Starting from martial arts and the art of the Japanese sword, which she still practices, she approached contemporary dance. After graduating from the Italian Professional School of Dance, she immediately started collaborating as a performer with the National Academy of Rome, the Wuppertal Theater and the Teatro alla Scala in Milan, coming into contact with internationally renowned choreographers and directors such as: Nikos Lagousakos, Cindy Van Acker, Claudia Castellucci, Crysanthi Badeka, Ariella Vidach, Gisele Vienne. Her meeting with Yoshito Ohono, MaluAiraldo and Adriana Boriello was decisive in her choice to direct her choreographic and performance language towards a continuous research on the body and its movement, including Visual Art, theater and new digital media in her poetics and multimedia. From 2010 to 2018 she collaborated as a performer for Monica Casadei’s Artemis Danza company, taking her shows all over the world. Her works include “Narcissus’s way,” presented at Infinito Studio Gallert TriBeCa, in which body, sensuality, interaction with the audience. With the OltreModo collective she presented the performance “Corpi” at the Infinito Studio Gallery in New York. A post-apocalyptic scenario in which real elements and imaginary references are mixed constitutes the performance of a hybrid nature. In collaboration with Did Studio and Studio Azzurro, she created “In Fieri – Dissolvenza del divenire,” a performance installation in which body and sound dialogue. Since 2013, she has collaborated with director Romeo Castellucci, both as performer and choreographer, further developing the qualities of plasticity, dynamism and compositional rhythm applied to the totality of the performing and visual arts. As a performer of her shows, she worked on such extraordinarily important stages as: Adelaide Festival of Arts, Festival dAutomne, Holland Festival, deSingle, Peak Performance Montclair, Festival Transamerique-Montreal. Under Castellucci’s direction as choreographer, Gloria performed in The Third Reich and at the Bonn Beethovenfest: “Pavane für Prometheus” for the Bonn Festival in September.

Eliza Collin (Plymouth,1993) is a British designer and researcher. Her practice spans areas of ethnography, art, co-design, curation, and education. She develops bodies of research and methodologies focussing on new systems, perspectives and ways of relating to material, resources and the environment. Delivering design-led, third party projects from Cornwall to Kuching, she’s worked as a Project Manager and Community Director in the ongoing Palestine based cross-cultural collaboration Samak Bilab Bi Delo and been commissioned to develop research projects from Studio Rizoma (Sicily, 2020), LIPA festival (Makassar, 2020) and Narratives of Soil (Kuching, 2021) with architect Wendy Teo for the British Council to name a few. As well as being an active member of the United Matters collective she holds an MA in Material Futures from UAL Central Saint Martins.

She was first inspired by the accounts of Sicilian farmers on how deforestation and overuse have rendered the water cycle unpredictable. She collaborated with researchers in Ghana and Jersey to design the regenerative water recycling kitchen, Aqua Dentro (2021). This work on the displacement of water, its consumption and recycling, stemmed from a body of ethnographic research carried out in Sicily, highlighting the potential of design to affect human perception and in turn promote best practice. She accomplished this through international expert engagement and researching indigenous systems and technologies. She explored their potential for laying the foundations of advanced contemporary methodologies through the focus on challenging how we see water, how we understand it as a resource, how it moves through the land and is pulled into the cities, and how it is expected to be used and disposed of. The work challenged old inflexible and hierarchical systems and produced community projects providing strategic support, direction and navigation to achieve excellent, relevant and long-lasting outputs.

Since then she has been working on water-related projects within the government design team PolicyLab, collaborating on a rainwater harvesting system for the BlueCity Rainwater Hackathon (Rotterdam, 2022) and is currently in residence in Utrecht for Gemene Grond: Water is what we make it (Utrecht, 2022).

Lena Chen is a Chinese American writer and artist creating performances and socially engaged art. A recipient of Mozilla Foundation’s 2022 Creative Media Award and “Best Emerging Talent” at the 2019 B3 Biennial of the Moving Image, her work has appeared at Transmediale, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, Färgfabriken, Baltimore Museum of Art, Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Sheffield DocFest, Museum of Contemporary Art Jacksonville, among others.

She has been awarded grants and residencies from Sundance Institute, Millay Colony for the Arts, Burning Man Global Arts Fund, Frank-Ratchye STUDIO for Creative Inquiry, Pittsburgh Foundation, and Arthur Boskamp Foundation. She has spoken at Oxford, Yale, Stanford, and SXSW. She is founder of Heal Her, an expressive arts initiative that supports survivors of gender-based violence.

Currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Performance Studies from the University of California, Berkeley, she earned a B.A. in sociology from Harvard University and a M.F.A. from Carnegie Mellon University’s School of Art. 

Born in Bangui, Central African Republic, in 1973 and raised in neighbouring Cameroon, Hervé Youmbi studied art theory and developed an interest in installation art, which he later pursued, through both practice and research, in France at ESAD (Ecole Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs de Strasbourg). 

Youmbi often integrates traditional Cameroonian sculpture techniques within his installations and into performance and video. This allows him to juxtapose indigenous African art traditions with contemporary global art conventions, and destabilise what is regarded as “traditional” versus “contemporary.” Youmbi’s series Visages des Masques/Faces of Masks transgresses these established categories in several ways. His departure point is to insert mask forms that diverge from the Western stereotypes of “African Art” for this region of Cameroon into “traditional” Bamileke ritual performances, thus embodying them with efficacy and authenticity.

Youmbi’s Les Trônes Célestes is an installation of beaded caryatid thrones “traditional” for rulers of the Cameroon Grasslands, each seat of power supported by an animal traditionally symbolic of idealized leadership—except for the tortoise that Youmbi has slyly inserted here to suggest that the deliberate creature might epitomize better leadership than, say, the leopard, a stealthy killer. His series Totems to Haunt Our Dreams confronted how difficult it was for artists to travel and network within Africa, despite shared aspirations and similar subordination to commodification, which reflects the globalisation of capital that nevertheless serves to constrain African artists within parochial silos. 

Hervé Youmbi is a founding member of Cercle Kapsiki, a collective of five Cameroonian visual artists established in 1998. The K Factory, the collective’s home, based in New Bell, one of the poorest but also one of the most dynamic districts of Douala, is a flexible space, experimental and open to a wide range of collaborations.