Alberto Amoretti is 36 years old and lives in Milan. He is a screenwriter, writer and director. Since 2011 he has been writing scripts for television films and series for the Italian channels RAI and Mediaset. In between he worked as a playwright for the Atopos Theater Company. He has written reports for Italian magazines on the photographs of Giovanni Hänninen and curated photo exhibitions. In 2017 he made his debut as a director with the documentary Atopos, theatrical genders, which accompanies a ‘sui generis’ company between theatre and life and the creation of a play between truth and fiction. Sixteen actors and one director are searching for their own identity beyond the concept of man and woman. Alberto Amoretti is the director and co-author of the Senegal/Sicily series, which was shown in 2018 at the Centro internationale de Fotografia in Palermo and at Dak’Art in Dakar.
Giovanni Hänninen was born in Helsinki in 1976. He lives and works in Milan. He holds a doctorate in aerospace engineering and teaches photography for architecture at the Department of Architecture and Urban Planning of the Politecnico di Milano. He is a photographer for the Filarmonica della Scala in Milan. He realizes research projects for public and private institutions. His most recent projects include: Il viaggio die Roland Ultra (2013), Mix City (2014), Sound Vision (2014), cittáinattesa (2012-2015, Mi-Bg 49 km (2015), Thread (2017), People of Tamba (2018), Layered Mumbai (2018). His most recent project, People of Tamba, was exhibited in 2018 at the Mon Super Kilomètre at the Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar. www.hanninen.it/
Johanna Bramble (born 1976 in Paris) is a designer and textile artist who lives and works in Dakar. She founded her own weaving workshop and produces textiles by means of Senegalese hand weaving looms including traditional symbolic patterns for interior decoration, accessories and in cooperation with young African fashion labels. With her artistic sculptural objects and installations, she stretches the boundaries of the country’s textile heritage and creates speculative, culturally hybrid structures involving a wide variety of materials. In her work, she understands textiles as a universal language that spans networks beyond political and social boundaries through transcultural links and documents alternative stories. She regularly exhibits her works in the OFF program of the Dak’Art Biennale in Dakar.
Leone Contini (born 1976 in Florence) studied philosophy and cultural anthropology at the Università degli Studi di Siena. His research focuses on intercultural friction, conflict and power relations, frictions, migration and diaspora and uses the tools of anthropology to short-circuit the spheres of commonness through lecture performances, collective interventions in public space, textual and visual narratives, blogs or self-publishing. Exhibitions and interventions took place in Khoj, Neu-Delhi (2014), Kunstraum München, Munich (2014), 2nd floor, Kunstraum München, Munich (2014).Tbilisi-Triennale, Tbilisi (2015), D-0 Ark Underground Biennial, Konjic, Bosnia (2015), Delfina Foundation, London (2015), Quadriennale, Rome (2016), Topane-i-Amire, Istanbul (2016), Mudec, Milan (2017) as well as the Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018). He was ‘artist in residence’ at Khoj, New Delhi (2014), Delfina Foundation, London (2014/15), Kronika, Bytom, Poland (2015), Cittàdellarte-Fondazione Pistoletto, Biella, Italy (2016) and at the Akademie Schloss Solitude, Stuttgart (2018/19).
Aliou ‘Badou’ Diack (born 1987 in Sidi Bougou, Mbour, Senegal) studied at the Ecole Nationale des Arts (ENA) in Dakar. His visual universe is inhabited by hybrid beings in a process of constant metamorphosis. Nature, being a co-producer in his artisitc practice, assumes the role of the unpredictable for dynamic transformations of his drawings. As a visual counterpart to the fable and from the pool of local oral narrative traditions the drawings negotiate the role of man, animal and nature in the age of the anthropocene. Works by Aliou ‘Badou’ Diack have been exhibited at Art X Lagos, Lagos (2017), Galerie Nationale des Arts, Dakar (2017), Hotel de la Mairie, Gorée, Senegal (2017), Regards sur cours, Saint Louis, Senegal (2017), Dak’Art OFF, Dakar (2018), Fondation Donwahi, Abidjan (2019) and Galerie Le Manège de l’Institute Francais, Dakar (2019).
Mohamed Keita was born in 1993 in the Ivory Coast and had to leave his country at the age of 14 in the civil war. After a very long journey through Guinea, Mali, Algeria, the Sahara, Libya and Malta, he reached Italy in 2010. Through his stay in the refugee center Civico Zero in Rome, he found his way to the medium of photography. Today Mohamed Keita lives and works as a photographer in Rome. In 2017 he founded a photography workshop for street children in Mali. He documents the marginal, people and objects in urban spaces that fall, frozen in time, out of the hustle and bustle of the city. In 2016, the Istituto Italiano di Cultura in New York showed his works alongside photographs by Paolo Pellegrin. His photographs were displayed in Italy at the Museo MACRO, Rome (2016), Centro Pecci, Prato (2018) and at the 58th Venice Biennale as part of the UNHCR contribution Rothko in Lampedusa (2019). www.mohamedkeita.it/
Juan Pablo Macias (born 1974 in Mexico) studied Fine Arts at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and at the Universidad de las Americas in Mexico. In 2005 he participated in the residency program of the Ratti Foundation in Como, Italy with Alfredo Jaar. Macias explores the relationship between systems of representation and affectivity and, analogously, between the knowledge system of political power and that of insurrection. With his actions, interventions, work on archives and editorial projects, he aims to create tensions between institutions, artistic practice and social spheres through programs that act directly with biological, social and economic bodies against flat semantics. His works have been shown at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (2012), 15th Jakarta Biennale, Jakarta (2013), Kunstraum München, Munich (2013), Italian Embassy, Berlin (2015), Goethe Institut, Sao Paolo (2015), 2nd Yinchuan Biennale, Yinchuan, China (2018), Museo Internacional del Barroco, Puebla, Mexico (2018), Center of Contemporary Art, Plovdiv, Bulgaria (2018).
Fabrice Monteiro, born in Namur in 1972, grew up in Benin and lives and works today in Dakar. He studied industrial engineering and worked as a model before before he started to dedicate himself to photography in 2007. Monteiro’s portfolio encompasses all genres – photo reportage, fashion photography and portraits – which merge and collide in his works, refusing one-sided perspectives and stereotypes. The themes of his photo series range from the apocalyptic visions of a destroyed environment to highly stylized portraits that bring forgotten colonial narratives into light. Monteiro’s works have been featured in many international exhibitions, including Rencontres Photographique de Bamako (2015), Lagos Photo Festival, Lagos (2015), Vitra Museum, Weil am Rhein (2015), Musee de l’Homme, Paris (2017), Hartware MedienKunstVerein, Dortmund (2017), Smithsonian Museum of African Art, Washington (2018), University of Michigan Musuem of Art, Michigan (2018), Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago (2018), Dak’Art Biennale, St. Louis (2018), Manifesta 12, Palermo (2018)
https://fabricemonteiro.viewbook.com
Mario Pfeifer (born 1981 in Dresden) explores representation structures and conventions through the medium of film. In a practice of overlapping, he interweaves transcultural references from art history, film and politics. Mario Pfeifer’s works have been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in institutions all over the world, such as the Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago de Chile (2014), Fotomuseum Winterthur (2015), Ludlow38, New York (2015), Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz (2018), Pylon Lab, Dresden (2019) and The Power Plant, Toronto (2019), His films were shown at the MoMA PS1 in New York (2013), Kunsthaus Bregenz (2013), Seoul New Media Festival (2015), 62nd International Film Festival in New York (2013). International Film Festival Oberhausen (2016), at the CAC Contemporary Art Center, Vilnius (2016) and at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2019). His video work Again – Noch Einmal was produced for the 10th Berlin Biennale, Berlin (2018). Mario Pfeifer’s works have received numerous awards, in 2019 he received the Edith Russ Award, Oldenburg. www.mariopfeifer.org/
Judith Raum (born 1977) lives and works in Berlin. She studied art at the Städelschule in Frankfurt, the Cooper Union School of Arts and the Parsons School of Design in New York. Her artistic practice includes video, installations and lecture performances with which she creates complex historical narratives based on long-term archive research on documents and objects as well as social and economic historical investigations, most recently on the textile workshop at the Bauhaus in Weimar. Her works have been shown in many international institutions, including Ludlow 38, New York (2014), Salt, Istanbul (2015), Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin (2015), and the German Pavilion at the International Architecture Biennale, Venice (2016), nGbK, Berlin (2017), Centrale Fies, Drau, Italy (2018), Tate Modern, London (2018), Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Dresden (2019), Istanbul Modern, Istanbul (2019), Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, MA (2019) and Grassl Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Leipzig (2019). https://www.judithraum.net/
Lerato Shadi, born 1979 in Mahikeng, South Africa, lives and works in Berlin. She studied art at the University of Johannesburg. Her practice investigates the politics of the body, the female body, the body of the South African-black woman. In her work, Lerato Shadi deals with themes of institutional violence, patriarchal and colonial strategies of exclusion and erasure, and resistance through subjective narratives. She works with various media such as drawing, performance and video. Works and performances have been part of many exhibitions in museums and project spaces, including the Biennials in Moscow and Dakar (2012), Maxim Gorki Theater, Berlin (2014), Iniva, London (2014), Galerie Wedding, Berlin (2015), South African National Arts Festival, Grahamstown (2016), GoetheOnMain, Johannesburg (2016), Tate Modern, London (2017), Zeitz MOCCA, Cape Town (2018), Centro Pecci, Prato (2018), Kunstraum München, Munich (2019). https://www.leratoshadi.art/
Patrick Joel Yonkeu Tatcheda was born in 1975 in Douala, Cameroon. He received a scientific and religious Catholic education at St. Jean Baptiste de Bangangtè College in Cameroun. Always active between art and science, he turned to art in Italy in 2009. He received a scholarship for the Academy of Fine Arts and studied painting in Bologna. His work deals with human existence, spirituality and freedom in today’s society. As media he uses painting, sculpture and installation. He considers himself a fine arts researcher. His works were shown in the IV. Biennale Internazionale delle Sculture di Salgemma in Sicily (2017), Fondation Sindika Dekolo, Luanda (2017), Villa Romana, Florence (2018), La Galleria Nazionale, Rome (2018) and the Dak’Art Biennale (2018).
Justin Randolph Thompson, sculptor, media artist and musician, was born in 1979 in Peekskill, NY. He lives in Florence, Italy. Thompson’s work explores the meanings of cultural relics and the transformations of their meanings in the context of displacement and diaspora. With an aesthetic practice that is largely collaborative and interdisciplinary, he creates platforms and interprets community as temporary monuments. His work aims to deepen the discussions about socio-cultural stratifications and hierarchical organizations by outlining hybrid, non-linear connections in history and in current socio-political discourse through installations and sound performances. Thompson has exhibited internationally and has been artist-in-residence at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Reina Sofia, Sofia and the American Academy in Rome. He is co-founder of the Black History Month Florence. https://www.justinrandolphthompson.com/