season1

Katarina Becic has moved to Berlin over a year ago, after 11 years living in London following her passion for music, technology and communications. She managed to merge all of these in her job as Head of Social Channels at Ableton, leading software and hardware manufacturer for music production. Prior to this she worked at Google in London and San Francisco. During Conversas she will discuss the general lack of female representation in Music Production, a project she started at Ableton to understand why this is the case and develop programs that will support and attract women on their journey to become music producers.

Born in Milano, Italy, Louis De Belle is a Berlin based photographer who recently graduated from the Bauhaus University of Weimar. His project 'Besides Faith', a photographic journey around the scared-profane dichotomy set in the World Fair for Church Supplies, was published by The Washington Post, The Independent and WIRED among others. At Conversas, Louis will introduce his works, share insights into upcoming projects and discuss about photography and book-making.

Yorgos Sapountzis studied Fine Art at Berlin University of the Arts and University Conservation of Antiquities and Works of Art at Athens School of Fine Art. In the making of all of Sapountzis' works handcraft is a distinctive factor. Sapountzis applies material that he can work, install and transport himself. In Sapountzis’ works the technique the medium is often constitutive of the form: e.g. in the use of serveillance or web cameras for the recording of his performances at night, in the construction of projection screens for the videos, in the electronic music that accompanies his films (and performances).

Paz Ponce (Cádiz, 1985) is a Spanish independent curator based in Berlin. Here she develops experimental approaches to art production and art mediation with municipal institutions and independent centers for art and education. She will introduce #Philopoetics, a pedagogical methodology she developed in projects which stimulate in children a sense of poetry of the every day life, providing them with the technical tools to capture, collect, transform and present that reality. In these projects language is particularly conceived as a playful tool and at the same time, as a synesthetic approach towards life and knowledge.

Heiko Pfreundt is a conceptual artist whose work is focused on the field of space narratives and performative institutions. He studied in the field of art teaching and visual communication and is a graduate from the University of Arts Bremen. He worked at different project spaces, artist residency programmes and institutions in Berlin. Since 2011 he and other artists have been running a performative institutional script called Kreuzberg Pavillon which became the host for weekly shows on every saturday night with over 130 shows and 800 artists and is known as one of the most vivid ideas of contemporary project spaces in Berlin.

Mario Asef studied architecture and art in Argentina, Germany, and England. His work has been exhibited worldwide, most recently at Quartier 21 (Vienna), Kühlhaus Berin (Berlin), Junge Kunst e.V. (Wolfsburg, Germany), Kasa Galerie (Istanbul), Abandoned Gallery (Malmö, Sweden) SSamzie Space (Seoul), Nouvel Organon (Paris). Recent museum exhibitions include Hamburger Kunsthalle, Villa Merkel, Kunstlerhaus Bregenz (Austria), and the Akademie der Künste Berlin. His videos, photographs, sound installations, and interventions in public space deal with architectonic as well as sociopolitical questions and confront issues related to their spatial representability. With a detached sense of irony they seek to make legible the “immaterial, invisible” architecture of the social sphere.

Michelle Teran claims a hybrid practice that links political and social involvement to contemporary art actions. She critically engages media, connectivity and perception in the city, utilizing the language of surveillance, cartography and social networks.
She will talk about her project 'Strategies for reclaiming, La Obra Social' , a campaign initiated by the PAH, a right-to-housing movement operating throughout Spain. The "Obra Social" targets the hundreds of thousands of empty apartment buildings constructed during the Spanish housing bubble and currently unoccupied, using then to relocate individuals and families who had been evicted from their homes.

Achim Lengerer works on political questions of speech and language that he thematizes in his performances, radio plays or spatializes within installations and publications. Lengerer founded different collaborative projects such as freitagsküche in Frankfurt a. M. and voiceoverhead, with artist colleague Dani Gal. Since 2009 Lengerer runs the Berlin-based showroom and publishing house Scriptings. Artists, writers, graphic designers, performers as well as publishers are invited – all of which are working with the formats of script and text within their processes of production. Lengerer is currently writing a Ph.D. on the ‘rehearsal’ as a socio-political as well as an artistic format at Goldsmiths, University of London, UK.

Can the quest for (increasing) order and safety lead to mutual spying and even lead to an intolerant behaviour towards otherness? Such questions influence the work of Desiree Palmen who works with performance, photography, video and drawing. 2016 she started, as artist-in-residence in Museumquartier 21, the airport security project: Bagage Humain at the Vienna Airport. She will show images and talk about the continuation she is working on for the Berlin BER-Airport.

Ties Ten Bosch (’s-Hertogenbosch, NL, 1977) is a conceptual visual artist who lives and works in Berlin. He ran his own art-zin hOUTSKOOL, co-initiated the video platform Volksrekorders, ran an artists bar LAAT and is currently involved in the project called ‘If Paradise Is Half As Nice’. One of the themes that returns often in his work is the way art functions and the research on his own position within the art world and society as a whole. In this he shows a special interest in the relation with artist around him. Are they competition or colleagues? A question that is important for many artists and there are many different answers. Ten Bosch his projects have in common that they bring artists together, not only to show their end product in the form of an art work, but puts the proces of art making up front.

black flamongo's goal is to couple artists with appropriate funds from sponsors, foundations or companies supporting the realization of projects across commercial and non-commercial ventures.

berlin-artist.info is a website gathering informations for Berlins visual artist community. Information can be filtered by categories ( i.e. Ateliers, finanzielles → Förderungen) and keeps an extensive list of suppliers, from art transports to lawyers and tax counselors...
Our Newsletter reaches approx. 1.800 subscribers.

Stephan Mörsch lives and works as an artist in Berlin. He studied Art History / New German Literature / Comparative Religious Studies at the University in Bonn and finished his Masters in Spacial Strategie at the Art Academy Weissensee Berlin. Mörsch grew up in the area of Calais and followed the situation from close by. He will tell us more about the history and the current situation of the 'Calais Jungle’.
Link (a daily blog by Phillippe Wannesson about Calais)

Bienengarten Berlin is a community of experienced beekeepers in the city of Berlin. The Bienengarten exists since 2009 and shares their knowledge with schools, kitas and anybody who wants to know more or even try. For 1 kg honey one bee would have to fly 7 times around the earth. Hossein Kheir will share more fascinating facts about bees and beekeeping in Berlin during Conversas #5.

Irene Kotnik has co-founded ’The Curves’, a women’s Motorcycle Club in Berlin.
She is a passionate motorcyclist, adventure enthusiast and since 2 years racing vintage motorcycles. This year she accomplished to organise the first motorcycle festival for woman in Europe: PETROLETTES.
Her engagement and fearless spirit for women in a strongly man dominated industry goes far and beyond. Together with The Curves she organises mechanical workshops for women and pushes female oriented innovations and embraces women needs. The Club is known for networking events such as weekly city ride outs and adventure trips on 2 wheels across Europe.

In 2014 Irene co-founded Video Art Channel - video art in public spaces. She has extensive experience in film production, new media and moving images. Trained in visual communication and digital imaging and design, she worked for many years in New York as an art director in advertising.

Noel B. Weber has devoted his career to hand lettering and the craft of sign-making.
He was classically trained in Chicago at the Institute of Lettering & Design. While living in Denver in the 1970s he helped start an influential sign artist group called the Letterheads. Later, he moved to Idaho and founded Classic Design Studios – an award winning sign-shop in the heart of downtown Boise.
Noel continues to design for clients and share his expertise via creative workshops. Classic Design Studios continues to operate under the direction of his son. The Letterheads have grown into an international organization with more than 40,000 members.

Christina creates site-specific, sculptural objects and installations—proposals that investigate the transformative potential of everyday objects and routines. She works as solo artist, in temporary collaborations, and as permanent member of the Finnish-German artist collective YKON. As part of the Hybrid Publishing Group she explores new forms of knowledge production and dissemination with open source technologies.

Camara released her debut album in April 2016 on Parachute records. Canadian born to a large Portuguese family, she now resides in Berlin.
As producer and writer, the sound she has cultivated exists as a collage of the diverse musical influences that have defined each chapter of her storied life: bass guitar lines wrought with the new wave sound that marked her formative adolescence, drums that echo the electronic music she migrated to during her early adulthood in Toronto’s dance music scene, and an overriding melancholy that signals the conflicted feelings she has when considering the thin layer of dust that has collected upon her chair at the family dinner table since she made her move to Berlin.

Martin Skauen is a Norwegian artist living in Berlin and Oslo. Surrealism, tragedy and humor are main ingredients in his work, be it large scale figurative drawings, video performance or painting. At converses he will talk about his Instagram project and his daily posting of absurd art world commentary, erotic surrealism and other absurdities in modern culture.

Lorenzo Sandoval (Madrid, 1980) works in the crossing points of artistic practice, curatorial processes and spatial design. He holds a B.F.A and a Masters in Photography, Art and Technology from the UPV, (Universitat Politécnica de Valéncia). Sandoval has attended international residencies in Berlin, (GlogauAIR), Portugal (Vila Nova) and in Nairobi, (Kuona Trust Studio). The work of Lorenzo Sandoval can be seen as an atmospheric process where different elements affect each other. His practice is situated between art, curation, architecture, writing, and edition. He works combining tools from those different fields to generate platforms for encounters and discursive sites that work under the idea of spatial storytelling. The interweaving of objects, displays and programs of activities produce space to reflect upon the social potentialities of the art spheres and to rehearse possibilities of organization of information, perception and bodies.

Heiko reading aloud:
'How to exhibit a bullfrog: A bedtime story for zoo-men from 1973.'

Lisa Overmann (Münster, 1981) studied visual communication at ArtEZ – University of the Arts Enschede, NL and has worked in the field of design, communication and branding during the last decade. Her alter ego Basic Instinkt was born 4,5 years ago, when she discovered a peculiar advertisement inviting women for a 'fresh meat day'. Little did she know, the athletic full-contact sport Roller Derby would be her new passion/pain/provocation and introduced her to an extraordinary 8-wheeled-community.

Yuka Sagai is a vegan/vegetarian/macrobiotic cook from Hokkaido, Japan.
Her family back home has been making home made miso and passed it from generation to generation over 100years. She would like to give you some tips of making your own and using miso for your daily cooking.
Miso is a traditional Japanese seasoning paste by fermenting soybeans.
The most popular dishes is miso soup and it contains all essential amino acid etc.

Lavinia Xausa (Bassano del Grappa, 1992) is experiencing the city like a young teenager in love for the first time. After two months of residency by Belius Foundation in Moritzplatz, she will tell us the experiences, the researches and the encounters of a messy wayfarer in Berlin. Lavinia is a photographer based in Rotterdam currently researching at the Master program at AKV St. Joost. She is committed to combine her knowledge in Contemporary Art and Media Semiotic with a motley practice based on the concepts of Trans-media storytelling and Convergent culture. Through the use of texts, videos, essays, pictures and found footage, she aims to achieve the perfect perspective on her thoughts, stories and considerations. Currently engaged with the definition of convergence, she aims to involve the urban community into her projects, reconsidering the role of the artist within the community.

Li is going to talk about Realartstate, a group of artists, patrons, public institutions and companies acknowledging the problematic of gentrification and knowledge transmission, 40 km from Berlin.
Alin is a communications manager and a producer. She is also a multidisciplinary artist known as Li Alin. She has worked among others with: Société of Art and Technologies (Montréal), Recombinant Media Labs, (San Francisco), Parc d'Aventures Scientifiques (Mons), European Media Arts Festival (Osnabrück), Canon Art Lab (Tokyo), Musée Ludwig (Cologne), Inter Society for Electronic Arts (Paris), Festival du nouveau cinéma (Montréal), ZKM, Center for Arts and New Medias (Karlsruhe), and the Canadian Cultural Centre (Paris).

Alter's (1980) work emanates from a critical observation of western society and its contemporary modus operandi. With human history being conceived as nothing but the "register of the crimes follies and misfortunes of mankind" as Voltaire had put it, Alter attempts to act in as remote manner as possible from what he identifies as the prevailing
elements of that modus operandi which seems to elicit the same old follies only with ever
developing technology.
He is going to talk about his project 'FRANZ MÜLLER'S WIRE SPRING', a short story of Kurt Schwitters that he translated and adapted to a theater play.
The Body Mapping Lab project focuses on the design of workshops and residency programs based on the methodologies and notions of site specificity, performance as research and community practice.

Nathalie (born 1975 in São Paulo) is a performer, researcher, art educator and yoga teacher. She has been exploring various methods and forms of performance- and bodywork for over 20 years. Under her label atelier obra viva, she develops and produces collaborative, educational and research based projects with the focus on the relation between body and space, body and city. She completed a Master of Arts degree in Space Strategies - Exploratory Art in Public Contexts at the Kunsthochschule Weißensee Berlin. From 2011-15 she was co-organiser of the independent Platform Month of Performance Art Berlin and since 2016 she is part of the Study Circle Practicing Communities from the Nordic Summer University. She lives and works in Germany and Brazil.