PARTICIPANTS

These speakers, artists, writers, pedagogues, performers will share their thoughts and work over the course of the symposium and the exhibition:

Fia Backström
Fia Backström is working out the parameters of engagement in various group formations as an artist, writer, and educator. The work straddles a wide range of media, and has been performed, shown, and published in multiple contexts. In the fall of 2016 Primary Information will release COOP –A-script, a book of poems, including some of her performance scripts. Fia Backström is a visual lecturer at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University and co-chairs the photography department at the Milton Avery Graduate School of Arts at Bard College.
Petra Bauer
Petra Bauer works as an artist and filmmaker based in Stockholm. She is concerned with the question of how film can be a feminist space for social and political negotiations. Bauer works with long-term research projects primarily focusing on how women choose to collectively self-organize with an aim to change political and social structures. She has among other things collaborated with institutions such as Showroom in London, and Tensta Konsthall in Stockholm. She is currently working with SCOT-PEP, which is a sex-worker led organization in Edinburgh, in collaboration with HER and Collective Art Gallery. In September her Ph.D dissertation Sisters! Making Films, Doing Politics will come out.

Bauer’s work has been exhibited widely, including festivals, screenings, seminars and exhibitions at institutions such as 56th Venice Biennale– international exhibition; Showroom, London; Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven; Tensta Konsthall, Stockholm; Moderna Museet, Stockholm; Bard College Annandale-on-Hudson, New York; Tabakalera, San Sebastian; Tate Modern, London: Kadist Art Foundation, Paris; Frankfurter Kunstverein; CAC Vilnius; Kunsthalle Nurnberg, Stadtgalerie; Kiel, Casino Luxemburg and Tallinn Art Hall. 

Ida Börjel
Ida Börjel har i diktböckerna Skåneradio, Konsumentköplagen: juris lyrik och senast Ma genom konceptuella metoder skrivit fram en undersökning av människans språkliga, juridisk-ekonomiska och existentiella villkor. Har bland annat tilldelats Erik Lindegrenpriset och Albert Bonniers lyrikpris.

Ida Börjel arbetar för närvarande med forskningsprojektet Follow the Money vid Malmö Högskola, som studerar hur ekonomiska framgångssagor i samtida städer förhandlas, remedialiseras och cirkulerar.

Kasper Collin
dokumentär filmskapare. Har gjort filmen: My Name is Albert Ayler, 2005
Arthur Jafa
Arthur Jafa is a director, cinematographer, and producer. He is also a principal member, along with Malik Hassan Sayeed and Elisa Blount Moorhead, of TNEGTM, a film company. Jafa has directed numerous films: Slowly This (1995), Smile (1997), Black Millenium (1999), Tree (2000), Yellowjacket, (2001), Deshotten 1.0 (2009), Dreams Are Colder Than Death (2014), selected for 2014 New York Film Festival. His cinematography includes, Daughters of the Dust, Julie Dash, 1991 (which he co-produced and for which he won the cinematography award at the 1992 Sundance Film Festival); Seven Song for Malcolm X, John Akomfrah,1993; Crooklyn, Spike Lee, 1994; A Litany for Survival: Audre Lorde, Ada Gay Griffin and Michelle Parkerson, 1995; Conakry Kas, Manthia Diawara, 2005; Meet the Eye, Aida Ruilova, 2009; Shadows of Liberty, Jean-Philippe Tremblay, 2012; The Start Up, Salim Akil, 2014, In the Morning, Nefertite Nguvu, 2014 (co- producer and cinematography). His writing has been published in various publications such a Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, 1992, and Everything But the Burden, edited by Greg Tate, 2003
Yvonne Bezerra de Mello
Yvonne’s passion for teaching started when she began working with street children, when she was a teenager. In 1998, after assisting the surviving kids in the Candelária massacre in Rio de Janeiro, she founded an NGO called Projeto UERÊ, a model school that takes in over 400 street children per year. These children have constantly been exposed to trauma, violence and poverty, due to the social conditions in the slum where Projeto UERÊ is located. These conditions lead to learning disabilities, cognitive problems and blockages, ultimately leading to school evasion, continued poverty and social exclusion.

In response, she has developed a unique pedagogical methodology: UERÊ-MELLO Pedagogy (U-M Pedagogy), which through the use of special exercises aims to reconstruct pathways and strengthen brain connections that are often affected in children with violence-induced trauma. These exercises generate new ways of visualizing, performing tasks, expressing feelings and reducing stress to conquer learning and cognition blocks. Case studies show that the UERÊ-MELLO Pedagogy has been efficient in recuperating and bringing in these children as members of society.

Projeto UERÊ has received international recognition as a model school. The methodology has become widely recognized both by the governments in Rio de Janeiro and Recife and is being adopted by many public schools. The approach has also been selected as the model pedagogy by a partnership between Rio de Janeiro Municipality and UNESCO in 2013.

Lawen Mohtadi
Lawen Mohtadi is an author and documentary filmmaker. For over more than ten years she has researched and documented the life and work of author and activist Katarina Taikon. This research has, among other things, resulted in the book: Den dag jag blir fri, 2012, the film: Taikon, 2015 and the photo exhibition: Ett gott hem för alla, Moderna Museet, 2015–2016. During the last five years, she has travelled across Sweden lecturing on Katarina Taikon’s struggle for equal rights of the Roma population in the 1960s’, as well as in Berlin, Budapest and New York. Lawen Mohtadi is the publisher of subject oriented prose (non-fiction) at Natur & Kultur.
Khashayar Naderehvandi
Khashayar Naderehvandi är poet, litteraturkritiker och doktorand i konstnärlig gestaltning vid Akademin Valand, Göteborgs universitet. Han debuterade 2011 med diktsamlingen Om månen alls syntes och är i år aktuell med Allting glittrar och ingenting tar slut.
Stefano Harney & Fred Moten
Stefano Harney teaches at Singapore Management University. He is author with Fred Moten of The Undercommons: fugitive planning and black study as well as the article series ‘Michael Brown’ (boundary2) and ‘Mikey the Rebelator’ (Performance Research Journal). He is co-founder with Dr Emma Dowling of Immeasure, a pro bono organisational consultancy working with movement organisations, and with Tonika Sealy Thompson of Ground Provisions, a curatorial group. He is co-artistic director of the 2016 Bergen Assembly.

Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), The Feel Trio, The Little Edges and The Service Porch. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Liselott Mariett Olsson
Liselott Mariett Olsson is lecturer in pedagogy at Södertörns högskola and works with kindergarden as her area of research. Liselott is a member of the research group ASIP (Advanced Studies in Pedagogy), and member of the international network Reconceptualizing Early Childhood Education and its French equivalence Repenser l’éducation des jeunes enfants. Liselott is the author of the book Movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: Deleuze and Guattari in early childhood education and the editor of the book series Contesting Early Childhood at Routledge.
Kamau Patton
Kamau Amu Patton is an interdisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York. His work is an examination of history and culture through engagement with archives, documents, stories and sites. Patton’s projects are dialogic constructs and take form as expanded field conversations. Temporary architectures made solid through attention, his work is always becoming, continuing and undergoing transformation.
Sondra Perry
Sondra Perry is an interdisciplinary artist whose works in video, computer-based media, and performance explore black stuff and the digital abstraction of subjecthood. Perry has exhibited in group shows at MoMA/PS1, Seattle Art Museum, Brooklyn Museum, Studio Museum in Harlem, and has participated in residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture, and the Experimental Television Center. Perry holds an MFA from Columbia University, New York City’s 12th largest employer and the number one cause of gentrification in the neighbourhood of Harlem, New York, a BFA from Alfred University, and is currently based in Houston, Texas as part of the artist-in-residence program CORE at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.