SEASON TWO

Eylül Aslan is born and raised in Istanbul, Turkey, where she went on to study French Language and Literature at Istanbul University, the photography artist Eylül Aslan eventually moved to Berlin, Germany where she continues to live and work. She focuses on the issues of womanhood. Her debut book Trauerweide is published by Editions du LIC in 2014 .
In 2015 she published the Zine Dear Slut by Edition Bessard / Paris. Her first solo photography exhibition “Herstory” took place at Alan Galeri in Istanbul, Turkey in 2015.
During Conversas Aslan will be sharing her project "Trompe L'Oeil" which is going to be published as a book. The project is about the perception of beauty, how arbitrary beauty/ugliness can be and how we could be easily tricked by different photographs that we see on social media, where people create identities for themselves.

Eylül Aslan

Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell

Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell is a Berlin based artist with a BFA from The Art Institute of Boston and an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and was born in Newark, NJ. In 2009, Ruglio-Misurell received a Fulbright Fellowship to Berlin. Along with Carrick Bell, Ruglio-Misurell co-runs HORSEANDPONY Fine Arts in Berlin. HPFA is an artist-run project space an with the aim of providing artists, curators, and other project spaces the opportunity to extend or act outside of their existing practices. Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell dismantles found objects and reassembles materials into informally arranged compositions. Through well organized messes, Ruglio-Misurell plays with oppositions such as strength and fragility while using both time consuming processes and speedy assemblages.

Jonny Tiernan is a DJ, Publishier and Editor & Chief of LOLA Mag. LOLA is an English-language cultural magazine that brings the spirit of Berlin to the page and web through in-depth interviews, features, exciting recommendations and news. Exploring music, art, cinema, theatre, and much more, LOLA tells the stories of Berlin’s most fascinating people, events, and places, helping its readers to discover the best of the city. Tiernan will share with us the importance of print and how print can survive within the new media.





The Münsterländer Borsdorfer Jörg Kösters thrives well on sandy to loamy soils and after several years of mouth mourning in the Czech Republic he is now roated in the edible Leipzig. Trained in geography and communication, he can not communicate with dolphins until today, but thanks to a stable network connection and pronounced fructophilia, he is useful for the local mundraub-communities. Do you like trips and wonder what edibles grow in your very surrounding? Mundraub community platform aims at discovering fruits, berries and herbs and shares tools conceiving landscape as possibility space for all senses. Taking a closer look at plant life through the practice of joint harvest, processing and eating.





Pablo Martinez Ruiz will share with us his knowledge and experiences about wine. Wine can be many things, a pleasure, a career, history, a way of life... But above all its something that is alive and makes us feel. During the last decades most of the wine lost its authencity trying to please everyone and a growing market. Modern techniques and chemicals started to design wine in a more artificial way in order to make it "perfect". But, what is perfection? Who is perfect in this world? Natural wine has come, naked, without make up, imperfect and wild to bring new experiences to our lives. Be curious, be adventurous, come and discover it.

Jonny Tiernan

Jörg Kösters

Pablo Martinez Ruiz

Jonny Tiernan is a DJ, Publishier and Editor & Chief of LOLA Mag. LOLA is an English-language cultural magazine that brings the spirit of Berlin to the page and web through in-depth interviews, features, exciting recommendations and news. Exploring music, art, cinema, theatre, and much more, LOLA tells the stories of Berlin’s most fascinating people, events, and places, helping its readers to discover the best of the city. Tiernan will share with us the importance of print and how print can survive within the new media.





The Münsterländer Borsdorfer Jörg Kösters thrives well on sandy to loamy soils and after several years of mouth mourning in the Czech Republic he is now roated in the edible Leipzig. Trained in geography and communication, he can not communicate with dolphins until today, but thanks to a stable network connection and pronounced fructophilia, he is useful for the local mundraub-communities. Do you like trips and wonder what edibles grow in your very surrounding? Mundraub community platform aims at discovering fruits, berries and herbs and shares tools conceiving landscape as possibility space for all senses. Taking a closer look at plant life through the practice of joint harvest, processing and eating.





Pablo Martinez Ruiz will share with us his knowledge and experiences about wine. Wine can be many things, a pleasure, a career, history, a way of life... But above all its something that is alive and makes us feel. During the last decades most of the wine lost its authencity trying to please everyone and a growing market. Modern techniques and chemicals started to design wine in a more artificial way in order to make it "perfect". But, what is perfection? Who is perfect in this world? Natural wine has come, naked, without make up, imperfect and wild to bring new experiences to our lives. Be curious, be adventurous, come and discover it.

Gráinne Toomey has a background in linguistics and translation and while birdwatching was a hobby of hers growing up in rural Ireland, for a period of many years other interests took hold and this passion waned. A re-interest in "birding" was ignited a few years ago and was propelled to a further level upon moving to Berlin, where there is a rich and varied spectrum of avian life. For this Conversas she discusses how there are surprises around every corner when it comes to birdwatching here, how watching birds can help city inhabitants connect to nature and why it’s not even necessary to own binoculars to get out and do it.




Maaike is a Dutch academic working on the interplay between law and morality in authoritarian Tunisia. Right before the fall of the Tunisian dictatorship in 2011, Maaike was 'embedded' in a Tunisian court during one and a half years. She studied how judges navigated the progressive, modernist and secularist law to bring it in conformity with the more conservative norms living in society. She focuses on issues pertaining to gender and sexuality. Maaike worked at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris and at Harvard University in the US.




Peter Wagner, musician, author and social scientist works since his youth on a concept which he called „reality density“. He developed a social empirical method on the basis of social game theory which does basically two things: First, its the first attempt to put the claim of constructivists ("reality is constructed socially") onto an empirical foundation. Second, it leads to a new perspective on social life and concerns in its consequence lots of different areas of every day life. In the last few years construct reality density was called „promising theory“, „world formula“, „more art than science“, "stammtisch philosophy" and „just another attempt to ride on the wave of gamification“. Because Peter isn’t sure what it is anymore he will be accompanied by visual artist and graphic designer Marius Förster who developed the visual concept of Wagners work.

Gráinne Toomey

Maaike Voorhoeve

Peter Wagner

Joseph Craig is in Berlin for his exhibition "Home is Where the Hearth is" at Centrum. Opening on 8 April, this exhibition examines the ways which fireplaces cinch us to dated traditions and histories, obscure outliers, and prevent us from moving forward. Within Joseph’s installation, a contemporary fairy tale will unfold, through which he inserts himself into the dormant passages that anchor us to festive traditions, cinematic illusions and our great aunt's ashes. These cavities no longer scorn at party pashes or laddered fishnets, they become an entrance to something higher.




Jasmijn Visser is a Dutch artist who lives in Utrecht and Berlin, and works on the intersection of art, writing, research and design. She has a deeply rooted fascination with the structural foundation of contemporary society and geopolitical conflicts. In large scale projects, Visser uncovers mechanisms and perceptions that are shaped by man-made structures. During Visser’s recent three months residency period at Delfina Foundation, she studied cartography, demography, patterns of migration and urbanisation. Visser recently finalised her work on the monumental Conflict Atlas, geopolitics and contingencies on the Malvinas- Falklands archipelago, in collaboration with design collective Metahaven.




Max Schreier runs Aunt Linda with his partner Anita Iannacchione. He also works at Artsy. The focus of Aunt Linda is on the familial sense of having a gallery in an apartment. Their idea is to invite people into their home. Previous shows in their apartment include works of Leah Dixon, Mathias Euwer, Michael Burditt Norton, Michael Rocco Ruglio-Misurell and Julia Colavita.

Joseph Craig

Jasmijn Visser

Max Schreier

Milos Trakilovic (1989 NL) is an independent artist and researcher. He holds a MFA from the Berlin University of Arts where he graduated in the New Media department. His work engages with increasing processes of digitization on-screen, off-screen and in between focusing on the automation of vision and language following the digital turnover. His practice is underlined by a strong research element and is most often situated within digital media taking on forms of video, performance, texts and lectures. He is going to talk about the challenges facing the production, circulation and reception of art in todays information age addressing the way in which the digital image has redefined our visual culture.




Chan will introduce Minbuk Village, which will be carried out this summer in Migrant-Propaganda Village in DMZ. The focus lays on the relations between the territory and the immigrant that settles down, the materialization of mind during the process of settlement. There are symptoms Chan actually finds and faces in Minbuk Village as a space of hetero-topia where myths and reality exist together.
Chan Sook Choi graduated with a double-major in Visual Communication (Diplom), Experimental Media Arts (Master) and a Meisterschüler degree in Media Art with Prof. Maria Vedder from the University of Arts Berlin.
Her works are exhibited internationally including the National Theater in Korea, the Queens Museum in New York City and the Sacheon Galaxy Contemporary.
Since 2015, She is adjunct professor of Art&Technology at the Hanyang University.




The Albanian born artist Majla Zeneli studied Graphics at the Academy of Fine Arts in Wroclaw, Poland completing her education with postgraduate studies in Burg Giebichenstein, the University of Art and Design in Halle. She is the initiator and director of Manière Noire, an art space founded in 2011 in Moabit. Whilst very active in the métier of prints and editions Zeneli pursued also literary interests that gradually influenced and altered the program of the space. Since late 2014 Manière Noire has been host of an intriguing series of exhibitions entitled "Appropriating Language", which deal with the occurrence of images seen inseparably from words, twined together visually and substantially, at the same time impacted by social, political and aesthetic issues.

Milos Trakilovic

Chan Sook Choi

Majla Zeneli

Florian Baron is a filmmaker who lives and works in Berlin. In his project STRESS, young veterans who were serving in Afghanistan or Iraq tell stories of their experiences in war and of readjusting to civilian life back home. Florian will talk about his visual approach to explore the complex nature of trauma.





Food structures our time and activities, conveys relationships and identities and has far-reaching influences on many parts of private and public life. Writing on food fills many bookshelves and magazine columns – but is there too much food in food writing nowadays? In this talk, Anke discusses her experience with reading and writing about food, how food writing can draw something universal out of everyday experiences, and what authors and texts ought not to be missed.
Anke has managed restaurants and bars in Dublin and headed public relations for Slow Food Germany in Berlin for several years. She holds an MA in Food Studies and Communication, a degree in English Literature and an Advanced Certificate in Wine and Spirits, and she will begin a research PhD on Humour in Food Writing in the autumn of 2017. Her writing on food, society and sustainability has been published in zitty, Slow Food Magazin, and Politico.

Anke Klitzing

Florian Baron

Our life consists of a constant saying good-bye, continually letting go, an everlasting farewell. This means a conscious approach, allowing and expressing all of the feelings and thoughts associated with the loss. The “Trauercafe (Mourning-Cafe)” offers a protected framework in which we can experience and develop this necessary path in a compassionate, solidarity company. It provides an open encounter, the possibility for mourning -accompanied by an experienced mourning companion- to be able to talk and exchange.
Anneliese Basten worked as an educator in a Kindergarten for 12 years while graduating from the university in social pedagogy. She worked 13 years as a pedagog in outpatient living assistance (Wittekindshof Gronau). Anneliese is a professionally trained Mourning-Companion and brought to life the 'Trauercafe' 15 years ago. She has a 2 year experience in spiritual welfare in emergency situations (Kreisdekanat Borken), continues actively as a pensioner to care for children and elderly and is the mother of three grown up children.




Uli Westphal is a visual artist. His works deal with the way humans perceive, depict and transform the natural world. He is especially interested in how misconceptions and ideologies shape our view of nature. In recent years he has focused on the portrayal and transformation of nature through the food industries. He will discuss how misinformation about plants and animals spread throughout history, from the dark ages up to the age of post-enlightenment, and what elephants, carrots and candies have in common, or not.




Svetlana Prigoditch will talk about the production of her collection of wearable art objects, where she connects different mediums such as drawing, collage, performance and 3d techniques.
The works are inspired by organic shapes from nature, the female body and sensual experiences. Svetlana was born and has lived in Belarussia. In 2005 she graduated in media art at ARTEZ Academie in Enschede (NL). Two years later she got her diploma at WdKa Rotterdam as an art teacher. In 2016 after a couple of months studying at premaster Sint Lucas Antwerp, she discovered her new passion.

Anneliese Basten

Uli Westphal

Svetlana Prigoditch

How can entheogenic master plants support us in living our modern lifestyle?
In which context can medicinal plants be most helpful to us?
Reflections and dialog about the necessity of Phytotherapy.




Anne Looss grew up in Berlin. She studied economics and works as a writer und journalist since 1998, her favourite topics: future, new thinking and cacao. She does energy work since 2003. Since 2010 she is drinking cacao, loving it for its various benefits. She considers it to be an energy turbo for body, mind and spirit. Anne will share with us the history and the various benefits of this ancient, long forgotten medicine plant. The latin name of the plant, Theobroma cacao actually means “Food of the Gods” it helps us to connect on a deeper level with our own inherent power.




Photographer Jan Rickers and artist Per Schumann realized "1000 in Berlin" within 1 year. In the project, „1000 in Berlin“ 1000 portraits of people living in Berlin resp. being connected to Berlin are shown in their colorful, multicultural splendor. From old to young, from the hipster to the stealworker at the flee market, from the homeless man to the 80 year old Lady in Kreuzberg, everyone is represented in this project. The book can be regarded as a declaration of love for humans in their colorful variety and serves as a multi-facetted portrait of our time.

Fabian Geimer-Lorusso

Anne Looss

Jan Rickers / Per Schumann

Ben Wealer is a research associate at the TU Berlin and a Heinrich-Böll-Foundation scholar. After graduating as an industrial engineer, he is currently doing his PhD in nuclear power economics, where he specializes on the technological and financial aspects of decommissioning of nuclear reactors and the final storage of radioactive waste.




Alejandro Arretureta-Schröder is a car enthusiast, and photographer based in Berlin. Since he was a child, he always had a passion for cars. Now he found a way to share this love with a project called Carphiles. During Conversas he will share his passion and vision for classic cars and how they became part of his life and the project Carphiles.

Ben Wealer

Alejandro Arretureta-Schröder

Alongside and intertwined with her painting practice, Tinka Bechert works with scientific institutions. She is interested in the differences and commonalities in artistic and scientific methodologies in order to explore the deep human need for reason as a common driving force- both in the arts and sciences.




The photographic focus of Sebastian Backhaus lies on crises in the Middle East. For years he has been traveling to the regions between Libya and Iraq. Especially Egypt is very close to his heart and therefore he spend several months a year in Cairo. In addition to his photojournalistic work his special interests lies in the Arabic language and the extremist interpretation of the Islam.




After 11 years in the real estate industry Frank Duske has found his small niche, where he cooperates with partners, who are not only obsessed with making more and more money, but want to create sustainable (cultural) values. His interest are mainly historic protected monuments and his projects aim at the creative class in Berlin. Some examples of his projects include 'Silent Green Kulturquartier' and 'Refugium Beelitz'. Together with architects and engineers Frank and his team create concepts for old empty building and try to find investors to transform these concepts into reality.

Tinka Bechert

Sebastian Backhaus

Frank Duske