A visual artist and singer, over the years he has explored different techniques and languages – video, installations, photography, music, ceramics, graphics – giving life to multiform works. He collaborates with Tempo Reale, both in teaching and in the production of multimedia works, and with the Catalyst theatre company. He is currently artist in residence at MAD Murate Art District. As part of the RIVA Project he directed the sound performance Rivers in 2018, participating in a sound installation of Tempo Reale Festival in 2017. In 2016 he created CONfusion, a multi-ethnic vocal group made up of people from many countries around the world, working for the inclusion of migrants through music and performance, also active at the Puccini Theatre in Florence.

Janine Gaëlle Dieudji is a bi-national French and Cameroonian graduate of Culture and International Relations from Lyon 3 University in France. She also holds a Master Degree in Political Science from Paris 2 Panthéon Assas University.

She’s been living in Florence, Italy, for the past six years, a city she has since fallen in love with. This is how Florence became home to her and the place where she started to build her career as an art professional. She considers herself as a ‘multi­local’ by believing that we belong to all the places we have lived in. Home is where the mind can create and feel rested at the same time. This is what the life journey is made for, exploring to become the person we decide to be.

Justin Randolph Thompson is a new media artist, cultural facilitator and educator born in Peekskill, NY in ’79. Living between Italy and the US since 1999, Thompson is Co-Founder and Director of Black History Month Florence, a multi-faceted exploration of African and African Diasporic cultures in the context of Italy founded in 2016.
Thompson is a recipient of a Louise Comfort Tiffany Award, a Franklin Furnace Fund Award, a Visual Artist Grant from the Fundacion Marcelino Botin, two Foundation for Contemporary Arts Emergency Grants, A Jerome Fellowship from Franconia Sculpture Park and an Emerging Artist Fellowship from Socrates Sculpture Park. His life and work seek to deepen the discussions around socio-cultural stratification and hierarchical organization by employing fleeting temporary communities as monuments and fostering projects that connect academic discourse social activism and DIY networking strategies in annual and biennial gathering, sharing and gestures of collectivity.

Luanda-Angola, 1979, Kiluanji Kia Henda is an autodidact which a profound springboard into this realm comes from growing up in a household of photography enthusiasts. His conceptual edge was sharpened by immersing himself into music, avant-garde theater and collaborating with a collective of emerging artists in Luanda ́s art scene. Kia Henda participated in several residency programs in cities such as Venice, Cape Town, Paris, Amman and Sharjah, New York and Arles.

Kia Henda´s selected solo exhibitions includes Something Happen on the Way to Heaven, at Museo di Arte di Nuoro (2020), The Isle of Venus at Museum of Leuven in Leuven (2020),  A City Called Mirage at the International Studio and Curatorial Program (ISCP) in New York (2017), In the Days of a Dark Safari at Galeria Filomena Soares in Lisbon and Goodman Gallery in Cape Town (2017) and Self-Portrait As A White Man at Galleria Fonti in Naples (2010).

Kia Henda has participated in group exhibitions at numerous institutions, amongst which Barbican Art Center in Lonodon (2020), Migros Museum in Zurich (2020), Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris (2020), Zeitz MOCAA in Cape Town (2019), Tate Modern in London (2019), MAAT in Lisbon (2018), the National Museum of African Art – Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C. (2015) and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao (2015).

His work was shown at the Gwangju Biennale (2018), Bergen Assembly (2013), São Paulo Biennale (2010), Venice Biennale (2007) and the Luanda Triennale (2007). In 2017, Kia Henda received the Frieze Artist Award. He presented his work The Fortress in the Somerset House courtyard (London) in 2019. The artist won Angola’s National Culture and Arts Award in 2012. His work can be found in public collections, including Tate Modern (London), the Museum of Modern Art (Warsaw), Centre George Pompidou (Paris), Pérez Art Museum (Miami) and Coleção de Arte Moderna Calouste Gulbenkian (Lisbon).

Victor Fotso Nyie was born in 1990 in Douala, Cameroon and lives and works in Faenza. In 2018 he attended the Biennium of Sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. He attended the Istituito Tecnico Superiore Tonito Emiliani / Diploma of Superior Technician for the design and prototyping of ceramic products, Faenza, IT in 2015. His artistic research leads him to explore human variety and beauty, without forgetting a spiritual dimension. He creates works that recall his homeland, Africa, which merge with others that metaphorically describe the globalized world in which we live. He has participated in numerous group and solo exhibitions including The Armory show, New York city 2020, Stand P420 gallery,(2020), III Biennale d’Arte don Franco Patruno, curated by Gianni Ceroli, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO) (2020).To be going to, curated by Francesca Bertazzoni & Davide Ferri, P420, (2019) In 2020 he participated in the project Research Residency for BHMF, OCAD University, (Florence). Winner of various awards including the Roberto Daolio Prize, 2018 the III Art Biennale Don Franco Patruno, Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), (2019). His next exhibitions include Museo MAGI ‘900, Pieve di Cento (BO), IT (only) (2020) and the Biennale del Mediterraneo, Republic of San Marino (2020).

Francis Offman (b. 1987, Butare) lives and works in Bologna.
In 2021, Offman took part in a workshop project for Valentino’s Autumn/Winter Haute Couture Show 2021-22.
2022 group shows include: Expressions. The Epilogue, Castello di Rivoli Museum of Contemporary Art, Italy; YGI-Group show, United States; The 3 ecologies, MACTE, Italy; The Tending of the Otherwise, Italy as well as the second iteration of Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand at the Italian Cultural Institute in Paris, France. In 2021, Offman had solo exhibitions at P420 Gallery, Italy; Baleno International, Italy; Herald St | Museum St, United Kingdom and MA*GA Museum, Italy. He also had a two-person show with Christian Offman at The Garage Lab, Italy. Previous group exhibitions include The Geological Viens, Palazzo D’Accursio, Italy; Painting in Person, Castello di Rivoli Museum, Italy; Italy at Frieze, Italian Embassy, United Kingdom; MEDITERRANEA 19 Young Artists Biennale: School of Waters, Republic of San Marino; Painting Stone, Villa Lontana, Italy; Throw the Stone and Hide your Hand, Murate Art District, Italy (2021); Premio Combat Prize 2020, Giovanni Fattori Civic Museum, Italy; Premio Zucchelli 2019, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy (2020); Open Tour 2019, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rundgang 2019, Art Academy, Germany, Art White Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy (2019); Decoration between history, nature and poetry, Zucchelli Foundation, Italy; Open Tour, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Rambling rides, distractions from a destination, P420, Italy; Art white Night, Academy of Fine Arts of Bologna, Italy; Scrap-Collective, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy; Monsters-phenomena, Monumental Complex of Baraccano, Italy (2018).
Awards received include: Agitu Ideo Gudeta Fellowship – Performance Act Award (2021); Emilia-Romagna Region Award in support and dissemination of Contemporary Art; 9th edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts (finalist); Premio Combat Prize (honourable mention) (2020); Eighth edition of the Francesco Fabbri Award for Contemporary Arts; Zucchelli Prize Scholarship; Tree Time workshop with Massimo Bartolini; Contemporary Minds Prize (finalist) (2019); ArtUp Collectibles Award; Switch The Rules, curated by the Elica and the Ermanno Casoli Foundation (finalist) (2018).

Emmanuel Yoro is an Italian visual artist of Ivorian origin working between Vicenza and Milan. Adopting an artistic practice that embraces collage, design, fashion, graphics and photography, he breaks down into images the questions of the multiple facets of his cultural identity and different nuances of queerness.

An Afro-diasporic sensibility and a raw and monochromatic aesthetic characterize his research and recent artistic production, always in the attempt of a wider redefinition of the self that dwells in the symposium between past and present, between memory and imagination.

Raziel Perin was born in 1992 in the Dominican Republic. He received a BFA in Visual Arts at Naba Milano. Drawing upon his personal experience, mental associations and cultural references, Raziel Perin creates mysterious, unexpected and direct works of art that recall precise moments of clarity and dense memories that evoke the complexity of the process of reconciliation of the diasporic identity freed from Western stereotypes. Perin was born in the hinterland of the Dominican Republic, where he lived until the age of four. In 1996 he moved to Northern Italy with his mother. His artistic production takes shape between two very distant realities, rooted in the need to be accepted as “the Other” and at the same time feeling the duty to suppress the sensitive part of his personal history, which constantly re-emerges. The introspection and reconnection with the echoes of those ancestral bonds that seemed to have been severed in this process of ‘whitening’ are the result and are channeled into drawings, paintings, sculptures and installations that unite and synthesize a series of recurring elements. His body of work conveys a compelling visual metaphor of the layers of personal memory and cultural history that inform and intensify his experience of the present.

Binta Diaw born in1995 is a Senegalese-Italian visual artist based in Milan, Italy. 

Her research is aimed at the creation of installations of various dimensions and works commenting social phenomena like migration and immigration, anthropology as well as her body in relationship with nature and notions of identity. Defying the Western gaze through a subverted reality, her practice questions perceptions of Italianness and Africanness in relation to her own cultural heritage and upbringing.

Embracing visual art with a strongly intersectional, afro-diasporic and feminist methodology based on a physical, personal experience, she is ultimately able to explore the multiple layers of her blackness, her self as a social body and her position as a black woman in a Western context. She studied Fine Arts at the Academy of fine arts of Brera in Milan and obtained a MA at ESAD Grenoble-Valence, in France. In 2018 she moved to Germany for an internship at SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin. In 2020 she debuted with her first solo show at Galleria Giampaolo Abbondio in Milan.

1978 Born in Argentina,  lives and works in Rome. Textile, ceramics and paper artist.

Quotidian objects in the domestic context and ordinary life situations, give me a ground from where to explore the poetics of the everyday. They constitute the starting point from where I explore notions of dwelling.  The interest I have in the space we inhabit and in how we inhabit comes from my own life experiences, especially that of migrating and motherhood.
I started working with old home linens, found, given or inherited, treating and whitening them to create a reclaimed surface to work on. Stains, tears and other signs of use populate them like forgotten steps across a landscape, conveying a sense of temporary presence. To all this traces i have added mine.
Over time, staining and mark making became a staple of my visual language. I work with water media, and create inks from the landscapes I come across. Burnt remains from a wild fire, botanical and domestic remainders or rusted urban objects found on the street, run across my work, transformed into pigments of unique colour and luminosity

Born in Kobe, Japan. Based in Belgrade, Serbia or Amsterdam, the Netherlanbds.
The works of Mariko Hori, consisting mainly of installations, are study of alternative way of architecture without building, through modest but characteristic way of choice of objects
and placing them intentionally.
Her interests have been in ‘atmosphere’ and ‘Ma’, a Japanese word which takes the concept of negative space farther, to define a continuum which spans both space and time.   For example,  ‘the space -in between’  or  ‘pause in time’  might at first appear that there is nothing between the structures, but actually there is  ‘Ma’, emptiness,  blank space or time exist. And the space and the time have a very slight difference.
She has been researching about the way objects are being.  Particular attention is paid to the space between them as each objects carries with itself many places that each need their
space to unfold meaning. A particular ‘aura’  or  ‘atmosphere’, that only things which have existed for a long time have, is made by time, space in flow. She describes this special atmosphere as ‘sense of existence’.
As  her  lifetime  practice,  she is trying  to find  the possibilities to  reproduce a certain atmosphere, the ‘sense of existence’ ( something beyond conceptual meaning ) and how to
share the feelings, qualia.
In spite of the fact that she studied architecture, she stopped liking  drawing – up new architectural plans since she was more attracted by aesthetic aspects of aged deterioration
and felt  that she will never be able to recreate the strong sense of enduring existence that old things have. It also appears to her  that modern societies are building  too many new
buildings which ultimately might end up as surplus.
She believes that one of the next steps for architecture is to try to create alternative spaces without buildings.  This ‘new way of architecture’ could be atmosphere itself, and in her
practice, she experiments with various materials  such as found objects, especially, which hold some kind of aura,  the air,  smells,  sounds,  lights,  dust,  as well as individual
imagination, in order to find the new potential experience which could be imaginative and real at the same time.

Francesco Pellegrino is a multimedia artist and musician; his works include electroacoustic music, performances and installations. As a musician he performs in electroacoustic concerts for various instruments (including sax, trumpet, clarinet and various objects) and live electronics; he plays in the electroacoustic trio3D3, with Maurizio Montini and Andrea Venturoli. As an artist he creates installations with a strong sound component, immersive environments, invitations to contemplation. His installations have been exhibited in Florence, Livorno, Stockholm, Mexico City, Chongquing and others.

Myriam Boulos. Born in Beirut in 1992, she graduated in photography from the Academie Libanaise des Beaux Arts in 2015. She has taken part in international group exhibitions including Photomed, Beirut Art Fair, Berlin PhotoWeek, Mashreq to Maghreb (Dresden, Germany), Beyond boundaries (New York), C’est Beyrouth (Paris) and 3ème biennale des Photographes du monde arabe (Paris), and received the Byblos Bank Award for Photography in 2014. He uses his camera to interrogate the city and its people, and his photos are a mix of documentary and personal research.

Sina Shiri. He was born in Rasht, Iran in 1991. He started photography at the age of 16 and has since worked in various Iranian press agencies and magazines as a photographer. Today he is a freelancer and focuses on social issues and themes.

Abdo was born in 1982 in Oran, Algeria, to a Sudanese father and Algerian mother. He studied engineering at the University of Sirte, Libya, until 2006. In 2012 an internship at Magnum Photos Paris gave him the opportunity to reflect on his photographic approach and produce his first short story for the magazine “Rukh”. His photographs have been published in numerous international magazines and newspapers. In 2015 he received a nomination for the Magnum Foundation Emergency Fund, in 2019 he won the CAP (Contemporary African Photography) award for his project “Dry”, in the same year he was selected for Joop Swart Masterclass by World Press Photo.

Amir Hazim is an artist and photographer based in Baghdad. He graduated from Baghdad College of Fine Arts and began his professional career in 2019, publishing in Arab News, The National and many others.

Reem Falaknaz documents with his artistic work the social and physical landscape of the United Arab Emirates and its inhabitants. In 2014 he took part in the prestigious Arab Documentary Photography Program, and his international participations include the United Arab Emirates Pavilion at the Venice Architecture Biennale 2016 and the Lahore Biennale in 2020.

Erdem Varol. Born in 1988, he lives in Istanbul. In 2017 Erdem published his first book “Free Fall” together with two fanzines, published in 2018 and 2019 respectively. He has held solo and group exhibitions in Turkey, Italy, France and elsewhere.

Mouad Abillat is a Moroccan photographer and director. He has a degree in Audiovisual Technician and has also studied photography and screenwriting, which has influenced his style and led him to develop an interest in storytelling. By photographing young people on the streets of Marrakech with a unique and original style, he strives to portray the contradictions and fight against the stereotypes faced by the new generations today.

Torinese di nascita, fiorentina di adozione. Cultural project manager, consulente strategico per lo sviluppo delle risorse culturali, storica e critica d’arte, da anni si occupa dell’ideazione, organizzazione e gestione di eventi culturali in tutto il mondo. Attualmente collabora con l’Associazione degli Amici dei Musei di Palazzo Davanzati e Casa Martelli a Firenze, è a capo dell’ufficio marketing della società Contemporanea Progetti, nella ideazione e gestione delle mostre internazionali, e si occupa con la sua associazione Fund4art, della strutturazione di progetti di marketing e innovazione territoriale, strategie d’ascolto della cittadinanza e consulenza nell’ambito della valorizzazione e gestione dei distretti culturali, nonché di promozione di eventi di divulgazione su temi umanitari. Proprio nell’ambito dei progetti di ascolto della cittadinanza e di studio delle memorie dei territori, si iscrive la sua passione giornalistica, scrive per Nena-News di Palestina principalmente, nonché per CuCo, Cultura Commestibile

Born in Jerusalem in 1977 and living in Milan, multimedia artist, composer and guitarist Yuval Avital develops his works in a variety of spaces, including public venues, industrial archaeological sites, theatres and museums, challenging the traditional crystallized categories that separate the arts. In his exhibitions, performances, immersive installations, total-operas, large-scale musical ‘rituals’, and concerts one can find dancers, contemporary music ensembles, masters of ancient cultures, recruited individuals or communities, multi-video projections, meditative tactile ambients, advanced technological instruments, archive materials, scientific data, Sound-Sculpture, painting and printed artworks.
Each of Avital’s artworks is a unique experiential, poetic and emotional microcosm with its own identity, fruit of a meticulous research carried out in a carefully coded language, confronting the reoccurring themes of archetype and structure; ancestral and currant global-era human condition; nature and hybridity; ritual and science.
Avital’s sound and visual artworks have been presented in museums, art foundations, venues and art events such as MANIFESTA Biennial, GAM – Torino, MACRO Museum of Contemporary Art Rome; OSTRALE Dresden Biennial, La Fabbrica del Cioccolato Foundation in Switzerland, Saint Antoine Church Istanbul, Marino Marini Museum in Florence; National Science and Technology Museum “Leonardo da Vinci” in Milan.

Pietro Gaglianò (1975) is an art critic and curator. After graduating in architecture he deepened the relationship between the aesthetics of power and individual freedoms, preferring the urban, architectural and social context as the scene of contemporary art practices. He has curated special projects and exhibitions in Italy and abroad. For years he has been experimenting with hybrid formats of the art verification space, in which laboratory and training experiences are grafted onto the traditional model of exhibition and conference.

Luigi Presicce (Porto Cesareo, 1976) lives in Florence. He attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Lecce, deliberately choosing not to discuss his thesis. His work has been influenced by his independent studies. In 2007 he attended the Advanced Course in Visual Arts (CSAV) at the Antonio Ratti Foundation in Como with Joan Jonas. In 2008, as part of Artist in Residence, he participated in the workshop in Viafarini in Milan with Kim Jones. In Milan, in 2008, with Luca Francesconi and Valentina Suma, he founded Brownmagazine and later Brown Project Space, for which he is responsible for programming. In 2011 with Giusy Checola and Salvatore Baldi he founded Archiviazioni in Lecce (exercises of investigation and discussion on the contemporary South). In 2012 he took part in Artists in Residence at MACRO in Rome, extending his invitation to nine other artists (Laboratorio). Since 2010, with Luigi Negro, Emilio Fantin, Giancarlo Norese and Cesare Pietroiusti he has been involved in the Lu Cafausu project that promotes La festa dei vivi (reflecting on death) and with which he was invited by AND AND to dOCUMENTA13, Kassel. Since 2016 he has been a founding member of the Lac o le Mon Foundation in San Cesario di Lecce. With Francesco Lauretta since 2017 he has been part of the Scuola di Santa Rosa, a free school of drawing en plein air based in Florence and New York. He has been selected for the 2018 Studio Program at Artists Allianc Inc, New York and TAD Residency at Monastero del Carmine, Bergamo. He conceived and curated in 2018 and 2019 the Symposium of Painting at the Lac o le Mon Foundation, a residence/platform focused on Italian painting of the last thirty years.

Nato nel Bronx nel 1965 da famiglia caraibica. Come molti altri ragazzi di quel quartiere turbolento, cercava di esprimere la sua rabbia giovanile attraverso una forma spontanea di affermazione d’identità: disegnando graffiti sui malconci muri di case tutte uguali, plumbee ed anonime o sui vagoni malandati e squallidi della metropolitana. Insieme ad alcuni dei suoi “colleghi” di maggior talento, viene notato e nel momento in cui so lancia il Graffitismo come forma d’arte a pieno titolo, Toxic è nel gruppo dei migliori. Compagno di strada di leggende dell’arte contemporanea come Basquiat, Haring, Rammelzee, A One ed altri, Toxic ha partecipato alla crescita di questa corrente artistica underground che dalle strade più povere della metropoli americana è poi approfata in alcune gallerie famose, transitando anche per la Factory di Andy Warhol, e in innumerevoli mostre museali. Toxic ha continuato a lavorare su tele (e muri), trasferendosi in Europa (Francia e Italia). Protagonista ormai di numerose mostre, attualmente Toxic vive e dipinge in Toscana.

Rosa Jijón (born in Quito, Ecuador in 1968, based in Rome from 2000). She is Visual artist, activist, cultural mediator and Cultural Secretary of the IILA, ​​Italo-Latin American Institute. She was Director of the CAC, Centro de Arte Contemporaneo di Quito, Ecuador (2013-2015). She has been part of the project “Women’s Letters” (Cartas de Mujeres) UN Women, as artistic coordinator and documentary film maker and also of the “Sa’r san Project”, which involved through art children of the Roma community in Rome, Italy. Her artistic research is focused on several photographic projects and sociological research, relating to the situation of men and women immigrants in Italy. She represented Ecuador at 54 Venice Biennial (2011).

Rossella Liccione vive ed opera a Firenze presso il suo laboratorio artistico, collaborando con l’Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze, affiancando i docenti nella Scuola di decorazione, dove ha conseguito il diploma Accademico di I livello in decorazione e successiva specializzazione di II livello in “Arti Visive e Discipline dello Spettacolo” ed un Master in Textile. L’Artista elabora un linguaggio di geometrie irregolari che sfruttano la luce e la trasparenza per esaltare l’intensità del colore.

Adji Dieye is an ItaloSenegalese photographer born in Milan in 1991. She graduated in New Technologies for Art at the Academy of Fine Arts of Brera in Milan. Over the past years she has been traveling between Milan and Dakar, focusing her research on the influence of advertisement in the African visual culture. Her work explores different facets of West African societies; the influence of advertising in the construction of a national identity and the syncretic spirituality that remains central to African communities.

Adji Dieye’s artistic practice pushes the boundaries of photography in an attempt to investigate the archetypes that constitute African visual cultures. In her research, the continent is never considered an end in itself; instead, it represents a bridge towards further investigations into broader social and geopolitical realities.

Born in 1975, Akka, Morocco, he lives and works in Tahanaout next to Marrakech where he teaches art. Using painting, sculpture, drawing or even video, M’barek Bouhchichi develops his work through a tentative language grounded on the exploration of the limits between our internal discourse and its extension towards the outer world, the actual, the other. He places his works at the crossroad between the aesthetic and the social, exploring associated fields as possibilities for self-definition.

Recently, his work has been exhibited as a solo show Les mains noires (Kulte, Rabat, Morocco, 2016), as collective exhibition Documents bilingues (MUCEM, Marseille, France, 2017), as well as Le Maroc contemporain (Institut du Monde Arabe, Paris, France, 2014), Between walls (Le 18, Marrakech, Morocco, 2017).

Sasha Huber (CH/FI) is a visual artist of Swiss-Haitian heritage, born in Zurich, Switzerland in 1975. She lives and works in Helsinki, Finland. Huber’s work is primarily concerned with the politics of memory and belonging, particularly in relation to colonial residue left in the environment. Sensitive to the subtle threads connecting history and the present, she uses and responds to archival material within a layered creative practice that encompasses performance-based interventions, video, photography, and collaborations. Huber is also claiming the compressed-air staple gun, aware of its symbolic significance as a weapon, while offering the potential to renegotiate unequal power dynamics. She is known for her artistic research contribution to the Demounting Louis Agassiz campaign, aiming at dismantling the glaciologist’s lesser-known but contentious racist heritage. This long-term project (since 2008) has been concerned with unearthing and redressing the little-known history and cultural legacies of the Swiss-born naturalist and glaciologist Louis Agassiz (1807-1873), an influential proponent of “scientific” racism who advocated for segregation and “racial hygiene”. Huber has had solo exhibitions such as at the Hasselblad Foundation (Project Room) in Gothenburg and participated in numerous international exhibitions, including the 56th la Biennale di Venezia in 2015 (collateral exhibition: Frontier Reimagined), the 19th Biennale of Sydney in 2014, and in the 29th Biennial of São Paulo in 2010.

Delio Jasse was born in 1980 in Luanda, Angola and lives and works in Milan. In his photographic work, he often interweaves found images with clues from past lives (found passport photos, family albums) to draw links between photography – in particular the concept of the ‘latent image’ – and memory.

Jasse is also known for experimenting with analogue photographic printing processes, including cyanotype, platinum and early printing processes such as ‘Van Dyke Brown’, as well as developing his own printing techniques.

Recent exhibitions include: MAXXI, Rome (2018); Villa Romana, Florence (2018); Biennale dell’immagine, Lugano (solo, 2017); Walther Collection, Neu-Ulm (2017); SAVVY Contemporary, Berlin (2017); Bamako Encounters, Bamako (2017); Lagos Biennial, Lagos (2017); Tiwani Contemporary, London (solo, 2016); Walther Collection Project Space, NY (2016); Dak’art Biennale international exhibition (2016); and the Angolan Pavilion, 56th Venice Biennale (2015). He was one of three finalists in the BES Photo Prize (2014) and won the Iwalewa Art Award in 2015.

Amelia Umuhire, born 1991 in Kigali Rwanda, lives as an artist and filmmaker in Berlin. In 2015 she wrote and filmed her first web series, Polyglot, in which she follows young deracinated London- and Berlin-based Rwandese artists with her camera. The series has been shown at numerous festivals, including the Festival D’Angers, the Tribeca Film Festival and the Geneva International Film Festival, where it was named Best International Web Series in 2015. Her short film Mugabo is an experimental short film set in Kigali. It explores the question of how to return to one´s homeland and how to deal with the past. In 2017 it was awarded Best Experimental Film at the Blackstar Film Festival and is currently touring festivals in North America and amongst others screened at MOCA Los Angeles, the MCA Chicago, the Ann Arbor Film Festival and the Smithsonian African American Film Festival. In 2018 Amelia Umuhire produced the radio feature Vaterland for the German radio station Deutschlandfunk Kultur. It tells the story of her father Innocent Seminega as a young student, teacher, husband and father until his death at the hands of the Hutu extremists. In February this year Umuhire had her first solo exhibition at Decad Berlin.

Nari Ward (nato nel 1963 a St. Andrew, Giamaica; vive e lavora a New York) è noto per le sue installazioni scultoree composte da materiale di scarto trovato e raccolto nel suo quartiere. Ha riutilizzato oggetti come passeggini, carrelli della spesa, bottiglie, porte, televisori, registratori di cassa e lacci delle scarpe.

Ward ricontestualizza questi oggetti trovati in giustapposizioni stimolanti che creano significati metaforici complessi per affrontare questioni sociali e politiche che circondano la razza, la povertà e la cultura del consumo. Lascia intenzionalmente aperto il significato del suo lavoro, consentendo allo spettatore di fornire la propria interpretazione.

Mostre personali del suo lavoro sono state organizzate presso l’Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston (2017); SocratesSculpture Park, New York (2017); The Barnes Foundation, Philadelphia (2016); Pérez Art Museum Miami (2015); Savannah College of Art e Design Museum of Art, Savannah, GA (2015); Museo d’arte della Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA (2014); The Fabric Workshop and Museum, Philadelphia (2011); Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, MA (2011); Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston (2002); e Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN (2001, 2000).

Piero Mottola is an experimental artist and musician, professor of Sound Design and Ornamental Plastic at the Accademia di Belle Arti of Rome. Director of the LER Laboratorio di Estetica del Rumore, He formed himeself within the Eventualist Theory at the Centro Studi Jartrakor in Rome, where in 1988 he held his first solo exhibition with interactive experiments “Improvement-Degradation” and “Bello-Brutto”. He investigates the subjectivity and free interpretation of the user to visual and sound structures through experiments and measurements. He has been invited by several international universities to give lectures and to carry out master’s degrees on the relationship between noise and emotion. The results of these researches have been published in the book Passeggiate emozionali, dal rumore alla Musica Relazionale (Emotional Walks, from noise to Relational Music), presented in several Italian and international universities and in the cultural transmissions of the Italian radio and television, Rai Uno, Rai Radio Tre and Radio Cultura Argentina. These researches have also been presented in several national and international museums: MAMBA, Museo Arte Moderno, Buenos Aires (2013); Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome (2013); MACRO, Museo d’arte contemporanea, Rome (2015, 2017; 2018); Museo Hermann Nitsch-Fondazione Morra, Napoli (2009, 2015, 2019); MAC Museo d’arte contemporanea, Santiago del Cile (2016); Beijing Institute of Graphic Communication (2017); Istituto di Cultura Italiano, Pechino (2017); Museo della Certosa di S. Lucia, Rome (2018); Museo della Certosa di S. Martino, Castel S. Elmo, Naples (2018, 2019); CCK Kirchner Cultural Center, Buenos Aires (2019); Istituto Italiano di Cultura, Buenos Aires (2019).

Zhang Xiang. Nasce nel 1982 a Dazhou, provincia di Si Chuan. Si è diplomato in Scultura all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Sichuan con un Master in Scultura nel 2010, ha studiato come Visiting Scholar al Academy of Art liberty vision of The Hague. Attualmente è docente di Scultura dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Sichuan, Direttore del cross-media studio, membro della Chongqing Sculpture Society e anche corrispondente speciale della Chinese Sculpture Society. Le sue opere sono state collezionate dal China Sculpture Society, dal Hubei Museum of Art, dal The Gallery Magazine e anche collezionisti privati.

Nasce nel 1987 a Hangzhou, provincia di Zhejiang. Attualmente lavora e vive a Chongqing e Hangzhou, è docente nel Dipartimento di Grafica, dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Sichuan. La direzione della sua ricerca artistica si concentra su “tempo e spazio”, con “oggetti” e “luce” come materie principali. Attua modalità di azione artistica diverse dalla mostra attraverso la scrittura e la pittura.  

Nato a Viareggio, Gabriele Dini dopo aver concluso gli studi presso il dipartimento di Nuove Tecnologie dell’Arte dell’Accademia di Belle Arti di Carrara, segue un biennio di specializzazione presso il Royal College of Art di Londra. Tra il 2017 e il 2019 ha partecipato a quattro residenze d’artista, la prima nel 2017 presso il MAC Museum of Contemporary Art, Istituto Italiano di Cultura, in Cile; nel 2018 viene ospitato dal Siena Art Institute, poi la Fondazione Pistoletto di Biella e infine le Murate Art District e il Sichuan Arti Institute nel 2019. Molte le sue esposizioni, tra le quali alcune personali, a palazzo Ridolfi a Firenze nel 2019, con Iconosmash, ad Asciano in provincia di Siena l’anno seguente, presso il Museo Archeologico Palazzo Corboli, con dormancy; infine a Carrara nel 2017, la Tekè Gallery ospita Augmented fragility. Nel 2014 vince il Thames Barrier Award a Londra e nello stesso anno riceve l’Augustus Martin Award presso il Royal College of Art di Londra.

Giulio Saverio Rossi (Massa, 1988) vive e lavora a Torino. Ha studiato pittura all’Accademia di Venezia e all’Accademia Albertina di Torino. Attualmente è docente all’Accademia di Belle Arti di Urbino.

Fra le sue mostre personali Il giardino di notte, Casa Masaccio (San Giovanni Valdarno, 2021); Nuova Scuola delle Nuvole e della Nebbia, Sichuan Fine Arts Institue (Chongqing, Cina, 2019). Il suo lavoro è stato presentato in mostre collettive, spazi istituzionali e musei fra cui Istituo Italiano di Cultura di Tokyo (Tokyo, 2021) e GAM (Torino, 2020).  Ha partecipato a programmi internazionali fra cui China Project, promosso da MAD Murate Art District e Zhong Art International (Chongqing, 2019); Mediterranea18, BJCEM (Albania, 2017); Real Presence, Castello di Rivoli Museo d’arte contemporanea (Belgrado, Rivoli, 2008). Nel 2020 è vincitore dell’avviso pubblico Cantica21. Italian contemporary art everywhere, promosso da MIC (DGCC) e MAECI (DGSP).  La sua opera è entrata recentemente a far parte della collezione Cassa Depositi e Prestiti.

Bettina Buck (Cologne 1974, Berlin 2018) graduated from the Kunsthochschule für Medien in Cologne and then obtained a Masters in Fine Art from Goldsmiths, University of London.  Her research focuses on the notion of sculpture as duration and collapse, chance and transformation. Selected exhibitions: 2018 Raumfolgen, Schloß Burgau, Düren; 2016 City Dance Köln; All Italy is silent German Academy of Villa Massimo and Royal Academy of Spain, Rome 2014 Another Interlude, Performance, Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome, To continue. Notes towards a Sculpture Cycle: Scale, Nomas Foundation, Rome; 2012 A House of Leaves, David Roberts Art Foundation, London; 2011 V&A cycle (performance), performance, Postmodernism: Style and Subversion 1970-1990: Friday Late: The Postmodern Look, V&A, London; 2010 Platzhalter, Galerie Monitor, Rome; 2007 Reaparecidos, Museo de la Ciudad, Quito. Between 2009 and 2017 she created five Invite projects, a series of exhibitions structured as a dialogue between her own practice and that of an artist with whose work she felt a relationship of intimacy and confrontation: Cologne, 2009; Berlin 2011; London, 2012; Exeter, 2013; Berlin, 2017.

Chiara Camoni (Piacenza, 1974) lives and works in Fabbiano, Alta Versilia. Graduated in Sculpture at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts, she worked for some years with the Institute for the Dissemination of Natural Sciences in Naples. Together with other artists she founded the Magra – Museum of Contemporary Art in Granara. With Cecilia Canziani she is developing the cycle of seminars La Giusta Misura, started at the Murate Progetti Arte Contemporanea in Florence. Recent exhibitions include: Zenzic, with Anna Barham, curated by Caterina Avataneo, Arcade Gallery, London; Sisters, MIMA – Middlesbrough Institute of Modern Art, Middlesbrough; La Vita Materiale. Otto stanze, otto storie, curated by Marina Dacci, Palazzo da Mosto, Reggio Emilia; Il disegno del disegno, curated by Saretto Cincinelli, Museo Novecento, Florence.

Mohammad Alfaraj’s (b. 1993 in Al Hassa, KSA, where he lives and works), practice centers around his exploration of the relationship between forms and concepts, is visible through superimposed stories in his photographic collages, regrouping and contrasting fiction and non-fiction subjects. Alfaraj’s work also often uses natural materials found in his hometown and combines them with children games and stories from people working the land, as an attempt to create states of co-existence between man and nature with an undertone of hope. A socio-environment activist at heart, his short documentary Lost, 2015 (which was awarded first place in the student category at the Saudi Film Festival), captures the latent state of the notion of temporality for the stateless Arabs living as refugees in their place of birth, and the dehumanizing effect this plays. This “un-homely” context portrays the poisonous beauty of nature when lived as a nemesis under political paralysis.

Alfaraj graduated with a BA in mechanical engineering from KFUPM in 2017. His recent solo show; Still Life and Plastic Dreams, Athr Gallery, Jeddah KSA (2020), and group shows include I Love You Urgently, 21,39 SAC, Jeddah, KSA (2020), Durational Portrait; A brief overview of video art in Saudi Arabia, Athr Gallery, Jeddah, KSA (2020), Sharjah Islamic Festival, Sharjah, UAE (2019). His work has also been shown at the Sharjah Art Foundation; Le Murate Pac, Florence (2019); Athr Gallery, Jeddah (2018); 21,39 Jeddah Arts (2017, 2019); Saudi Film Festival, Dammam (2015) and Dubai International Film Festival (2014). Alfaraj worked as a programmer in both the Saudi Film Festival and the poetry house festival in Dammam.

Michelangelo Pistoletto was born in Biella in 1933. He began to exhibit his work in 1955 and in 1960 he had his first solo show at Galleria Galatea in Turin. An inquiry into self-portraiture characterizes his early work. In the two-year period 1961-1962 made the first Mirror Paintings, which directly include the viewer and real time in the work, and open up perspective, reversing the Renaissance perspective that had been closed by the twentieth-century avant-gardes. These works quickly brought Pistoletto international acclaim, leading, in the sixties, to one-man shows in important galleries and museums in Europe and the United States. The Mirror Paintings are the foundation of his subsequent artistic output and theoretical thought.
In 1965 and 1966 he produced a set of works entitled Minus Objects, considered fundamental to the birth of Arte Povera, an art movement of which Pistoletto was an animating force and a protagonist. In 1967 he began to work outside traditional exhibition spaces, with the first instances of that “creative collaboration” he developed over the following decades by bringing together artists from different disciplines and diverse sectors of society.
In 1975-76 he presented a cycle of twelve consecutive exhibitions, Le Stanze, at the Stein Gallery in Turin. This was the first of a series of complex, year-long works called “time continents”. Others are White Year (1989) and Happy Turtle (1992).
In 1978, in a show in Turin, Pistoletto defined two main directions his future artwork would take: Division and Multiplication of the Mirror and Art Takes On Religion. In the early eighties he made a series of sculptures in rigid polyurethane, translated into marble for his solo show in 1984 at Forte di Belvedere in Florence. From 1985 to 1989 he created the series of “dark” volumes called Art of Squalor. During the nineties, with Project Art and with the creation in Biella of Cittadellarte – Fondazione Pistoletto and the University of Ideas, he brought art into active relation with diverse spheres of society with the aim of inspiring and producing responsible social change. In 2003 he won the Venice Biennale’s Golden Lion for Lifelong Achievement. In 2004 the University of Turin awarded him a laurea honoris causa in Political Science. On that occasion the artist announced what has become the most recent phase of his work, Third Paradise.
In 2007, in Jerusalem, he received the Wolf Foundation Prize in the Arts, “for his constantly inventive career as an artist, educator and activist whose restless intelligence has created prescient forms of art that contribute to fresh understanding of the world.”
In 2010 he wrote the essay The Third Paradise, published in Italian, English, French and German. In 2012 he started promoting the Rebirth-day, first worldwide day of rebirth, celebrated every year on 21st December with initiatives taking place all around the world.
In 2013 the Louvre in Paris hosted his personal exhibition Michelangelo Pistoletto, année un – le paradis sur terre. In this same year he received the Praemium Imperiale for painting, in Tokyo.
In May 2015 he received a degree honoris causa from the Universidad de las Artes of Havana in Cuba. In the same year he realizes a work of big dimensions, called Rebirth, situated in the park of the Palais des Nations in Geneva, headquarters of the UN.
In 2017 the text written by Michelangelo Pistoletto Ominitheism and Demopraxy. Manifesto for a regeneration of society was published.
Between 2018 and 2020 the activity of the Third Paradise has further intensified, in particular through the development of an international network of Embassies and Forums. In these same years he has been particularly active in various South American countries, with personal exhibitions and a series of initiatives linked to the Third Paradise.