Emilie Amrein (they/them) is a scholar, artist, educator, and activist whose professional activities resist and unsettle the boundaries of academic disciplines. They locate their work in community practice, drawing on the revolutionary wisdom of abolitionist, anti-colonial, and anti-capitalist organizers and freedom dreamers from the Majority World. Widely regarded as one of the most progressive thinkers in the arts and social justice in the United States, Amrein’s professional life traverses a number of disciplines, epistemologies, and fields. They position themself in the confluence and trans spaces of arts education, community arts, community development, activism, and public practice in the arts. Amrein’s professional work has taken them to diverse settings, spanning professional arts ensembles, and engagement with incarcerated folx, refugees and asylum-seekers, LGBTQ+ communities, and justice-deprived locations. They have given numerous talks for national and international audiences and creative workshops with community groups. Their co-authored book, Empowering Song, is considered a ground-breaking pedagogical and epistemological frame. Amrein currently serves as Executive Director of UTSA Arts, Associate Dean for community engagement, and professor of community arts leadership, education, and practice at the University of Texas at San Antonio.
Dasha Anosova (b. 1992, Kyiv) is a researcher based in London, whose work extends to curation, editorial projects, and collaborations with artists. She has curated projects for Mimosa House in London, the Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw, and gta exhibitions in Zurich, and served as a research associate on Faktura 10. Her writing has been published by PIN–UP, Temptress, Elephant, Starters, Various Artists, and e-flux Architecture. She is completing a PhD in East European Studies at University College London, writing on critical spatial practice.
Lucinda Bell (they/them) is a composer and musician based in London and Oxford. Birds are a focus of their work which aims to gain appreciation of bird behaviour through their own perspectives and cognitive processes by mixing sound aspects of composition with other media types, most often poetry and photography. Combined with minimalistic tendencies and their experience of synaesthesia, used to create timbral, textural and harmonic frameworks, in their work birds can be understood authentically and with clarity. lucindabellcomposer.squarespace.com
Charo Calvo is a Spanish electroacoustic composer, sound designer and teacher, living in Belgium. After having performed as a dancer with the influential Belgian dance company Ultima Vez, she started her studies on Electroacoustic Composition in 1992. Her work as composer is being developed through different media, widely diffused on international venues and festivals, dance performances, theatre, film and radio. Her work has received important international awards. She is a lecturer at ARTS2 and KASK and Conservatorium Ghent.
soundcloud.com/user-562545561
Emma Clarke is a performance maker working primarily within the London-based artist duo emma + pj, a collaborative studio practice spanning performance, installation, multimedia, and co-creation. The collaboration explores humanity in extreme landscapes, creating cinematic, otherworldly environments that invite us to reimagine our place in the world. Her work has been presented across the UK at venues including the Barbican Centre, Summerhall, New Diorama, and The Yard. She was a Barbican Open Lab resident artist and has published performance texts with Bloombury UK/Methuen Drama. She recently made her Royal Court Theatre directing debut on Joel Tan’s Scenes from a Repatriation. www.emmaandpj.com
Andy Cowton ‘I’ve been working as a composer and sound designer for many years. My main field of work has been writing for contemporary dance, cinema and tv documentary and fiction. I originally trained in dance and theatre at Dartington College of Arts. These studies were rooted in improvisation and collaboration, with a strong leaning towards site specific work: “technique” as such seemed a secondary consideration or rather something that was discovered and maybe self defined. It’s with this methodology in mind that I approached music composition. I was initially turned on to music/sound composition after attending a series of classes in electro acoustic music composition at Morely College London with composers Barry Anderson and Philip Waxman. I also joined agit-prop industrial noise group Test Dept with whom I toured and performed for 2 years. Over the years my work has led to long standing relationships with filmmakers , dancers and artists all of which invite new beginnings and new ways of working together. As a member of Musarc, I’m delighted to be able to extend these ideas and practices with other artists, singers and performers.’ www.andycowtonmusic.com
Leopold Frey is a filmmaker, storyteller and researcher with an academic background in theatre, cultural studies, modern philosophy and cinema directing. He is currently pursuing a PhD in audiovisual art and ethical AI at LUCA and KU Leuven, where he is researching interactions and states of mind in human and nonhuman agents, while exploring a poetics of transformation for expanded cinema at the intersection of intuition as method, artistic collaboration, and creative media practices.
Rani Geroult is a vocalist and educator whose work bridges performance, pedagogy, and research. Rooted in vocal jazz, her practice has grown into an experimental and participatory approach that invites collective creation through voice and listening. She has explored drama in education in China and music education in France, deepening her focus on children’s voices, the native tongue, and the role of sound in shaping identity. Central to her research is the metaphor of the house with a hidden ground, a space where memory, imagination, and inner voices find resonance.
Jawid Ghani ‘I was born in 1989 in Balkh, in the north of Afghanistan. In 2010 I left for India to study where I was introduced to ghazal music and learned to play the harmonium, which I accompany with singing. In 2016 I came to France to study for an MA in International Trade, and since 2019 I have been working at ASLC, a linguistic and cultural association in Paris. Persian culture in all its forms has always been central to me. In my work I share Persian poetry and Afghan music in Europe, and strive to preserve Afghan musical heritage by every possible means. My repertoire includes Persian ghazals, Afghan folk songs, and more contemporary works by popular Afghan singers such as Ahmad Zahir, while also drawing inspiration from Indian music. In recent years I have also composed original pieces blending Afghan traditions with French poetry (Ronsard, Éluard, Louise Labé, Baudelaire, Verlaine). With fellow musicians I perform regularly in France, in museums, theatres, universities, migrant centres, and embassies (Tadjikistan et Afghanistan). We also participate in local cultural events and, more recently, had the opportunity to share Afghan music with a wider audience on French television in Culture Box.’
Lucy Gunning’s practice involves installation and live events that juxtapose diverse material and spatial elements, engaged with the entanglement of a given site/context. Often working with moving image, sculptural or found objects, architectural intervention. There is an ongoing interest in performativity, temporality, space, matter and the intangible. Informed by literature, feminism, queer theory, and esoteric practice. She is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London, and teaches at Chelsea College of Arts.
Francesca Hawker (born 1992, UK) lives in Brussels and is a Research Assistant at LUCA Ghent, where she is exploring embarrassment in performance art. She often works collaboratively within the ‘slapstick of ordinary relation’, defined by Lauren Berlant as a way of ‘trying to stay in the same enough conversation in order to build something together that neither of us could build by ourselves.’ francescahawker.net
Lize Maekelberg ‘I create objects and textiles that picture my dreams, allowing my imagination run free on how I would love the world to look. Clinging on to feelings of nostalgia, happiness, loneliness, optimism, and uncertainty, I’m currently working on an ever-growing installation series of beach towels. I took an optimistic approach to my own doubtful artistic and personal quest after graduating from art school. Why do I make this (art)work? What drives me? How do I feel when I create this work? In search of playfulness, collectivity, fun, pleasure, beauty, festivity, freedom, and a place to land, I wash, card, spin, and dye wool for a farm just outside of Ghent. The work serves as an invitation for a collective, peaceful moment of relaxation. In my practice, I perpetually balance between what is beautiful and kitsch, between the heritage of domestic textiles and my own, queer, playful little life. I swing between performing caring rituals and a reckless painterly etiquette, pingponging between my imagination and encounters with the real world. By turning away from the horrors of today and reflecting on them, I aim to create playful, colorful, and intimate work. The long process of washing, carding, dying, and spinning the wool, beginning from a raw material, is a time-consuming, all-consuming waltz of care. When working with wool, I always imagine the sheep as close friends of mine. I make something out of their beloved winter coat. In the beginning of 2023, I started a long-lasting residency with Manoeuvre, a Ghent-based co-creation collective. Working with people of different atmospheres, we cook, sing, knit, crochet, felt, and weave to make art that intertwines craft and daily life. It is a joy to work, cry, laugh, and dance collectively, together, horizontally.’
Carol Mancke is an artist and architect who, after many years practicing and teaching architecture, broadened into individual and collaborative art practices. Carol brings time, objects, images, movement, humor, hospitality and conversation into play to prompt alternative ways of participating in everyday life. Her artwork has featured in shows in Britain, Australia, the US and Japan, and her PhD research (‘Thinking in Public: The Affordance of Hopeless Spaces’, RCA 2021) explored collaborative thinking as a public artistic practice that might build agency in the public sphere. In 2018 Carol founded machinaloci space, a place for playful research into alternative ways of being, thinking, and doing together which she ran in Berkeley California until 2022 and now in London since 2025. She has been singing with Musarc since 2022 and helping with the administration of the choir since 2024.
Paul Martin Art School: Painting, Reliefs, Sculpture, Environment & Performances with fellow students including electronic tape. Sculpture: Tape Pieces (with fan) Film: River Film, Mist on Mountains etc. Competitions: Botanic Gardens Station, Glasgow; Bellevor Tor, Dartmoor; River Crossings, London. Book: Spirals through Eye. Exhibition: Along the Roman Wall – LYC Museum, Banks (photographs). Sound: Crossness Pumping Station. Field Studies 2012 and following with Davide Tidoni, Aki Onda and Akio Suzuki, Joseph Kohlmaier and others. Musarc Choir since 2013. Unbuilt roads.
Amélie Mourgue d’Algue’s practice focuses on artistic mediation and collaborative art, with a keen interest in the experience of linguistic plurality. In 2021, she co-founded the artistic research group Bureau des Heures Invisibles (bhi), located in Aubervilliers, Greater Paris. She is the initiator of Ensemble Plurilingue, produced by the bhi, that has brought together professional and semi-professional artists, actors, singers and musicians living in and investing the soundscape of Aubervilliers and Greater Paris for collective and participatory compositions since 2022.
Loïs Pluymers is an artist and saxophone player working at the intersection of sound, movement, and materiality. Her artistic practice moves between the individual and the collective, between the visual and the musical, between fixed form and improvisation. Central to this is a desire to blur the boundaries between disciplines: to understand music as movement, image as sound. Her practice is grounded in listening: not just to sound, but to what materials, environments and objects have to say. I search for moments where different systems – musical, physical, social – overlap, break open or rub against each other, where patterns unravel. In search for the tension between the mechanical and the personal, the coded and the chaotic, the structured and the improvised.
loispluymers.cargo.site
Júlia Rúbies Subirós (she/they) is a graduate of P.A.R.T.S. She has worked with choreographers including Alix Eynaudi, Georgia Vardarou, and Mette Ingvartsen, touring across Europe as a performer. She has been involved in collective research through Cascades, which she initiated in Barcelona, and in Brussels through her participation in MOTA000 and as co-initiator of Accompany Class. She has been entering a new phase in her work, where the voice becomes central to her choreographic practice, unfolding as both subject and medium in the creation of her upcoming piece She Spells Sea Shells on the Shea Sore. jurusu.cargo.site
Shamica Ruddock is a London-based artist-composer thinking through film, live improvisation, recorded musics, collaborative research and glass. Research interests encompass vernacularity, (techno)creolisation, transferral and legibility. Shamica is inspired by detours and tangents, mishaps and accidental arrivals. www.shamicaruddock.com
Listening, sounding, performing, choreographing & facilitating, Tanya Soubry (she/they) works with the body, voice, place and matter, tending to the choreographic, the sonic and the ecological. Rooted in decoloniality, political ecology and environmental justice, Tanya researches, imagines and creates with, following tensions, curiosities, desires and care, so as to process the past and present and create possibilities, through sensuousness, humour, collaboration, collectivity and solidarity. As a choreographer and artist, Tanya has created, performed and toured work in Europe, Canada and Hong Kong, from stage performances, to immersive and participatory projects, to gallery installations, and now site-sensitive land-based work. www.taniasoubry.com
Aga Ujma is a singer, composer, and multi-instrumentalist from Poland. She grew up around folk music from the mountain village where her mother is from. At the age of eight, she signed herself up for music school to study classical piano and music theory. Later, she studied Renaissance and Baroque music analysis while also being fascinated with punk and noise. In her twenties, she became obsessed with gamelan and moved to Java to study traditional music and singing at the Indonesian Institute of Arts. There, she joined an experimental music collective, touring extensively across the Indonesian archipelago. She now learns the harp, lives between London and Poland, and has recently toured the world with Black Country, New Road; Hinako Omori; and Crack Cloud. She performed the theme song for Resident Evil: Village and plays with various music projects, including folk collective Broadside Hacks.
‘I am jorre vandenbussche (b. 1975, Bruges, Belgium). I graduated in 1997 as Master in Drama from the Conservatory of Antwerp. I have worked as an actor, theatre maker and writer with companies large and small in Flanders and the Netherlands. In 2015 I co-founded theatre company MAELSTROM. I have been searching for my own voice for as long as I can remember, and that quest is still going on, both in my work as an actor and as a teacher.’
