The Erotics of Knowing

Sydney Alderman is an artist, writer and performer from Chelmsford, studying at London Metropolitan University. Predominantly sculptural, she mostly works with found materials and ready-made objects, often being more concerned with audience interaction and space than any object itself. Her practice emerges from and is underpinned by her negotiations of the body, what it means to be human and living with chronic illness. Through this she explores duration, rest, adaptation, labour, vulnerability and repetition as both lived experience and artistic method. The work engages with systems and spaces of control, using modular forms, such as simple cubes, to question ideas about order and stability. The body not as the human we think of but as a dysregulated, fleeting and adaptive system. She is currently working toward a new project that will re-imagine and disrupt the streets of Venice as a Fellow of the British Council, La Biennale 2026.

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.

Celia Bickersteth (b.1998) looks at histories of making and craft: the production line, the product, material processes. Working across media and in collaboration. Most recently looking at the production of North Sea Fisherman’s jumpers. She currently is being trained as a shoemaker.

Mela Boev trained in performing arts with Thomas Leahbart, Pino Costalunga, Antonio Fava, Chiara Guidi, and Claudia Castellucci. She studied decorative arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and at ESDAC in Strasbourg. She has explored the idea of myth as a collective experience, a structural paradigm, a production approach, and, more recently, applied it to the writing of narratives for Comprehensible Input Language Learning and Augmented Language. She has collaborated with choral ensemble Musarc on projects that have informed the pedagogy and methodology of Field Studies since 2011, most recently on the production of The End of the World Service, Taranto, Italy, 2022. Since 2017, Mela has collaborated with the international dancing communities of DanceWell. There are three roots to my practice: Textiles, Stories, and Time. They are not intended to be strategies or devices, but rather imprints on a tortuous terrain where one can navigate imperfectly.’

Rachal Bradley is a London-based filmmaker, artist and writer working at the intersection of body, system and material. Her work traces how identity is shaped—through language, through structure, through what we wear. Her films and artworks have been presented across the UK and Europe, and her writing has appeared in Texte Zur Kunst. She is currently developing FOLD, a feature documentary exploring a northern woman’s lifelong devotion to Japanese avant-garde fashion as a form of self-invention. She has taught in art schools across the UK and Europe since 2016.

Born in Taipei in 1971, Lin Chiwei is a transdisciplinary artist who received academic training in French literature, cultural anthropology and media art. Since the early 1990s, Lin has been involved in the Taiwanese counter-cultural scene. He was a founding member of noise band Z.S.L.O. and responsible for the programming of various alternative art festivals. At the same time, Lin explored the realms of religious music and art, notably temple sculpture and Taoist rituals, through intense research and field studies. These experiences, combined with his practice in noise performance and electronic music composition, developed into critical positions toward contemporary art practices. Since 2004, Lin has worked on the Tape Music and IDCM (Interhuman Dynamic Coordinated Models) series of works – synchronous protocols which allow individual autonomy in the forming of collective intelligence that leads to complex sound works. In his 2012 book Beyond Sound Art – The Avant Garde, Sound Machine and the Modernity of Hearing, Lin denies the term ‘Sound Art,’ and provides a holistic view blurring the boundary between human culture and technology. Lin’s art works were shown in various biennales and museums including Tate Modern, Pompidou Center, PSA Shanghai along with other non-art sites including local community projects, private residences, public schools, factories, churches, temples, bars and live venues in different countries around the world. Lin Chiwei lives and works in Shanghai, Taipei, and Paris.

Joseph Kohlmaier is an artist, designer and teacher. He is currently Associate Teaching Professor in history and theory at the School of Art, Architecture and Design, London Metropolitan University. He is the founder and creative director of several collectives, organisations and educational projects including experimental choral ensemble Musarc (2009–present), Field Studies (2010–17, 2025–present), graphic design studio Polimekanos (with Stefan Kraus, 2000–2020), and independent imprint Cours de Poétique. It is through these frameworks that Joseph’s practice evolves and where it has had the greatest impact by creating spaces for people to experiment with new ideas. As a curator and producer, Joseph has commissioned and worked with emerging and established artists, and collaborated with leading arts organisations in the UK and Europe on projects that have transformed the landscape of education, contemporary music, and performance. Joseph’s work is multifaceted, situated at the intersection of different disciplines and activities that oscillate between solitary practice and collective performance. It is animated by the question of how we learn, how thought is related to symbolic form, the agony and potential of collective acts, the general ecology of the chorus, and marginalised ways of thinking such as the role of embodiment and felt sense in the production of knowledge.

Indigo Leveson-Gower is an architectural designer and artist working in public realm and landscape with a focus on participatory design processes. Her interests lie in collaborative creative thinking and making practices, having recently co-run a two-week workshop in Finland that explored collective drawing and thinking through natural-dye making and site-specific installations. Other interests and previous work include founding an art and events collective that held non-profit art, music and poetry events, aimed at creating an accessible space to make and display art.

Trevor Norris is a humanities scholar whose intellectual practice moves across literature, political economy, performance theory, ecology, and the philosophy of technology. His work is less defined by a single discipline than by a method of relational enquiry: tracing how aesthetic forms, institutional structures, and ethical sensibilities evolve together across historical time. Drawing on traditions as diverse as Renaissance drama, decolonial thought, ecological systems theory, and contemporary debates about artificial intelligence, he treats culture as a diagnostic instrument for understanding civilisational transformation. His style of enquiry is synthetic and exploratory, privileging pattern recognition across domains rather than narrow specialisation. Trevor is particularly interested in how institutions metabolise violence, how aesthetic forms operate as civic technologies, and how new forms of dialogue might revive traditions of philosophical correspondence. Across essays, lectures, and collaborative conversations, he pursues a form of intellectual work that joins moral seriousness with speculative imagination in order to think clearly about an age of ecological, epistemic, and institutional upheaval.

Carolyn Roy has been a member of Musarc since 2023, participating as a vocal performer and writer in most of their projects since joining. She lives with unilateral hearing loss, which, as well as prompting explorations of mis-spoken words, (bad) singing and soundings, has produced a particular sensitivity to resonance – specifically the way that our bodies are touched and moved by sound and the more subtle resonance generated by bodies in shared space. Carolyn is a London-based, freelance dancer and writer with a PhD in dance, who works in the independent dance sector. As a practitioner channelling the somatic processes and understanding we use as dancers through other art forms, her body of presented/published work includes poetic and critical texts, sound narratives, film and photographic projects as well as live performances and political actions. In recent years her practice has focused on examining philosophical concepts through the materiality of bodies. Performance and text projects (2018–2022) explored what it is to be with others in this world, what it is to be-with as dancers, the politics (and pleasure) of dancing, with reference to Jean-Luc Nancy’s Être Singulier Pluriel. She is currently working in collaboration with dance-maker Amy Voris using scores derived from Experiential Anatomy as a way of encountering propositions made by Anne Dufourmantelle in Puissance de la douceur. Carolyn has performed in work by Gaby Agis, Marina Collard, Keira Greene, Derek Jarman, Graeme Miller, Florence Peake, Pacitti Company, Tino Sehgal, and Margarita Zaffrilla Olayo. She has been a visiting lecturer at the Architectural Association, Bartlett School of Architecture, East London University, Cambridge University, Lincoln University and teaches regularly at Trinity Laban, LCDS and Independent Dance, as well as leading workshops for non-dancers in community and healthcare settings. Carolyn is an activist member of artist-led collective, Chisenhale Dance Space.

Imogen Stidworthy’s sculptural installations and films are shaped by different forms of voicing, through sound, body, and spatial and temporal relationships. She spends time and stages situations with people whose language is shaped by powerful experiences, neurological conditions, such as aphasia, or cultural practices, such as shamanism. Her work grapples with the impossibility of glimpsing language from the outside; ‘What happens to sense-making in encounters with unfamiliar or unrecognisable forms of voicing? What different forms of communication emerge in spaces between languages? In recent years I’ve been engaging with these questions through the lens of autism, and non-verbal being.’ She completed her PhD ‘Voicing on the Borders of Language’ at Lund University (SE) in September 2020. In 2018 she was awarded the Special Prize for the inaugural David and Annely Juda Award and has won and been shortlisted for many awards and prizes.

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.