Year Long
Brigitte Baptiste is an ecologist, academic, public intellectual, and LGBTQ+ activist from Bogotá, Colombia. She has been a key figure in advancing the concept of socio-ecosystems, which takes an integrated approach to understanding nature and society and has been successfully applied across Colombia to protect its ecosystems. Since 2019 she has been president of the Universidad EAN, Bogotá, after serving for almost ten years as director of Alexander von Humboldt Biological Resources Research Institute, Bogotá, where she oversaw the development of environmental policies for Colombia’s post-conflict areas, as well as serving for more than twenty years as a professor of ecology at Javeriana University, Bogotá. A high-profile transgender woman, she has used her platform to raise awareness about the field of queer ecology, and has authored 15 books, appeared on television shows, and is a regular newspaper columnist. Baptiste was a Prince Claus Fund Laureate in 2017.
Nabil Ahmed is a researcher and writer from Dhaka, Bangladesh. For over fifteen years his spatial practice and writing has interrogated the representational and narrative challenges of environmental destruction, conflict, development, and human rights across visual culture and law. He is the founder and co-director of INTERPRT, a research agency that pursues environmental justice through spatial and visual investigations. The group’s online platform on the toxic legacy of French nuclear tests in Maohi Nui, French Polynesia, with the investigative newsroom DISCLOSE won the Sigma Award for data journalism (2022). Ahmed is professor of visual intervention at The Trondheim Academy of Fine Art (KiT) in the faculty of architecture and design, Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Trondheim, where he leads the Norwegian Research Council funded project “Climate Rights: Designing Visual Evidence for Climate Cases.” He is a member of the advisory board for Stop Ecocide International.
Rodrigo Lledó is a Chilean human rights lawyer, director of Stop Ecocidio Americas, vice president of Derechos Humanos Sin Fronteras (DHSF), Santiago; and professor at the International University of La Rioja (UNIR), Logroño. Formerly, he was director of the Baltasar Garzón International Foundation and he was one of the members of the Independent Expert Panel for the Legal Definition of Ecocide. In Chile he was head of the legal area of the Human Rights Program of the Ministry of the Interior and worked in the National Commission on Political Imprisonment and Torture (Valech Commission).
Etcétera is a multidisciplinary collective composed of visual artists, poets, and performers formed in Buenos Aires, Argentina, in 1997. Since 2007 it has been led by co-founders Loreto Garín Guzmán (Chile) and Federico Zukerfeld (Argentina). Etcétera were founding members of the International Errorist Movement, an international organisation active since 2005, which asserts the notion of error as a philosophy of life. In addition to participating in exhibitions in museums and biennials, their work appears in the form of street art, public interventions and actions, and performances that are necessarily contextual, ephemeral, and circumstantial.
Etcétera has been recognised for its denouncement of human rights and environmental abuses through theatrical and poetic actions and statements often exercised at the members’ own personal risk. Etcétera were Prince Claus Fund Laureates in 2015.
Brian Holmes is an essayist, mapmaker, and activist, living a third life in Chicago after earlier incarnations in Paris and San Francisco. A polyglot and eternal wanderer, he collaborated extensively with artists, philosophers, and activists in Europe before returning to the Americas, where he works on political ecology with Casa Río in Argentina, the Anthropocene Commons around the world, and Deep Time Chicago at home. Currently he is helping run a community art space, Watershed Art & Ecology, with his partner Claire Pentecost.
Serkan Taycan is an artist with an engineering and visual arts education, currently pursuing his PhD in urbanism at Carleton University, Ottawa. In his practice, Serkan focuses on ecological and urban transformations and uses media such as photography, video, mapping, and walking. Taycan has exhibited in various venues, including the MAXXI, Rome; Het Nieuwe Instituut, Rotterdam; MuCEM, Marseille; SALT and Istanbul Modern, Istanbul; as well as Venice Architecture Biennale and Istanbul Biennial. His book, Agora #04: Taksim, was published by Fuam in 2017. He has held residencies at Cité Internationale, Paris, and Delfina Foundation, London. Taycan has taught courses on urbanism and visual arts at Carleton University, Istanbul Bilgi University, and Bahçeşehir University, Istanbul, and led workshops at Iceland University of the Arts, Reykjavik; Srishti Institute, Bangalore; and Leeds Arts University, Leeds.
T. J. Demos teaches art history and visual culture at University of California, Santa Cruz, and directs its Center for Creative Ecologies. He writes about contemporary art, global politics, and ecology and is the author of numerous books, including Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and Political Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016), Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017), and most recently, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come (Sternberg Press, 2023).
Mabe Bethônico is an artist, researcher, and professor. Her work has been shown at exhibitions including: the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale, Venice (2021), and the 27th and 28th São Paulo Biennials. In 2005 and 2019 she participated in the Panorama da Arte Brasileira at the Museum of Modern Art, São Paulo. She is a member of World of Matter, an international group of artists and theoreticians investigating primary materials and the complex ecologies of which they are a part. She acquired her MA and PhD from the Royal College of Art, London, and she currently teaches at HEAD – Genève, Geneva, and at ENSP, Arles.
Maria José Arjona is a Colombian multidisciplinary performance artist whose work proposes a unique form of political resistance through radical poetic gestures. At a time when political art is understood primarily as political activism, Arjona instead uses the body as a site for subtle and complex re-articulations that challenge normative conditioning and violence. Her focus moves beyond her identity as an artist to highlight the organic, expansive, and shared potential of the body, one that transcends individual or biographical aspects and becomes collective and unconditioned.
Alejandra Rojas Giraldo is a cultural manager and producer, though she prefers the term cultural worker due to the nature of her practice. She currently leads the cultural actions for the Centro Nacional de Memoria Histórica, Bogotá, a public entity responsible for historical memory and truth in the context of the Colombian armed conflict. For a period of five years, Giraldo was part of Mas Arte Más Acción (MAMA), Bogotá, where she served as a project coordinator in its artistic residency programme, as well as working on territorialized projects in collaboration with Afro organisational processes, exploring the intersection between art and the environment. She played a pivotal role as MAMA’s producer during its participation in lumbung, documenta fifteen, Kassel, where she focused on experimentation, shared resources, and collective practices. Previously, Giraldo held the position of regional coordinator for the Arts Collaboratory network, which brings together 25 artistic organisations from the Global South. In this role, she facilitated the operation of the common pot, internal communication, and knowledge management, among other responsibilities.
Dr Samaneh Moafi is the Assistant Director of Research at Forensic Architecture, a multidisciplinary group in Goldsmiths, University of London, London, that uses architectural techniques to investigate cases of state violence, violations of human rights, and environmental destruction. Samaneh is responsible for identifying new areas of research, overseeing research quality and integrity, and directing the innovation of new analytic techniques, methodologies, and processes. She is also responsible for the Febrayer/FA Investigative Lab and will provide advice and support across FA’s affiliates on research issues.
She earned her PhD from the Architectural Association School of Architecture (AA), London (2018), with a dissertation on the contemporary history of state initiated mass housing in Iran and the class identities and gender roles it informed.