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Stavros Stavrides

School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece
& LABORATORY FOR THE URBAN COMMONS

Dr. Stavros Stavrides, architect and activist, is Professor at the School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece, where he teaches graduate courses on housing design (social housing design included), as well as a postgraduate course on the meaning of metropolitan experience. He has published numerous articles on spatial theory and urban struggles. His books: The Symbolic Relation to Space (Athens, 1990), Advertising and the Meaning of Space (Athens, 1996), The Texture of Things (with E. Kotsou, Athens, 1996), From the City-as-Screen to the City-as-Stage (Athens, 2002 National Book Award), Suspended Spaces of Alterity (Athens, 2010), and Towards the City of Thresholds (in English, 2010, in Spanish, 2016 and in Turkish 2016). His research is currently focused on forms of emancipating spatial practices and urban commoning, characteristically developed in his last books Common Space: The City as Commons, (2016 in English, in Greek 2018 in Turkish 2018 and in Portuguese, forthcoming), and Common Spaces of Urban Emancipation (2019). He has lectured in European and Latin American Universities on urban struggles and practices of urban commoning.

http://courses.arch.ntua.gr/stavrides.html

Secondment destination
TBC

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Georgia Perkins at Coventry University

My SPACEX secondment took place from January – March 2023. Over the course of 31 days, I investigated how artists and curators re-imagine the future of liquid urban areas in response to the historical and contemporary climate concerns of rising sea levels and invisible pollutants in the water. This constitutes part of my wider research on the water’s edge as an intertidal space where toxicities circulate in more-than-human bodies.

During my secondment, I met with SPACEX researchers Frances Yeung, Marley Treloar, Alex Parry, Giorgia Rizzioli, lecturers Mel Jordan, Carolina Rito, Gary Hall, and artists attached to Coventry Biennale, such as Dion Ellis-Taylor. I gave a presentation on my research, called ‘At the Water’s Edge – response to the molecular biopolitics and the polluted aquatic context’ for the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. The event also included a presentation by fellow Spacex-rise researcher, Andri Christofides from Home 4 Cooperation.

I visited the neighbouring city Northampton, and attended the NN Contemporary’s event ‘When I image the earth, I imagine another’ by Open-weather. I also participated in the Civic Reading Room event with NN Contemporary, which included visits to Vulcan Works, Guildhall, 78 Derngate, Civic Reading Room Spaces.

After my secondment, I joined the Postdigital Intimacies reading group with Adrienne Evans, Lindsay Balfour and Marcus Maloney.

Georgia Perkins

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Georgia Perkins at the Royal College of Art, England

The SPACEX secondment took place in August – November 2022. During this period, I focused on my current research on the watery molecular biopolitics of mass toxicity. My research investigates the site specificity of galleries located next to a river, canal or seaport, which leaks into the conceptual underpinnings of their exhibitions and the material conditions of their buildings.

At the RCA, I was involved in meetings with artists and researchers, working in the library and Sculpture department at the Battersea and South Kensington campus. I joined MA Sculpture students on a walking tour of Battersea Park to visit a temporary work called ‘Making Marks’ installed on the site of Barbara Hepworth’s Single Form, which is currently on loan.

The secondment at the RCA has allowed me to become an active member of the ‘Planetary’ group organised by Josephine Berry and Catherine Ferguson for the RCA Earthwise Project. This involved site visits to the Phytology Nature Reserve and Community Project and Eduardo Padhila/ Balin House Projects. The Planetary cohort contributed to the ‘Earthwise’ Pamphlet publication, where I included a chapter on ‘Toxicity.’ This was based on research I had developed over the course of the secondment. I also presented a text panel called ‘The Gallery Holds the Politics of Mass Toxicity at the Molecular Scale’ for the exhibition component of the ‘Earthwise’ project at Beaconsfield Gallery, London.

Concurrently, I am part of the ‘Spaces of Coalescence’ Project which brings together RCA lecturers and post-graduate students, as well as external researchers attached to SPACEX-Rise, including Jaspar Joseph-Lester, Melanie Jackson, Simon King, K. Yoland, Osman Yousefzada, Carmen Maria Mascal, Marisa Ferreira, Ludovica Fales, Ahuvia Kahane and Vittorio Lervese. During the SPACEX-Rise training event in Dublin, we met as a group to discuss plans for the project.

Georgia Perkins

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Aideen Quirke

SIRIUS, Ireland

Aideen Quirke is a curator and arts worker. As Programme Manager at SIRIUS, her work involves the research, support and realisation of projects and programmes focusing on working with artists, communities and partnership building. Through SPACEX, she is interested in frameworks for accessibility within artistic research and production outcomes through reciprocal practice between the institution and the artist. She is a recipient of the Arts Council of Ireland Visual Artist Bursary Award 2022, which funds her independent curatorial work. She engages directly with the production of collaborating artists’ work, contributing, facilitating and participating in theory (reciprocal knowledge production and communication) and hands-on practice (fabrication, installation, display methods and audience engagement). She has worked in curatorial, administrative and production roles at galleries and museums across Ireland and internationally, and holds a BA in Fine Art from MTU Crawford College of Art and Design and an MA in Museum Studies from University College Cork.

http://www.siriusartscentre.ie

Secondment destination
University of Amsterdam, Netherlands, June 2024

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Fani Arampatzidou

MayDay Rooms, UK

Fani is an educator, theatre practitioner and activist. For the past eight years she has been working in the cultural heritage sector, co-running MayDay Rooms, a radical history archive, and setting up the East End Women’s Museum in London. Alongside her archival and museum work, ie building collections, programming events, talks, exhibitions, and publications to promote their activation, she has been involved in designing and delivering political education projects, researching the convergence of oral history, the paper archive and education. She is currently looking into archival and historical dissemination practices in the public space, mainly using oral history and verbatim theatre.

https://maydayrooms.org/

Secondment destination
National Technical University of Athens, Greece, September 2022

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Georgia Perkins

SIRIUS, Ireland

Georgia Perkins is a Curatorial Fellow at SIRIUS, Cobh, County Cork, Ireland. Georgia has worked on numerous exhibitions and events with artists and writers such as Daniela Ortiz, Chila Kumari Burman, Shen Xin, Marie Brett, Anton Vidokle, Gregory Sholette, Amanda Rice, and The White Pube. During the SPACEX-Rise project, she investigates polluted aquatic ecologies in the currents of late capitalism. This research draws from the geographical context of the Cobh port area, where SIRIUS is situated, and her doctoral research into molecularity, indeterminacy and the sensible. She is also a tutor and doctoral candidate at Goldsmiths University of London and a visiting lecturer at Winchester School of Art. She has three book chapters to be published by Routledge and Sternberg Press in 2023 and 2024. 

http://www.siriusartscentre.ie

Secondment destinations
Royal College of Art, London UK, August – November 2022
Coventry University, UK, January – March 2023
University of Northampton, UK, October – November 2023

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Kallia Fysaraki

National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Kallia Fysaraki is a PhD candidate and teaching assistant at the School of Architecture of the National Technical University of Athens. She graduated from the Department of Architectural Engineering at the University of Patras and holds a master’s degree from the Postgraduate Program Research in Architecture: Architectural Design – Space – Culture of the NTUA. Since 2010, she has been a co-founding member of cultural groups and research collectives, such as Pismones Chori (transl. stubborn spaces/espaços teimosos), Revisiting On the Commons part of the Laboratory for the Urban Commons (LUC), etc., where she co-initiated self-learning processes, public interventions and actions towards space-commoning. Her doctoral research focuses on photography as a practice of habitation of the public space, exploring published amateur photographs from the example of the Occupied Squares movement of 2011-2013.

Secondment destination
CASCO, September 2023

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Ilaria Speri

Director, The Wonder Cabinet

Ilaria Speri is a curator and manager of exhibitions, cultural projects, and publications. She holds a Master in Photography from NABA Milano (2012), executive training in Management at the SDA Bocconi (2020-21), and completed Ashkal Alwan’s Home Workspace Program 2021 (Beirut). For ten years she worked in Milan as a producer and curator with Fantom and the creative consultancy studio Boiler. In these contexts, she worked extensively across the Mediterranean, with institutions such as Arte Fiera Bologna; Bardo National Museum, Tunis; Beit Beirut, Lebanon; Fundació Enric Miralles, Barcelona; the Florence International Crafts Fair; Les Rencontres Internationales de la Photographie de Fès, Morocco; Manifesta Biennial, Palermo; and Triennale Milano. A former lecturer on the History of Photography at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, she was curatorial coordinator of the festival Fotopub in Novo Mesto, Slovenia, and a photography correspondent at Il Giornale dell’Arte (2015-20). Her writing has been published in books and magazines, most recently in ‘Dixit Algorizmi. The Garden of Knowledge’ for the Pavilion of Uzbekistan at the 59th Venice Biennale. She moved to Bethlehem, Palestine in March 2022 to take on the direction of the Wonder Cabinet.

https://wondercabinet.space/

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Hayriye Rüzgar

Home for Cooperation, Cyprus

Hayriye is the Program Planning & Communications Officer of the Home for Cooperation. She holds a BA in Political Science and International Relations from Boğaziçi University/Istanbul and a MSc in Communication Science from the University of Amsterdam, with a focus on Political Communication. Her thesis was a case study of Cyprus, where she conducted a comparative content analysis on the framing of municipal and parliamentary election campaign periods, testing the “personalization of politics” argument.  Although she is not currently continuing in academia, moving onwards, Hayriye is particularly interested to explore the potential of art as a political tool in creating a space for expressing alternative narratives, and the ways it can be utilized for campaigning by different political actors.  

www.home4cooperation.info

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Emer Grant

NN Contemporary Art, UK

Emer Grant is the current Artistic Director and CEO of NN Contemporary Art, a National Portfolio Organisation in Northampton. She is a Curator, Producer, and Researcher who completed her studies at CCS Bard College (USA) the University of York (UK), and the University of Brighton. Emer was a Fellow for The Recalibrated Institution (Miami) and Curator at Art Center South Florida (now Oolite Arts). Prior she has curated shows and programming for various institutions including the Hessel Museum (NY), P! Gallery (NY), ISCP (NY), Stroom den Haag (NL) Void Gallery (NI), Pollinaria (IT), Yeah Maybe (MN), PHL (DE) and The Grand Parade Gallery (UK). She was Visiting Tutor at the RCA, Visiting Curator at Bard College MFA, Visiting Curator at the University of Minnesota Studio Arts BFA and Visiting Critic for Florida International University’s Architecture BFA programme. and has written for various publications including, Nero, Electronic Beats, The Editorial, The Miami Rail and Rhizome.

She was a fellow selected for the ICI (Independent Curators International) 2013 and has consulted for various organizations on Digital Arts and interdisciplinary strategies for public space, she was also an Associate Curator for Left Gallery (Berlin). Emer initiated and developed the 4.7 mil capital project at  24 Guildhall Road, Northampton, due to be completed in 2024. The renovations of the old Town Hall built in 1927 ( across 5 floors & 2000 sqm) will become NNCA’s new permanent home. Facilities will include a new gallery space, project space, education studio and civic reading room.  NNCA plays a unique role in the ecology of the visual arts in the town and region, focusing on how artist-led institutions can be developed and defined for the 21st century.

Secondment Destination:
Athens: June 2023

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