Researchers

Coventry University, UK

Elpida is Operations Manager for the Creative Cultures Research Centres at Coventry University (UK). She has long-standing experience in supporting research teams to deliver high-quality research in the Creative Arts. Elpida holds a PhD in Information Systems from the Athens University of Economics and Business (Greece). She held research positions both in academia (University of Essex) and industry (Open Data Institute). She was also the A.C. Laskaridis Post-Doctoral Fellow at the European Institute, LSE. As researcher, her work is focusing on digital innovation, data infrastructures and experiential computing. Her work has been published in the European Journal of Information Systems, New Media & Society and Political Studies and presented in major conferences in the area of Information Systems, Politics and Media Studies.

During her SPACEX secondment, Elpida will explore the role of recent digital art exhibitions in the development of a post-crisis narrative for Athens.

Secondment destination
Laboratory for Urban Commons, Athens, Greece, April 2023 and October 2023

National College of Art and Design, Dublin, Ireland (NCAD).

For SpaceX-Rise, Anne Kelly’s research inquiry focuses on the potentialities within a commoning approach in establishing an operative critical spatial practice that functions as a site-specific framework toward public arts programming: exploring long and short social models inclusive of transdisciplinary participation networks engaging existing cultural infrastructures.

Anne Kelly, cultural practitioner, is the curator at the National College of Art and Design, Dublin (NCAD, 2011-) where she operates the NCAD Gallery with particular emphasis on transdisciplinary integrated public programming aligned to institution-specific research directions, the commissioning of new work and fostering collaborative creative partnerships. As well as, working cross-departmentally and lecturing on the School of Visual Culture elective programme. She is a National College of Art and Design, Dublin, BA Fine Art and Trinity College Dublin MSc Comp Sci Multimedia Systems graduate and a recipient of Arts Council of Ireland, CREATE: National Development Agency for Collaborative Arts, Culture Ireland and County Council artist practice funding awards.

www.ncad.ie/about/gallery

Secondment destination
AAU ANASTAS The Wonder Cabinet, Bethlehem, Palestine, 2023

Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki

Denise Ziegler, DFA, is a Helsinki based visual artist and researcher of public space.  In her artistic practice and research, she questions the concepts of urban space and public art. Instead of interrogating people and involving them in the process, Ziegler’s interventional artworks put questions directly to public infrastructure, to walls, fences, or vehicles of public transport. In a post-Beuysian vein, an artist workshop is extended to public space in order to work with its mechanisms and possibilities. Ziegler has made permanent and temporary works in and for public space, her practice includes in three-dimensional assemblages of objects, drawings, paintings, videos, literary-visual works, and writing. Ziegler is currently working as a professor of artistic research at the doctoral programme of the Academy of Fine Arts at the University of the Arts Helsinki and as university lecturer at Transdisciplinary Art Studies (TAITE) at the Department of Art and Media at Aalto University.

http://denise-ziegler.squarespace.com/

Secondment destination
Project Arts Centre, Dublin, Ireland, Spring 2024

School of Architecture, National Technical University of Athens, Greece

Penny Koutrolikou is an Associate Professor at the School of Architecture, NTUA. Her research interests include: urban conflicts and inter-group relations; Urban geopolitics of migration and development; Theories of crises, power and hegemony; socio-spatial justice and legal geographies; Representations and discourse analysis. She is/has been involved in research projects concerning the spatial justice, housing, legal geographies and crises. Her more recent published work include (In)visibilities and “disappearences” from public space (forthcoming 2023), “Constructing European “Souths” through Crises” (South Atlantic Quarterly 122.2, 2023), “Embodied geopolitics: Negotiating belonging from Turkey to Athens” (Political Geography 102, 2023, with Vlastou, F., Karimali E., Avramopoulou, E.), “Instrumentalization of Migration: the geopolitics of migration in EU / Turkey borderlands” (2022, with P. Teunissen), “Reflections on public, private and ‘in-between’ places and living together” (The Journal of Public Space).

http://www.arch.ntua.gr/

Secondment destination
TBC

University of Northampton, UK

José Neves is Lecturer in Photography at the universities of Northampton and Ulster in the United Kingdom. He holds an MA in the History of Photography from De Montfort University and a PhD from University of Ulster, where he conducted extensive academic research on the history and historiography of photographic books. From 2012 to 2017, he created and curated the Irish Photobook project, which resulted in a collection of photography books now housed in the University of Ulster’s special collections. José began his curatorial career at the Wilson Center for Photography in London in 2010 and has since curated various photobook exhibitions in collaboration with Photobook Week Aarhus Festival in Denmark.

He frequently attends conferences and festivals where he presents his research on photography and photobooks. He has also contributed articles on these topics to various specialized academic and non-academic publications. His current research focuses on the general history of the photography book and artist’s book, Portuguese photobook history and the relationship between the HIV-AIDS epidemic and photographically illustrated publications.

Secondment destination
A Reserva na Fábrica, Lisbon, Portugal

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

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

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

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

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