Jesko Fezer, architect, based in Berlin, is co-manager of the bookstore “Pro qm” and co-editor of the political architecture magazine AnArchitektur that initiated the “Camp for Oppositional Architecture”. Having taught at various universities, he was most recently visiting professor for Urban Research in the master’s degree course at the Academy of Fine Arts in Nuremberg. In his artistic ventures with art historian Axel John Wieder, he works on questions of public space, institutions and urban environments – including work for the 3rd Berlin Biennale of contemporary art, the Istanbul Biennale of 2005 and in 2007 for the European Kunsthalle. As an architect in the planning cooperative “ifau und Jesko Fezer”, he realized buildings and redesigns for art institutions in Munich, Stuttgart, Berlin, Utrecht and Graz. His most recent publications are Fezer and a42.org, Planungsmethodik gestern, 2008; Fezer and Heyden, Hier entsteht. Strategien partizipativer Architektur und räumlicher Aneignung (Berlin: B_books Verlag, 2002); Fezer and Schmitz, Lucius Burckhardt: Wer plant die Planung? (Berlin: Martin Schmitz Verlag, 2004); Fezer and Reichard and Wieder, Martin Pawley’s Garbage Housing (Berlin: 2004). His most recent publications are Fezer/a42.org: “Planungsmethodik gestern”, Fezer/Heyden: “Hier entsteht. Strategien partizipativer Architektur und räumlicher Aneignung”, Fezer/Schmitz: “Lucius Burckhardt: Wer plant die Planung?” and Fezer/Reichard/Wieder: “Martin Pawley’s Garbage Housing.”
Ute Meta Bauer (b. Stuttgart, Germany) is the Director of the Visual Arts Program and an Associate Professor in the Department of Architecture at M.I.T. Bauer is best known for her work as an international curator focusing on transdisciplinary formats involving art, architecture, film and sound linked to feminist and socio-political discourses. In 2008, she was the guest director of SITAC VI (Simposio Internacional de Teoría sobre Arte Contemporáneo) at the Centro Cultural Universitario Tlatelolco in Mexico City. “Lo que nos queda / What’s left…, what remains?” 40 years after the ‘68 movements addressed the ongoing need for an engaged critical cultural practice. In 2005 she contributed a Mobile_Transborder Archive, investigating transborder issues and the notion of the archive as a scenario project for inSite 05 San Diego (USA)/Tijuana (MEX) commissioned by artistic director Osvaldo Sanchez. Bauer was the artistic director of the 3rd berlin biennial for contemporary art (2004) and served as a co-curator of Documenta11 (1999-2002) on the team of Artistic Director Okwui Enwezor. In 2001, Bauer curated First Story - Women Building/New Narratives for the 21st Century for the European Cultural Capital Porto 2001 and Architectures of Discourse, Fundació Antoni Tàpies in Barcelona. She was the founding editor of the art periodicals META 1 - 4 (Stuttgart 1992-94), case (Barcelona 2001, Porto 2002) and publisher of Verksted # 1 - 6 (Oslo 2003-2006).
Yvonne P. Doderer, currently a visiting professor in the MIT Visual Arts program, is an architect, urban researcher and a Professor of Gender in Media and Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Duesseldorf, Germany. Her fields of research focus on the linkage of urban/spatial theories, gender studies and contemporary art. As artistic and cultural producer she has participated in various international art exhibitions and as author she contributed widely to scientific publications, exhibition catalogs and is a regular contributor of the Austrian cultural magazine springerin. Her publications include Doing Beyond Gender (Muenster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2008); Urbane Praktiken (Muenster: Monsenstein & Vannerdat, 2003).
Peter Marcuse, a planner and lawyer, is Professor Emeritus of Urban Planning at Columbia University in New York City. He has a Ph.D in planning from the University of California at Berkeley, was Professor of Urban Planning at UCLA, President of the Los Angeles Planning Commission and member of Community Board 9M in New York City. His fields of research include city planning, housing, the use of public space, the right to the city, social justice in the city, globalization, and urban history, with a focus on New York City. He has taught in both West and East Germany, Australia, the Union of South Africa, Canada, Austria, and Brazil, and written extensively in both professional journalists and the popular press. His current projects include a historically-grounded political history of planning and the attempt to make urban theory useful to the U.S. Right to the City Alliance. His most recent books include Peter Marcuse and Ronald van Kempen, Globalizing Cities: A New Spatial Order? (Boston: Blackwell, 1999) and Of States and Cities: The Partitioning of Urban Space (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
Pia Maria Ahlbäck is a lecturer and researcher in Comparative Literature at Åbo Akademi University in Finland, and a critic and writer. Her main research interests are postcolonial studies, visual studies, eco-criticism, utopias/dystopias, relationship between historiography and literary writing, and science studies. Publications include Energy, Heterotopia, Dystopia. George Orwell, Michel Foucault and the Twentieth Century Environmental Imagination (Åbo: Åbo Akademis Förlag, 2001).
Shuddabrata Sengupta is an artist, writer and member of the Raqs Media Collective, co-initiator of the Sarai Program at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies in Delhi, India. Most recently, Raqs Media Collective was a co-curator of Manifesta 7 at Ex Alumnix, Bolzano, Italy and the collective’s work in contemporary art has been exhibited at international art venues most prominently at Documenta 11, Kassel, the 51, Venice Biennale and art biennals in Istanbul, Liverpool, Guangxhou, Taipei and Sydney, among other international venues. Sengupta works at the Sarai Media Lab and is member of an editor of the Sarai Reader Series. Sengupta lives and works in Delhi, India.
Philippe Rekacewicz is a geographer, cartographer and journalist. For twenty years he has worked regularly for Le Monde diplomatique, an international French magazine published in 70 international editions in 26 languages. Since 1999 he has participated in diverse artistic projects in Germany, Spain, Norway and France including Fareed Armaly’s project From/To at the Witte de With, Rotterdam and at Documenta11. In 2004 he was the editor of the Atlas of Globalization (Paris: Le Monde Diplomatique, 2003), which was included in the 3rd Berlin Biennale of contemporary art. From 1996 to 2006, he was the head of the environmental program (PNUE/GRID-Arendal) in the Department of Cartography of United Nations in Norway. Currently he is a consultant for an innovative climate change program developed at the World Bank. Rekacewicz is the co-director the documentary On the Map 52 produced by Sons et Lumières and TV5 (French International Broadcast). Recent exhibitions include “Frontières, migrants et réfugiés” c(art)ographic exhibit, sketches, March 2008. His main interest is the relationships between cartography, art, science and politics. He focuses particularly on the role of art in the production of maps and how this influences the political use of maps as a tool for propaganda.
Regina Bittner is a cultural scientist and art historian. She is the coordinator of the Bauhaus Kolleg at the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation in Germany and a curator of exhibitions focusing on cultural history and urbanism. She participated in international conferences and workshops and organized various international colloquiums. Her work and research focuses on the study of Eastern European transformations, ethnography, the culture of labor, the history of urban entertainment, and experience-society in East Germany. She has published widely on urban transformation in Eastern Europe, urban culture in post-industrial cities and the cultural history of the modern era. She is editor of Urbane Paradiese (Frankfurt on the Main: Stiftung Bauhaus Dessau, 2001) and Die Stadt als Event (Frankfurt on the Main: Campus, 2002).
Stefano Boeri is a Milan-based architect and founder of the research agency Multiplicity participating regular in architecture, urbanism and art projects. His professional studio, Boeri Studio is involved in several architectural projects and urban transformations. Since September 2007, Stefano Boeri has been the Editor-in-Chief of the international magazine Abitare. From 2004 to 2007 he was Editor-in-Chief of Domus magazine. He teaches urban design at the Milan Polytechnic and is a visiting professor at the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, Cambridge.
Bartolomeo Pietromarchi is an art critic and curator, recently being appointed as curator for MAXXI, the Italian National Contemporary Art Museum in Rome. From 2001 to 2007 he served as the director of the Adriano Olivetti Foundation in Rome. He has curated many exhibitions and edited the catalogs Alfredo Jaar - It Is Difficult and Lucy+Jorge Orta – Antarctica (Milano: Hangar Bicocca, 2008), The Hot Season. Italian Art Now (Oslo: Stenersen Museum, 2008), Not Afraid of the Dark - Emergenze (Milano: Hangar Bicocca, 2007). He initiated the tri-annual project Trans:it. Moving Culture through Europe and the workshop Prototipi with Stefano Chiodi. He is editor of The (Un)Common Place. Art, Public Space and Urban Aesthetics in Europe (Barcelona: ACTAR, 2005), together with M. De Luca, F. Gennari Santori, M. Trimarch of Creazione Contemporanea Arte (Roma: Luca Sossella Editore, 2004.)
Lukas Feireiss is a teacher, writer and curator deeply involved in the discussion and mediation of architecture, art and media beyond its disciplinary boundaries. He attained his graduate education in Religious Studies, Ethnology and Philosophy. In his recent book Architecture of Change. Sustainability and Humanity in the Built Environment (Gestalten, 2008), he addresses the issue of sustainability by presenting architectural projects from around the globe that combine creativity, scientific knowledge, technical innovation, social engagement and a strong sense of responsibility to address environmental challenges. Other recent books are Strike a Pose! Eccentric Architecture and Spectacular Spaces (Gestalten, 2008), Spacecraft. Fleeting Architecture and Hideouts (Gestalten, 2007) and Game Set and Match II. On Computer Games, Advanced Geometries and Digital Technologies (Episode, 2006).
AbdouMaliq Simone is an urbanist in the broad sense that his work focuses on various communities, powers, cultural expressions, governance and planning discourses, spaces and times in cities across the world. Simone is presently Professor of Sociology at Goldsmiths College, University of London. Key publications include In Whose Image? Political Islam and Urban Practices in Sudan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), For the City Yet to Come: Changing Urban Life in Four African Cities (Durham: Duke University Press, 2004) and Movements at the Crossroads: Urbanization from the Peripheries (Forthcoming: Routledge, 2009). In 2002 he gave a keynote lecture at Platform4_Documenta11 in Lagos, Nigeria.
Nicholas Makris, Professor of Mechanical and Ocean Engineering, is Director of the Laboratory for Undersea Remote Sensing at MIT. His research interests include ocean exploration, undersea remote sensing of marine life and geophysical phenomena, census of marine life, ocean acoustic hurricane classification, Europa ice sheet fracture mechanics and seismics, wave propagation and scattering theory in remote sensing through random media and waveguides, statistical estimation and information theory in sensing, linear and nonlinear acoustics and seismics.
Trained as a fashion designer and working as an artist since the beginning of the 90’s, Lucy Orta has realized what she calls “architectures with soul”. Her objects respond in a critical and constructive gaze on the most sensitive areas of society, evoking the need for change, poetically prefiguring reality and suggesting alternative life styles. Her early works ‘Refuge Wear’ (1992-1998) and ‘Body Architecture’ (1994-1998) are tents that become overcoats, backpacks that become sleeping bags or prototype structures that are light and autonomous for emergency ’situations’. Orta created Nexus Architecture (1994-2002) in which a variable number of people wear suits connected to each other shaping modular and collective structures that put into forms the concept of ‘Social Link’. She has produced numerous interventions and actions putting on stage crucial themes of our contemporary world: the community and the social exclusion, dwelling, mobility, sustainable development, recycling. In parallel to and feeding into her practice Orta holds the first Rootstein Hopkins Chair of Fashion at the London College of Fashion, University of the Arts, London. In 2002 she founded the Master in Industrial Design ‘Man and Humanity’ at the Design Academy in Eindhoven, the Netherlands to stimulate socially driven and sustainable design solutions in the form of alternative systems and products.
Armin Linke, currently based in Milano and Berlin, is a photographer and filmmaker. He is working on an ongoing archive about human activity and the most varied natural and man-made landscapes. He documents scenes where the boundary between fiction and non-fiction blurs or becomes invisible. His publications include Transient (Milano: Skira, 2003), Breaking News (Milan: a+mbookstore edizioni, 2002) and Side Effects (Silvana Editoriale, Milan 2002). He had numerous solo exhibitions at venues including the Galleria Massimo De Carlo, Milano, Storefront in New York, the Vitamin Creative Space in Guangzhou and has participated in joint exhibitions including La Dolce Crisi, Villa Manin, Codroipo, Udine, the Second Guangzhou Triennial, Guangzhou, China, 6X Torino, GAM Galleria D’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Torino and InSite_05. Art Practices in the Public Domain Tijuana San Diego.
Ingrid Book and Carina Hedén share a collective artistic practice for more than a decade. Their project Military Landscapes has been selected by the Bergen Kunsthall to be included in the annual exhibition Bergen Festival in 2008. Their solo exhibition Stories for Empty Shop Windows was included in the Salzburger Kunstverein (Austria, 2007.) In 2004, the artist duo presented News from the Field/Ocampo as the official Norwegian Representation at the 26th Bienal de Sao Paulo and participated in the 3rd Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art (Berlin, 2004). In 2003, the artist duo presented Temporary Utopias, a large scale exhibition at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, Norway. Book and Héden’s publisher is the Hong Kong Press.
Nikolaus Hirsch is a Frankfurt-based architect. He has held academic positions at the Architectural Association in London, at the Institute of Applied Theater Studies at Giessen University and at UPenn in Philadelphia. His projects include the award-winning Dresden Synagogue, Hinzert Document Center, the European Kunsthalle in Cologne, unitednationsplaza in Berlin and currently the Cybermohalla Hub in Delhi.