Elvan Tekin (Izmir, 1994) is a dancer, choreographer and community organiser based in Berlin. In her practice, she navigates the nuances of identity and the body, reclaiming spaces and cultivating a deeper understanding of collective struggles. In 2023, her solo performance to be a fish in a raki bottle was presented at Tanztage Festival in Sophiensaele, Berlin. Moreover, Elvan is the founder and co-curator of the curatorial project emergentspaces that is centralising queer and trans* feminist perspectives in diaspora. In 2024, she completed a master in Choreography at the HZT – Berlin.
@badelv1
Saemi Jeong studied composition with Prof. Hanspeter Kyburz since 2018 and electroacoustic music with Prof. Wolfgang Heiniger at the Hanns Eisler School of Music Berlin from 2023. Her pieces have been premiered at several projects and festivals, including the M♀ZART Chamber Music Festival, Klangwerkstatt and Berliner Lautsprecherorchester. Since 2019, she has been organizing the concert event “Series of Combined Music” with her colleagues in Seoul, where young composers want to bring their works to a wider audience. She is also active as a member of the “Kollektiv Unruhe”, a Berlin-based group of musicians and composers.
vAL is an adopted identity of artist Corey Scott-Gilbert. vAL’s agenda is to further understand the mental state from which creation springs; concerned with sketches of possibility unconfined by genre, gender, demographic or any other limitation placed on the individual by society. The artist’s personal history of movement serves as a vehicle for interrogating their own breath, often collaging word-play and physical utterance which often serve as the foundation for their multidisciplinary playgrounds. vAL uses each creative process as an opportunity to analyze and rediscover truths that forge beyond current conformities to make space for alternative realities of otherness. vAL highlights the absurdities of an abysmal, limiting and globally omnipresent social condition, presenting curated realities where joys are not sought after but rather devoured as a means to restore a malnourished existence. The work is made to lay adjacent to the conundrums of our current world and reflect hopes that align with catharsis.
www.coreyscottgilbert.com/val
femBlack Performance Collective is a group of five people which emerges out of a collaboration with Magda Korsinskys dance performance PATTERNS in 2019. Mariama Sow, Isabel Kwarteng, Luana Madikera, Jasmin Eding and Virginnia Krämer work interdisciplinarily and negotiate amongst others, questions around care, memory, community and time from a black, queer perspective and experience in Germany. Inspired by afrofuturistic approaches, femBlack opens immersive, vulnerable spaces of resonance.
@femblackperformancecollective
Dorothy Carlos is an experimental cellist and electronic musician working in improvised performance and multi-channel sound in New York City and Chicago. Her work utilizes randomized electronics and extended techniques to explore fragility and imaginaries. Solo performances have been presented internationally by e-flux, Experimental Sound Studio Chicago, Big Ears Festival, default, Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) at UC Berkeley, Chicago Jazz String Summit, and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. She holds a Bachelor’s degree from New York University where she studied classical cello and anthropology on full scholarship, and an MFA in sound from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
www.improvisingwhileblack.com/
Monique Smith-McDowell is a British performer and choreographer that weaves together the creative languages of dance, creative audio description and music to highlight the perspectives of the marginalized in relation to socio-political issues. Monique has had the pleasure to collaborate with artists such as Michael Turinsky, Ursina Tossi, Jerron Herman, Zwoisy Mears-Clarke and Richard Alston to name a few.
@monsm_23
Naomi Sanfo is a visually impaired dance educator, performer, access dramaturge, and audio describer. She lives and works in Hamburg and researches, among other things, as a dancer with the dance company Chorosom, the diversity of audio description, and dance that can be experienced with all senses.
@nalefasa
Camille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology, and harm reduction. Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic-assisted therapy to arts education. Their debut book "Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community" was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books. Based in Amsterdam, Camille designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023), a master's program exploring socially engaged art-making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. They curate events and offer consultancy combining trauma-informed practice, experiential learning, and their studies in political science. Camille loves plants, music, and dancing.
www.camillesaparabarton.com/
I am a PoC, queer, migrant from Pakistan. My own personal healing journey has helped me process and deal with arriving in Europe as a young adult in hope of finding better life conditions. I have studied Social Work, Art Therapy and Compassionate Inquiry Psychological Counseling Approach. I bring lived experiences in navigating through poverty, patriarchy, multiple losses, forced sex-work, unstable home/family system and experiences of classism, racism, queerphobia and struggles that come along with migration. In my community work, I bring experiences in psychosocial support for bipoc, queers, migrant, refugees and FLINTA’s who face domestic and sexual violence.
Zem*u lives and works at the intersections of Blackness, queerness, health, politics and movement. With a degree in medicine, it has been of core importance to point out that the socio-political effects on our bodies, psyche and wellbeing are often overlooked and treated seriously. They co-founded the group Black In Medicine and are now active with Casa Kuà, a Health & Community Center for and by Trans*, Inter, Nonbinary People, especially those affected by racism. Holding the sensual and spirited body as indispensable, he feels that healing needs to center our bodies and the experiences it holds, first. Stemming from this, Zem*u trained in Zen Shiatsu as a Japanese healing tradition that works with touch and Meridian systems, currently able to offer Wellness Shiatsu. Furthermore they engage in dance and movement as a way to be and heal through community and connection, lastly through an intimate performance on skin and perception titled „No thick skin“ with Mandy Lan.
femBlack Performance Collective is a group of five people which emerges out of a collaboration with Magda Korsinskys dance performance PATTERNS in 2019. Mariama Sow, Isabel Kwarteng, Luana Madikera, Jasmin Eding and Virginnia Krämer work interdisciplinarily and negotiate amongst others, questions around care, memory, community and time from a black, queer perspective and experience in Germany. Inspired by afrofuturistic approaches, femBlack opens immersive, vulnerable spaces of resonance.
@femblackperformancecollective
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
www.improvisingwhileblack.com/
mayfield brooks improvises while black and is based in Lenapehoking, the unceded land of the Lenape people, also known as New York City. brooks is a movement-based performance artist, vocalist, urban farmer, writer, and wanderer. brooks teaches and performs practices that arise from Improvising While Black (IWB), their interdisciplinary dance methodology which explores the decomposed matter of Black life and engages in dance improvisation, disorientation, dissent, and ancestral healing.
www.improvisingwhileblack.com/
Makisig Akin (they/them) and Anya Cloud (she/they) love each other. They have been collaborating and imagining together for 12 years. As queer dance artists/activists/educators their work is deeply rooted in the politics of the body and intersectional identity, indebtedness to ancestors and descendants, love, inventing new strategies for being intimately together, and cultivating radical aliveness. Makisig is originally from the Phillipines and Anya is originally from Alaska. They co-direct The Love Makers Company and are currently based between Berlin and Colorado. Together, they created two choreographic works titled We Are (nothing) Everything and Long & Wild, which both premiered in Berlin in 2023. We Are (nothing) Everything is now touring internationally. They regularly co-teach together including at Tanzfabrik Berlin Schule, ImPulsTanz, BeingTouch, Wainsgate Dances, Seattle Festival of Dance Improvisation, and The Field Center among others.
@makisigakin @anya.cloud
Isabelle Dikumbi is a black Yoga Teacher living in Berlin. She researches in healing and health, learning traditional chinese medicine, plant medicine, massage and is a singer and musician exploring the healing power of sound and music. Her mission is to remind us that resources of healing and health are already plenty inside of us, available to all, and guides us to reclaim the power of our own bodies and well being. She teaches regular Vinyasa Yoga classes, Workshops around the power of the voice, Restorative Yoga and practices of Rest in Berlin. She also Co-Created the BIPoC Yoga Retreat “Nourish your Soul“ in Germany and will host the first “Yoga and Rest Retreat“ for BIPoC this year in 2024.
Djibril Sall is a queer Senegalese choreographer and writer based in Berlin, Germany. Born in Dakar, he grew up working class in the Deep South of the United States of America and was educated at the “elite” Wesleyan University where he graduated with a degree in dance before immigrating to Europe. Djibril describes himself in these terms to illustrate the range of marginalization and privilege he has as someone who went from the peripheries of the Global South to someone who can now move somewhat unencumbered within the confines of the Global North. Djibril's work is situated at the intersection of migration and belonging, where he questions the reasons that force people to leave. This questioning includes his migration background and his insights into (non-)belonging and being in-between. The most important question Djibril asks himself and his audience is: “How can we use our traumas as a starting point to explore practices of pleasure, letting go and disclosure, and open-hearted connection?”
@liminal.rehab
ShahrZad is a BIPoC, Trans, non-binary multidisciplinary artist based in Berlin. With a profound belief in the power of cultural research and practice, healing work, music, body movement and cooking, ShahrZad utilizes these mediums as a means to challenge social and political issues. Their work is centered around defending individual rights and advocating for the rights of the community in addressing these crucial matters.
@shahrzad.sdredCamille Sapara Barton is a writer, artist, and somatic practitioner, dedicated to creating networks of care and livable futures. Rooted in Black Feminism, ecology, and harm reduction. Camille uses creativity, alongside embodied practices, to create culture change in fields ranging from psychedelic-assisted therapy to arts education. Their debut book "Tending Grief: Embodied Rituals for Holding Our Sorrow and Growing Cultures of Care in Community" was published in April 2024 by North Atlantic Books. Based in Amsterdam, Camille designed and directed Ecologies of Transformation (2021 - 2023), a master's program exploring socially engaged art-making with a focus on creating change through the body into the world. They curate events and offer consultancy combining trauma-informed practice, experiential learning, and their studies in political science. Camille loves plants, music, and dancing.
www.camillesaparabarton.com/I am a PoC, queer, migrant from Pakistan. My own personal healing journey has helped me process and deal with arriving in Europe as a young adult in hope of finding better life conditions. I have studied Social Work, Art Therapy and Compassionate Inquiry Psychological Counseling Approach. I bring lived experiences in navigating through poverty, patriarchy, multiple losses, forced sex-work, unstable home/family system and experiences of classism, racism, queerphobia and struggles that come along with migration. In my community work, I bring experiences in psychosocial support for bipoc, queers, migrant, refugees and FLINTA’s who face domestic and sexual violence.
Zem*u lives and works at the intersections of Blackness, queerness, health, politics and movement. With a degree in medicine, it has been of core importance to point out that the socio-political effects on our bodies, psyche and wellbeing are often overlooked and treated seriously. They co-founded the group Black In Medicine and are now active with Casa Kuà, a Health & Community Center for and by Trans*, Inter, Nonbinary People, especially those affected by racism. Holding the sensual and spirited body as indispensable, he feels that healing needs to center our bodies and the experiences it holds, first. Stemming from this, Zem*u trained in Zen Shiatsu as a Japanese healing tradition that works with touch and Meridian systems, currently able to offer Wellness Shiatsu. Furthermore they engage in dance and movement as a way to be and heal through community and connection, lastly through an intimate performance on skin and perception titled „No thick skin“ with Mandy Lan.
emergentspaces is a curatorial project that centers queer and trans*feminist perspectives in the diaspora. It stands for organised actions aimed at creating spaces of hope at the intersection of art, solidarity and activism with an inter-and trans-disciplinary approach. It gathers knowledge from the distinctive backgrounds of diasporic communities to strengthen networks of care and create alternative spaces that are constantly emerging in relation to ever-changing socio-political issues. emergentspaces focuses specifically on diasporic artists, striving to increase their visibility within the German context with meaningful contributions by basing its programming on co-creation and collaboration, inviting local actors with a different theme for each edition.
Berlin-based Brazilian DJ, host, curator and graphic artist Rafush claims their space in the scene, advocating for diversity and awareness. They co-founded the afro-futuristic collective Yoko Yoko, and the music collective “ouch,” promoting inclusivity. Rafush co-hosts shows on Cashmere Radio and co-curates the Karl Kutter Stage at Fusion Festival. With a passion for pushing boundaries, Rafush is a driving force in Berlin's music and cultural scene.
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