. Her previous publications include: What’s the Use? On the Uses of Use (2019), Living a Feminist Life (2017), Willful Subjects (2014), On Being Included (2012), The Promise of Happiness (2010), Queer Phenomenology (2006), The Cultural Politics of Emotion (2014, 2004), Strange Encounters (2000) and Differences that Matter (1998).

Ciprian Facaeru

Ciprian is an XR designer of immersive and interactive experiences, and a creative explorer researching new media technologies. He is a co-founder and lead designer at Augmented Space Agency and a research assistant at the International Center for Research and Education in Innovative and Creative Technologies part of the National University of Theatre and Cinema Art "I.L. Caragiale" in Bucharest. Exploring new technologies found at the intersection between reality and virtuality, Ciprian contributes to the development of XR solutions across multiple application domains: academic research, education, arts, creative, and industrial fields. His mission is to explore and discover innovative ways of communication and artistic expression to foster sustainable connections in an emerging mixed-reality world.