setareh fatehi
Listen to voiceover
setareh fatehi (او) is an artist-researcher NoT based in Tehran or London. setareh looks at the formation of trans-local collaborative bodies among ‘distanced’ localities by conducting the practice of Parallaxing (i). This practice explores the ethics of hosting remote bodies that are dealing with the debilitating effect of limiting the notion of ‘presence’ to its colonial definition where the differences between (i) and the other was used to legitimise the existence of the borders that have been brutally separating them. setareh has finished her MA in choreography at the Amsterdam School for the Arts and is currently a PhD candidate for the collaborative doctoral award offered by RCSSD and performingborders.
Tanja Ostojić
Listen to voiceover
Tanja Ostojić (*1972 Yugoslavia) is a Berlin-based artist, researcher and educator internationally renowned as a pioneer of institutional gendered critique and for her art works in the field of socially and politically engaged art. Since 1994, she has been developing conceptual and research-oriented, performative art projects that deal with issues of gender politics, feminism, migration, displacement, labour and ethical participation. Most recent projects are centred around community building and grounded in collaborative practices, and methodologies of shared women knowledge.
In the frame of her current project “Changed by Water” she is organising workshops that combine swimming practice with conversations, gathering and transmission of knowledge among women, around the topic of swimming cultures as healing for menopause. As a feminist, Ostojić is committed to embrace the changes in her body as politics. Through artistic research, she is working on mapping out strategies to touch and change through bodies of water, and through women’s collective knowledge.
She studied at the Belgrade University of Arts and the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts in Nantes, and in 2012-14 she received research fellowship of the Graduate School, at the Berlin University of the Arts. Ostojić has presented her work internationally, such as the Venice Biennale, Performa in New York, Brooklyn Museum in New York, Busan Biennale in South Korea, and Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin, among others.
In 2018, she published the Lexicon of Tanjas Ostojić (LADA, London, 2018), a book based on transformative encounters derived from a women communal project, from the region of former Yugoslavia. Ostojić co edited Integration Impossible? The Politics of Migration in the Artwork of Tanja Ostojić, (with M. Gržinić, argobooks, Berlin, 2009) and edited Strategies of Success/Curators Series, (La Box, Bourges and SKC Belgrade, 2004), among others.
Moviendo Territorios: Eli Wewentxu & Sharon Mercado Nogales
Listen to voiceover
Moviendo Territorios is a collective formed by Eli Wewentxu (Wallmapu-Chile) and Sharon Mercado Nogales (Bolivia Andes), which was born with the intention of building relationships and activating spaces through the construction of greenhouses in different places and within different communities in Abya Yala. Moviendo Territorios creates a direct bridge with communities and spaces that are working the land, building self-sustenance, caring for the seeds, and through the recognition of their territory are fostering la resistencia del pueblo, the peoples’ resistance, without the promotion of conventional institutionalism. Since 2020, we have been able to collaborate with 3 territories: Chomio-Wallmapu, Cusijata-Bolivia, and El Chaco-Argentina. Through these connections, an alternative reality to the concept of “solidarity” opens up, questioning the power dynamics that diminish the role and voice of ancestral peoples in the face of the patriarchal institutionalism of NGOs, Foundations, and the State. Moviendo Territorios organizes Soli Fiestas in Berlin, Germany, with the intention to collect a significant amount of money. This financial support is used to pay for materials, transportation, refreshments, and other needs agreed upon with each community, ensuring that their needs and desires are met. All of this is made possible only through the network of friends, spaces, and collaborators who support us at every event we hold.
Rodolfo R. Suárez Molnar
Listen to voiceover
Rodolfo R. Suárez Molnar, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana- México. I am currently coordinator, with Philippe Olé, of the ICORN-UAM project for the foundation of refuge houses for writers, artists and journalists at risk, and I am also the coordinator of the Project Fronteras. (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana), dedicated to social intervention through artistic devices on issues related to migration and exile.
I studied a degree in Psychology and a Master and PhD in Philosophy of Science. Throughout my academic career, I have carried out various research projects on the theory of history, collective psychology and popular culture. However, for the last 15 years, I have dedicated a large part of my work to projects and activities focused on the use of academic and artistic tools and devices for social intervention in different topics (migration, exile, forced disappearance, gender-based violence) in diverse social contexts (Mexico City, Sarajevo, Tijuana, Gaza, or Santiago de Chile). Some examples of this are the Project Ciudades Inmateriales that I developed with Ángel Hernández, the Bitácora del encierro (a book co-directed with Philippe Olé in which 180 writers participated with texts about the measures generated by COVID-19), the Diploma in Forced Disappearance in Mexico and Latin America, or the Cátedra Pensamiento situado (Museo Reina Sofía/UAM).
I was also the editorial coordinator – with Philippe Olé and Rodrigo Fernández – of the Selected Works of Antonin Artaud in Spanish and, with Giulia Palladini, the curator of the art exhibition Rumbos de vida (Atri, Italy) and of this project: Backpack
Giulia Palladini
Listen to voiceover
Giulia Palladini is a writer, and curator currently based between Italy and Mexico, working in the field of performance and contemporary art both in academic and contemporary art contexts. Her work moves between different languages and fields of knowledge, striving for a situated and affective approach to both critical and creative practice. Her main interests are political imagination, the politics and erotics of artistic production, social reproduction, language and translation. She is an Alexander von Humboldt alumna, and Honorary Fellow at the University of Roehampton in London. She also taught in Germany, the Netherlands, Colombia and Spain, and presented her work in numerous art institutions in Europe and Latin America, such as the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, Tate Modern in London, the Museum Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Museo Miguel Urrutia in Bogotà. Giulia collaborated as dramaturg and critical theorist with various international artists like Mapa Teatro, Forced Entertainment, Tara Irani. She led various research clusters fostering a dialogue between artistic practice and critical theory, such as Affective Archives (Italy 2011, Poland 2014), and Feminismos Antipatriarcales and Poetic Disobedience (UK/MX/Ecuador/Brazil 2021). In 2024, she curated the series Antidotes: encounters to think live arts in the political landscape (Centro de Cultura Digital, Ciudad de México) and Rumbos de vida (with Rodolfo Suárez Molnar, Atri, Italy,). She authored The Scene of Foreplay: Theater, Labor and Leisure in 1960s New York (Northwestern University Press, 2017), numerous essays published in various languages, and co-edited Lexicon for an Affective Archive (Intellect, 2017, with Marco Pustianaz).
Fehras Publishing Practices
Listen to voiceover
Fehras Publishing Practices was co-established in 2015 in Berlin. We are a cultural workers collective holding emotional capital, grandmother’s wisdom and loyalty to our ancestors. Our work engages in various participatory methods and artistic productions, focusing on the relationship between publishing and history-making. We examine the role of publishing as a tool to combat cultural domination, as well as a means to foster solidarity and deconstruct colonial power. Fehras serves as an observatory for publishing strategies and practices in relation to the geo-political transformations of southwest Asia and North Africa.
Our research is based on our intuition, desires and concerns. We utilize archival materials, including books, magazines, photographs, memoirs, letters, contemporary art publications, and the libraries of authors, publishers, and book sellers. We collect, organize, and re-curate these materials, placing them in diverse spatial and temporal landscapes. We enact publications and reflect their sorties with various mediums. We instrumentalise tools of architecture, design, performance, embroidery and our bodies to witness, protest, map, and investigate politics of (non-conforming) and marginalized bodies in urban spaces and the archives. Our method of demarking boundaries in front of the audience is based on extensive cohabitation and sharing bread and salt, a practice we call Moasherat.
Fehras upholds publishing as a means of creating, transferring, and disseminating knowledge. Consequently, we initiate projects in various forms, such as exhibitions, films, books, lectures, performances, and Moasherat. Our practices address issues that concern them; gender, collectivity, identity, migration, emancipation, funding, and institutions. Fehras Publishing Practices includes Kenan Darwich, Nancy Naser Al Deen, Sama Ahmadi and Sami Rustom.
Diana Damian Martin
Listen to voiceover
Diana Damian Martin is a writer, artist and researcher interested in border-work as a mode of exploring new political formations and anti-colonial imaginaries, be they through critical, political or artistic acts, feminist and queer modes of exchange and experimental cultures of critique, publishing and reflection. She co-hosts the collective Something Other, and the Serbo-Romanian critical cooperative Critical Interruptions, is a member of artistic research committee Generative Constraints and a founding member of Migrants in Culture. She is currently Senior Lecturer in Performance Arts at the Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, where she leads the BA Hons Experimental Arts and Performance course.
performingborders e-journal #3:
ENTANGLED PRACTICES: Embodying cross-border live art
Listen to voiceover
Edited & taken care of by:
Alessandra Cianetti, Xavier de Sousa, and Anahí Saravia Herrera, with support from Diana Damian Martin.
Website and Design by:
Design Print Bind
with additional support from NewNuevo
Audio Descriptions by:
Michael Skellern
Thank you to the Necessity Fund, Royal Central School of Speech and Drama, and to Arts Council England for supporting this work.