season4

Born in Hungary (1979), traveled the world. Holds an MA in Journalism. Built a film production company and moved on. Directed and produced a few documentary films, but not enough yet. Passionate, caring, responsible, imperfect. Loves humankind and motion picture. Takes no bullshit. Searches for the Buddha in you. Currently resides in the loving city of Berlin. During Conversas Lorand will share his project Speakeasy. A series of intimate mini portraits relating to universal subjects told by the most diverse human inhabitants of the city, which binds, influences, and holds them in a moving and unrepeatable way.

Annika Hirsekorn is a curator and producer. Her research focus is drawn to the field of memorial culture. With a series of interventions and activities titled "Encounter With Monument" she is exploring possible ways of participation in landscapes of memory and how to alter dominant narratives of power through interdisciplinary practices.

Marius Wenker is a Typographer and Illustrator based in Berlin.
He is the creator of the next Conversas Berlin publication! And we are as curious as you are to see what he made of it. It will be special that is for sure!!

Andreas Loh is a Berlin based Composer and Pianist. He studied music for percussion and piano at the University of Music in Leipzig. He also practiced Yoga since 1999 and is the founder of Tala Yoga and Yoga Piano. He travels all over europe to teach yoga workshops and presents his music in extatic solo Piano Concerts.
Its all about music! The connection of being alive - listening - heart - mind - hands and yoga.

Antonia Hernández is a Montréal-based visual artist and PhD candidate in Communication at Concordia University. Her current research looks into a sexcam platform and explores from there work in the context of the platform economy. Both as a performative space and research device, she uses a dollhouse for enacting and learn about the role of habits and maintenance practices in the incorporation of new economic and technological infrastructures. It is, at the same time, an affective exploration of an speculated, yet inhabited, networked domesticity: the domesticity of the online self.

Rotterdam Art And Radio was initiated by Joshua Thies in 2016 as the audible element for a festival of art and music in the south of Rotterdam, The Netherlands. RAAR continues as a monthly narrowcast with focus on live performance of audible artworks by Rotterdam based artists. In collaboration with multiple venues RAAR maintains a nomadic, public presence in the city. Each episode of 3-4 hours features 3 artists and 1 amateur DJ mix. Episodes are occasionally thematic such as the Climate Change and Art show. Other times, RAAR is a free and open platform for artists to experiment with media they are not accustomed to. How the medium is approached is up to each individual and has included, sound experiments, noise, voice and storytelling, poetry reading, radio plays, music and a mix of everything audible. RAAR is loosely curated and hosted by Joshua Thies, MFA Piet Zwart Institute 2009, with occasional co-hosting support by Patricia Qi and Mihai Gui.

John Lee is a multi-disciplinary artist exploring drawing, dance, text-based art, and performance. Lee has been working on a series of works called “Bodygraphy,” in which he draws from his experience as a mover and transforms his body to blobs of ink or strokes of texts using simple costumes and video editing. Based on his exposure to various languages including his native Korean, short lessons in Chinese logograms, mandatory English, and recent move to Berlin, Lee is interested in loss in translation, opacity of language and alienation to assimilation. During Conversas Lee will talk about his work Arirang Half. The work is a transmedia piece including video and prints, exploring the idea of translation between text, image, and body movement. The original text is performed by ten thousand North Korean students in 2012 during the annual Arirang performance, also known as Mass Game in the West. Arirang is also a title for various regional Korean folk songs without clear origins, often speaking for the sentiment of "Han," a deep resentment.

Aleks Slota (b. 1978, Poland) is a conceptual artist working primarily in the mediums of performance and sound art. He creates improvised and dynamic performances that challenge audience engagement and the perceived safe space of the performance venue.

Martin (co founder/ executive director and best friend)
Martin Ringenbach is the Executive Director of Pass the Crayon, a nonprofit organization that fosters self-expression for refugee youth in Berlin through art workshops. Martin has previously worked within the Berlin tech scene with companies such as Zalando and Apple. As an adult, he still views the world through a child’s gaze, which is what ultimately brought him to start Pass the Crayon as a co-founder. A self-made creative, Martin has also worked as an art seller for a Parisian art gallery, a shoemaker, and Assistant Photographer for the Louvre.

Sevin (co founder and director of operations and best friend)
Sevin moved to Berlin from Geneva, Switzerland, in 2009 with the head and heart full of desire to create something unique. Throughout the years and meaningless jobs, she knew that she would never let her inner child die, even when confronted with a more conformist and serious working environment. So when she launched Pass the Crayon with her best friend back in 2015, she finally found a place where she could combine her entrepreneurial drive and her creative skills. Today as Co-Founder and Director of Operations at Pass the Crayon, her main goal is to share art and life skills with underprivileged children to inspire many to be secure in who they are.

Chilean born artist and designer based in Berlin. Hast a vast experience activating cultural projects, platforms and collaborations that deal with social matters. One of them is called Visual Public Service (co-founded in 2012), a collective ran project that makes public interventions in urban settings. These interventions evolve from conversations and observations of local communities, making them partners in the creative work. Through appropriation of a specific public space, a design service takes form in different formats and media for a limited time, aiming to make unheard locals become protagonists in their own environment.

Sevin Özdemir and Martin Ringenbach

If you browse an Occulto issue, you can expect essays on history of science, biology, mathematics, but also artist’s projects, sci-fi stories, and experimental music. An events series in Berlin integrates the project. Designed, edited and curated by Alice Cannavà. 100% independent!

American-born and Korean educated, Julian moved to Germany earlier this year to continue his artistic practice of reinterpreting forgotten or all-too-ordinary human objects. While working on his MFA (2016) from Kookmin University, Seoul’s numerous small mountain bunkers or pillboxes inspired his projects about these military structures that exist within civilian life. Today, he is working on a project exploring the meaning of everyday objects by recontextualizing their purpose and appearance.

Alanna Lawley seeks to absorb her environment’s physical terms, creating site-specific architectural constructions that develop the notion of architecture as a mediated, inaccessible and therefore uncertain experience. In 2018, Lawley has begun to explore the concept of space as a potential healing modality and her intuitive paper works are a direct and honest response to the psychology and personal relationship with female health and our personal relationship with our (female) body through painting and drawing. Through this process she has begun to provoke new attitudes towards how we heal and what is necessary in the process of healing to drive her practice.

Every minute there are 400 hours of video material uploaded on youtube. Who needs another film, another documentary then? Is it time for an iconoclastic Bilderverbot or at least a visual diet or how can we create a trustful imagery in an era of a rising flood of images, that's corrupted by filters, fake news and algorithms? Questions of a filmmaker, skeptical about her next project.

Another Italian Architect based in Berlin, exploring the two sides of this practice: Alternating periods of standard 40h a week office work in Berlin and developing personal projects with local communities in Camerun, Nepal and Magadascar, which she accomplished together with her partner during the last 4 years.

Maria Vittoria Monaco

Tomás Dittborn, Chilean, living in Berlin since 2018. He defines himself as a Da Vincist.
He has been in Advertising, Design, Radio, Press, Magazines, photography and Cinema industry. Tomas is passionate about change, innovation and evolution. And the question Can we really Change? Is his motto. He’s journey started with an MBA, then an Ontological Coach degree and now he is studying a magister in Change at Insead, Fontainebleau, France.

einBuch.haus plays a role in showcasing experimental books in the field of arts and design. Following the name, each event offers viewers to read and buy only one selected art book offline or online. Since the platform's foundation on 12. Sep 2018, four books have been presented in einBuch.haus. As creative director of einBuch.haus, Frau Kim sees books as art objects which can be curated and presented in exhibition formats, providing immersive experience between people, objects and spaces.

Durch ihre starke Suche nach alternativen Lebens und Arbeitsformen wagte sie sich, ihren Traum vom Eigenheim zu erfüllen und die Grenzen Ihrer Selbst zu erforschen (tiny house projekt). Isabelle’s Vorhaben ist eine Antwort auf unsere kulturellen Veränderungen von Heute und Morgen. Mit einem offenen Blick für die Welt möchte sie auf den Spuren dieses neuen Trends sein und Menschen eine kreative Alternative zu unserem üblichen Lebensstil aufweisen. Da viele Menschen von einem unabhängigen Wohn- und Arbeitsraum träumen, möchte Isabelle für diese Menschen die Motivation sein und zeigen, dass man es selber machen kann. Sie lüftet den Schleier über alternatives Leben und räumt das Hippystigma ein für allemal aus dem Weg. Denn mit dem gewissen Know-How formt dieses „smart house“ eine Liaison zwischen Unabhängigkeit, Nachhaltigkeit, Innovation und Design. Ganz getreu dem Moto Hendry Fords „ Wer immer tut was er schon kann, bleibt immer das, was er schon ist „ schreitet Isabelle durchs Leben und setzt sich immer neue Ziele.

Fascinated by the body’s own ability to heal itself, I experimented with fast mimicking diets, intermittent fasting and prolonged fasting (over 48 hours). My last fast lasted three weeks. For 19 days my sole intake was of water and only in the last 3 days I consumed broth before slowly going back to eating. For the past few years I experienced waves of severe pain and discomfort when digesting. My instinct was to stop eating, an obvious choice to an animal but less obvious when one grows up with fear of death in the case of a missed lunch.
Later on I Learned about the connection between the gut and the mind and made a connection between my stress levels and inability to digest properly. I set myself new goals. My plan was to give the gut a long break and by doing so, heal and regenerate it, hoping that would help me get mental clarity and assist in lifting my mood from depression and anxiety. My thought was that by feeling relaxed I will be able to digest properly again.
In this talk I’m hoping to share some practical knowledge and tips to a successful water-fast as well as my personal impressions from this intense experience, the highs and the lows that come with such deep work and most importantly, share my journey to a stronger connection between body and mind.

Paper planes e.V. believes that increasing urbanization brings with it great opportunities. If we manage to make the right investments in our cities, it will not only be possible to make our everyday environment more livable, but we can also tackle today’s major global challenges.
Perttus will speak about Radbahn Berlin, transforming the forgotten space along Berlin’s famous U1 elevated subway line into a major urban thoroughfare and create a space for contemporary mobility, innovation and leisure.

Jeanne Bénony, architect. Graduated from Paris-Belleville school, 2012.
Florent Lévêque, architect. Graduated from Versailles school, 2014.
After working for a while in Paris, they moved to Berlin to live and work.
Since 2015, in parallel with collaborations with various agencies, they develops their own concepts and reflections within Commun Architecture, a Paris and Berlin based office of architecture, urban-planning and research.

Jeanne Bénony and Florent Lévêque

As a young girl Renata asked herself the question what it would be like to ‘look out of her own eyes’. This question has followed her through her whole life and has led her to travel and live in various places around the globe and experiment with the question what it is like to be a self-authorised, creative (schöpferischer) human being, in dialogue with life and others. Renata is a film maker, artist and dialogue facilitator, currently CEO and art director of the magazine ‘evolve’.

Vincent Chomaz is an artist and cultural operator interested in associative and informal forms of knowledge production and dissemination. Spanning installations, workshops, publications, formats of co-production, and interventions, his work focuses on listening as a social, political, and aesthetic practice—an associative and empathic tool to investigate collective dynamics as a network of subjective narratives and memories.

Guido is an Italian statistician who is very fascinated by Genetics studies. In 2016 he moved to Berlin to start a PhD project focused in understanding the genetic differences between the sexes since the very earliest stages of embryonic development. After a few cellular divisions, every cell composing the female embryo (XX) randomly selects and transcriptionally silences one of the two X chromosomes, in a process known as X chromosome inactivation (XCI). This irreversible process results in genetic mosaicism for females, as every cell composing their organism will only have a single active X chromosome. This process can be explored through the analysis of imaging and transcriptomics data from in vitro embryonic stem cells, with the aims of identifying the key regulators of XCI and to understand how this may affect the following cell-differentiation stage in both males and females.

Slanted House is a collective of artists and writers based between Berlin, Paris and London. Slanted House makes space for queer creators and talented individuals who challenge the restraints of the contemporary art and publishing worlds. Queer is not only a crucial noun and identity but also a verb. To queer is to crack open, skew and twist normative imperatives. We seek work that challenges typical form, style and content as well as identification, gender, sex and desire. Our art exhibitions include readings, performances and the circulation of new issues of the Slanted House Zine.

Linda is a media artist based in Berlin.
Her works are build on intense research and deal with questions surrounding bodies and technology in the context of intellectual history.
At Conversas, she will introduce her working process and De/Reconstruct/Discuss decisions and choices made during the making of a work. In a brainstorming-like setting, we will try to reframe some of the decisions and maybe even find alternative results?

Empowerment project acting in India and Kenya. We provide training using fair trade programs for women in vulnerable situations or without a fixed source of income. By teaching women how to create handmade pieces out of recycled materials, we want to generate new social and economic opportunities for them.