Lavinia Filippi is an art historian and contemporary art curator currently based in London. Co-founder of Translocalia since 2014, she curated projects, exhibitions and public programmes in Italy, Pakistan and the United Kingdom. She worked as research curator, as well as public and educational programme co-curator, for ‘Neither Nor: The challenge to the Labyrinth’, the Italian Pavilion at the 58th Venice Biennale. Lavinia also curated special projects and publications at Belmacz London; and worked as associate curator for Volcano Extravaganza in the island of Stromboli, North of Sicily in 2016, 2018 and 2019.

Previously, she lectured at the National College of Arts in Lahore (2012-14); directed Castello di Rivoli’s web-tv (2011-12); worked as author and correspondent for a series of cultural programmes for Italian national television RAI (2007-2011), and wrote for a number of publications, including: Flash Art, artnet Magazine and ARTEìN. She holds a BA in Social Sciences from the University of Ottawa, a degree in Art History from La Sapienza University of Rome and an MA Hons in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London.

Amanda Masha Caminals is co-founder of Translocalia and co-director and curator of the Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives (IMNA), the artistic laboratory for climate action of the City of Madrid. Based at the Innovation and Technology for Development Centre of the Technic University of Madrid (itdUPM), IMNA fosters artistic practices in connection with journalism, science and technology as a response to the challenges of the environmental crisis. Amanda is also Advisor to the European Commission S+T+ARTS Prize, an initiative to foster alliances between science, technology and the arts.

Previous to that, she directed the CITY STATION at the Centre for Contemporary Culture of Barcelona (CCCB) and the Barcelona City Council. As an independent curator she was responsible for the 2019 edition of MWB, the 10 days festival of the Mobile World Congress of Barcelona. She has worked at institutions including the Institute of International Visual Arts in London or Casa Triângulo in São Paulo. She holds a BA in Humanities from Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, a Degree in History of Art from the University of Barcelona and an MA Hons in Curating Contemporary Art from the Royal College of Art in London.

Paula Nishijima is a Brazilian visual artist based in Amsterdam, with a research-based practice that unfolds at the crossroads of life science, technology and participatory social practice. She investigates the social, historical and political dimensions of systems aesthetics.

Recent exhibitions include: The Nature of the Cities Festival, online, 2021; Here and Now, Media Art Festival Friesland, Leeuwarden, Netherlands (Nomination for Young Masters Award), 2021; Teachable Moment, Stove Works, Chattanooga, Tennessee, USA, 2020; Mutant Institute of Environmental Narratives, Madrid, Spain, 2019. She received an MA in Arts and Culture from Leiden University, Netherlands and holds a BA in Visual Arts from the Universidade Estadual Paulista Júlio de Mesquita Filho, São Paulo/Brazil.

Pablo de Soto is a Spanish architect, academic and technologist who works on geographical and disciplinary boundaries. In March 2022 he became director of LABoral Centro de Arte y Creación Industrial. He works at the intersection of art and architecture with digital media technologies exploring new conceptual frameworks and cutting-edge tools. His practice-led research uses fieldwork, radical cartography and critical epistemologies to produce spatial knowledge and investigate the urgent political and environmental conditions of our time.

DeSoto has a creative approach to pedagogy always in the search for inventive strategies, experimental methods and imaginative processes.In 2010 he launched Mapping the Commons, a parametrical experimental method and multiyear research participatory project on urban commons with six case studies in Europe and South America awarded with the Elinor Ostrom prize by University of Buenos Aires. In 2015 he created the Drone Hackademy, a temporary school, citizen science laboratory and critical theory platform for the use and discussion of unmanned aerial vehicles as a social technology.

María Castellanos is an artist and researcher working at the intersection of art, science, technology and society. She is currently  working as a postdoc researcher at Oslo Metropolitan University, in the framework of FeLT Project Futures of Living Technologies. Her artistic practice focuses on human sensory boundaries and the creation of complex systems that promote the communication and the understanding between humans and non human beings. 

Since 2009 she has collaborated with the artist Alberto Valverde in uh513.

Her work has won awards like Leonardo Grant for Researchers and Cultural Creators by Fundación BBVA (2020), VERTIGO STARTS (2017), the Antón Scholarship for Sculpture Research from the Museo Antón in Candás, and she was nominated for the STARTSPrize’ 16 at Ars Electronica, Linz and the Japan Media Arts Festival, Tokyo (2016).

Michela de Mattei is an artist based in Milan. Working directly with moving image and multimedia installations she creates fictional scenarios and unusual associations to explore different forms of authority and control. Her interests include the animal world, the use of current technologies and the shifting dynamics of communications systems.

Recent collaborations include: Aquaria or the illusion of a boxed sea, MAAT Museum Lisbon 2021, Nuovo Cinema Galleria, Galeria Vera Cortez, Lisbon (2020); Alserkal Residency, Dubai (2019);Hypermaremma – Chapter II, La città sommersa, Antica Città di Cosa (2019); Blushing, Belmacz, London (2019); The Shape of a Circle in the Mind of a Fish, Part 1: Language,  Serpentines Galleries / ZSL London Zoo (2018); Estée Lauder series, Italian Cultural Institute, London (2018). She studied Philosophy at La Sapienza, University of Rome. 

Fito Conesa is an artist and producer with a degree in Fine Arts from Barcelona University. He has given and designed workshops for the Education Department of Fundació la Caixa. He worked as an art director on the Green Santo Domingo campaign for Santo Domingo City Hall and formed part of the tutorial team of Sala d’Art Jove in Barcelona. His work has been shown at various museums and festivals such as the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Fundació Joan Miró, Oslo Screen Festival 2010, Barcelona International Poetry Festival, the Centro Cultural Español, Santo Domingo, Matadero Madrid, and Caixafòrum, Lleida, Tarragona and Barcelona.

He has contributed to publications such as Zeitgeist: Variations & Repetitions (Save as… publications, 2010), Unique Window Display (Loft Publications, 2009) and Suite for Ordinary Machinery (Save as… publications, 2008), with the latter being included in the holdings of the Tate Library, London, the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo Reina Sofía, Madrid, and the MACBA Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Barcelona.

Siddharth is a multidisciplinary artist, designer, and educator, specializing in the moving image. With more than a decade of experience in branding, broadcast design, advertising, art and film, he has always moved with the aim to learn new things and broaden his horizons, both physical and artistic. He works between Barcelona and Valencia, where he teaches digital design at LABA, Valencia.

Siddharth’s has worked with and exhibited at various festivals and institutions like the Fondation Cartier pour l’Art Contemporain, LOOP Barcelona, Matadero Madrid, and ARCO Madrid.

Tobias Seidl is Professor at the Westfälische Hochschule in Bocholt, where he established a bachelor’s degree in biomimetics. After his studies in Saarbrücken – where he produced seminal work on the adhesion mechanism of spiders and spent six months at BMW group as a biomimetics expert – he did his PhD on the navigational system of desert ants at the University of Zurich and in Tunisia. He then received a fellowship with the European Space Agency (Noordwijk, The Netherlands) where he worked on biomimetic and bioengineering topics including verifying brain machine interfaces on the 47th parabolic flight campaign. Since 2010 he is full professor in Bocholt.

Andrew Straw is a professor of biology at the University of Freiburg. His research asks the question of how insects see and use visual memories to navigate their world. To do so, his lab also develops novel technologies such as virtual reality for freely moving animals. Using experimental arenas inspired by the holodeck and the Matrix, his lab studies how computations are implemented in the tiny brain of flies and collaborates with others on collective behaviour in groups of animals. Ultimately, such work will lead to a better understanding of helpful and harmful insects such as bees and mosquitoes in addition to providing inspiration for the limits of autonomous vehicles.

Emma Smith is a visual artist based in the UK and works internationally. She has a social practice and creates platforms for people to share research, experiences, knowledge and ‘no-how’ of human relationships with one another and the places we co-habit.

Through performances, installations, objects and actions, Smith’s work reveals the subtleties of human connectivity: relationship, communication, sense of place and entanglement. 

Smith’s process is research and production based and often involves the bringing together of multi-disciplinary teams including collaborations with academics, professionals and hobbyists and drawing on the fields of anthropology, history, psychology, neurology, physics, ecology and biology. Through this co-research process her work results in published findings as well as new artwork, unearthing forgotten histories and proposing new futures. 

Previous exhibitions and performances include Tate Modern, Barbican, Whitechapel, Bluecoat, Whitworth, ICA and Arnolfini with international projects across the globe.