Thank you to all our wonderful contributors, listed below:
Moira Brown, St Celfer, Isa Fontbona, Sophie Hoyl, Alda Reiter, Anabel Roque Rodríguez, Francesca Steele, Leonor Veiga, Alkistis Voulgari, Fadiah Wadud, and Nicolae Zamsa.
Moira Brown is an interdisciplinary artist and writer. Her expressions often carry thematic ties to gender, sexuality, queerness, and psychological fragility and resilience. These expressions aim to participate in social rhetoric and counter-cultural pursuits of change.
St Celfer, once a New York artist, is now based in Seattle and São Paulo with drawings on display at the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC-USP).
Isa Fontbona (1987) is a Ph.D. researcher, natural bodybuilder competitor, and a performance artist. Fontbona holds two Bachelor’s Degrees, in Philosophy and Art History, as well as a Master’s Degree in Humanity Research at the University of Girona, Spain. Currently, she is completing her dissertation on the artistic and gendered interventions enabled by female and trans bodybuilding practices. This project, more than research, brought her to introduce herself to the performance art sphere. Her artistic work merges different approaches into the same coin: her research and her sports career. She explores the malleability of the body through her own skin, using bodybuilding as a tool. Through this corporeal practice, she questions the binary categorization regarding gender distinction, and the social pressure exerted on the expectations of the bodies. In some of her artworks, she challenges herself to the limits of the endurance of her body. She tends to ask about her own identity in relation to her body through uncomfortable positions.
Sophie Hoyl: I am an artist and writer whose practice explores an intersectional approach to postcolonial, queer, feminist, critical psychiatry and disability issues. I relate personal experiences of being queer, non-binary and part of the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) diaspora to wider forms of structural violence.
Alda Reiter studied history and was trained as a printmaker in Belgium. In her work she aims to explore ancient worlds and associate them within a present perspective, as the world’s concerns stay timeless. @_alda_reiter_
Anabel Roque Rodríguez is an art historian, writer and curator currently based between St. Gallen (Switzerland) and Munich (Germany). Her research focus lies on feminism, the relationship of art and the social, the financial crisis in the Mediterranean, community based art practices, labor issues in the arts and creative entrepreneurship.
Francesca Steele is a performance artist, a writer and though her Ph.D. is researching ways in which the artists body itself documents the work. Her practice is held in reiterations, revisiting, remaking and reinterpreting works she has made in the past. Steele’s idea of the “female bio Cutup” reiterates body ‘reconfigured as arts practice’ or ‘document of work’ via the performative practice of bodybuilding and its undoing; inscribed bodily actions coincide to meet with Gysin’s and Burroughs Cutup technique and Acker’s reflections on her own bodybuilding practice. She has exhibited at many UK and international festivals, with work such as “The female bio cutup” (2018) SYMBIOTICA, Perth, Australia; “Recount”, SPILL Festival (2018). Her work has been featured in a range of publications, including “Marina Abramovic and the Future of Performance Art” (Prestel 2010). Steele’s work also features on internet sites such as ‘Girls with Muscle’ and persists outside the tradition of the white box space.
Leonor Veiga is an art historian and curator, currently associated with the University of Lisbon through the project “A History of Presence: a dialogue between Portuguese collections of material culture from Southeast Asia and Southeast Asian artists”. She was co-curator of Natura, the second edition of ARTFEM, Women Artists International Biennial of Macau SAR (2020). She holds Ph.D. from Leiden University (2018) with the dissertation entitled The Third Avant-Garde: Contemporary Art from Southeast Asia Recalling Tradition. The research, which analyzed contemporary art practices from the region that reprocess elements of traditional culture, was supervised by Prof. Dr. Kitty Zijlmans and Prof. Dr. Pieter ter Keurs. The dissertation was awarded the Humanities Best Dissertation Prize, by the International Convention of Asian Scholars (2019). Her curatorial work (2006-20) includes exhibitions in Indonesia, Mozambique, London, Macau and Lisbon. Her writing on the arts (2010-21) has mainly focused on non-Western art. Veiga was Guest Editor for CONVOCARTE 8 and 9, with the theme “Art and Time” (2020) and published in several journals and books, including “Movimentu Kultura: Making Timor-Leste” in Routledge Handbook of Contemporary Timor-Leste (Routledge, 2019); “The Third Avant-garde: messages of discontent,” in Southeast of Now: Directions in Contemporary and Modern Art in Asia, vol.1 – no.2 (NUS Press, October 2017); “Movimentu Kultura in Timor-Leste: Maria Madeira’s Agency,” in Cadernos Arte e Antropologia vol. 4 – n. 1 (2015) and “Suddenly we arrived: polarities and paradoxes of Indonesian contemporary art,” in Indonesian Eye: Contemporary Art from Indonesia, SKIRA Editore (2011).
Alkistis Voulgari was born in Athens. She is an actress and dancer specialized on Isadora Duncan’s Dance Technique. Over the last two years she has started her own filming experimentations and performance creations which contain theatre, poetry, literature, dance, Isadora’s choreographies as well as personal choreographies.
Fadiah Wadud is a self-proclaimed procrastinator who sings when she’s happy but even louder when she’s not.
Nicolae Zamsa is an Irish/Moldovan graphic designer and researcher. He studied Visual Communication at the Zurich University of the Arts and runs his design practice in Zurich. He is also currently researching design ethics and he publishes video interviews with designers about their work.
