Researchers

Festival dei Popoli – Istituto italiano per il film di documentazione sociale ETS (Italy)

Margot Mecca is a researcher, programmer and producer working mainly in the field of creative documentary. She works at Festival dei Popoli since 2011, she’s currently a member of the selection committee and Head of Doc at Work Future Campus, an initiative dedicated to emerging talents in documentary filmmaking. She collaborates, in different roles, with several film festivals around Europe (FIDMarseille, Visions du Réel, Majordocs).

She holds a PhD in Geography from Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona; she has been a post-doctoral researcher at Universitat Pompeu Fabra from 2019 to 2023. Her research interests focus on urban public space, gender, youth and the use of cinema in ethnographic research.

https://www.festivaldeipopoli.org/

Secondment destination:
University of Applied Arts Vienna, March 2023

Coventry University UK

Gary Hall is media theorist and experimental writer, editor and publisher. He works (and makes) at the intersections of digital culture, politics and technology. He is Professor of Media at Coventry University, UK, where he directs the Centre for Postdigital Cultures. He is the author of a number of books including, most recently, A Stubborn Fury: How Writing Works In Elitist Britain (Open Humanities Press, 2021), Pirate Philosophy (MIT Press, 2016) and The Uberfication of the University (Minnesota UP, 2016). In 1999 he co-founded the critical theory journal Culture Machine, an early champion of open access in the humanities. In 2006 he co-founded Open Humanities Press (OHP), the first open access publishing house explicitly dedicated to critical and cultural theory, which he co-directs. His work can be found at www.garyhall.info

Secondment destination:
CASCO

Van Abbemuseum, NL

Teresa Cos Rebollo studied Art History in the University of Barcelona and Cultural Economics and Entrepreneurship in Erasmus University Rotterdam. Since 2019 she has worked in the Van Abbemuseum where, as assistant curator, has coordinated several projects and exhibitions, including: The Otolith Group Xenogenesis (2019-2023), Parallel Lives, Parallel Aesthetics: Gülsün Karamustafa & León Ferrari (2021-2022), and the Decolonial Summer School 2020-2023.

She is currently working on a research project and collaboration (since 2020) that will develop into an upcoming exhibition called Soils (opening on June 2024) dealing with issues around land use, farming, extractivism and exploring our cultural and spiritual connection to land and territory.

https://vanabbemuseum.nl

Secondment destination:
TBD

Van Abbemuseum, NL

Charles Esche is director of Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and professor of contemporary art and curating at Central Saint Martins, University of the Arts, London where he works with Exhibition Studies. He is a visiting professor at Jan van Eyck Academie, Maastricht and chair of CASCO, Utrecht.

For his secondment he will visit Dublin, Cork and Cobh. In 2023 he will investigate archives and artists that could be useful for the development of the Soils exhibition planned in 2024, dealing with topics around farming, extractivism and land use will also join the Sirius Summer School organised by Mia Lerm-Hayes from University of Amsterdam and Miguel Amado, director at Sirius Art Centre.

In June 2024 he will organise the Sirius Summer School and also spend time in Dublin with NCAD and intend to visit artists including Gerard Byrne whose work is in the Van Abbemuseum collection.

For his secondment he will visit Dublin, Cork and Cobh. In 2023 he will investigate archives and artists that could be useful for the development of the Soils exhibition planned in 2024, dealing with topics around farming, extractivism and land use will also join the Sirius Summer School organised by Mia Lerm-Hayes from University of Amsterdam and Miguel Amado, director at Sirius Art Centre.

In  June 2024 he will organise the Sirius Summer School and also spend time in Dublin with NCAD and intend to visit artists including Gerard Byrne whose work is in the Van Abbemuseum collection. 

https://vanabbemuseum.nl

Secondment destination:
NCAD national college of Art & Design Dublin (SIRIUS, Project Arts), Summer 2023 and Summer 2024

Stroom Den Haag, the Netherlands

Ilga Minjon is a curator, researcher and advisor working at Stroom Den Haag and a tutor at Design Academy Eindhoven with a background in Art History, and interests in societal questions around public space, ecology, and technology. She aims to weave future imaginaries from artistic practices that speculate on the senses and (networked) relations, as well as on queer, decolonial and feminist re-writings of belonging. At Stroom she has curated Attempst to Read the World (Differently): Three Exhibitions in Five Acts, with Max de Waard, Monira al Qadiri and Jean Katambayi Mukendi, Lawrence Lek: Nøtel The Hague, Yvonne Dröge Wendel: To Be To Gather; and most recently From the Sea to the Clouds to the Soil a group exhbition mapping kinship relations across time and technologies with Femke Herregraven, Risk Hazekamp, Urok Shirhan, Yeon Sung and Natasha Tontey. Since 2017, Ilga has initiated the Uncertainty Seminars an ongoing cycle of experimental exchanges, platformfing interdisciplinary ways to imagine doubt as a cultural strategy.

https://stroom.nl/index_en.php

Secondment destination:
TBC

Stroom Den Haag, the Netherlands

Vincent de Boer is a senior advisor of art in public space. Graduated at the sculpture department from the Rietveld academy, he curated the first public space group exhibition EXHANGE/MOSCOW 1993. Working as a free lance curator for Sonsbeek (2001), SKOR (foundation for art in public space), Cultural Embassy Lloyd Hotel and various artist as Tadashi Kawamata, Lily vd Stokker, Maria Roosen, Suchan Kinoshita and Ram Katzir. Since 2009 working for Stroom Den Haag as an advisor art in public space, advising the municipality with the public sculpture collection, De Beeldengalerij (The Sculpture Gallery), art commissions for schools, ‘Scaffold’ by Sam Durant, ‘Resetting’ by Toby Paterson and recently involved with the forthcoming monument to commemorate Slavery in The Hague. He also curated two exhibitions at Stroom ‘A matter of Time, Thom Puckey and the Thorbecke monument’ and photography group exhibition ‘Capturing Corona’.

https://stroom.nl/index_en.php

Secondment destination:
TBC

Stroom Den Haag, the Netherlands

Lua Vollaard is a curator based at Stroom Den Haag, with a background visual cultures, image theory, and human rights. She has been working as a curator at Stroom Den Haag for the past five years. At Stroom, she is particularly interested in investigating the systems and materials that govern society, with a particular focus on infrastructure and notions of justice. In The Hague, her curatorial practice responds to the local branding of ‘the city of peace and justice’.  

Recent projects include the presentation grounds for denial by Anna Dasovic, on the spatial presence of genocide denial in Republika Sprska; the programme Reenactment , on reenactment of acts of state violence as an artistic strategy; an edition of Uncertainty Seminars (2020-21) in collaboration with Ilga Minjon titled There, there, on artistic strategies to challenge conventional notions of distance. Other projects include Hybrid Peace by the Visual Culture Research Center (2019), on the Russian war on Ukraine; andTowards a Black Testimony by Languid Hands (2019), on the (im)possibility of Black testimony in the Western legal system.

https://stroom.nl/index_en.php

Secondment destination:
TBC

A Reserva (Portugal)

Ilídio Louro (1972) is an architect and a designer, working since 2012 at the Portuguese consultancy Mapa das Ideias as a designer and project manager and in the fields of Heritage, Culture and Public Participation. After an early career as a junior architect, he studied journalism and worked later on as a journalist, a communications officer and a consultant for different design, architecture and engineering firms.

He has been involved in the development and implementation of several European and local cooperation projects, among which the Museum Mediators Europe, ADESTE plus and MEMEX, working with a number of academic, cultural and arts organisations like the Gulbenkian Modern Art Museum, Fondazione Fitzcarraldo, the Portuguese National Plan for the Arts and Culture Action Europe.

As a member of the non-profit A Reserva since 2015, he has been interested in investigating the particular character of cities, that close-grained juxtaposition of talent and cultural diversity that allows societies to thrive.

As a member of the Oeiras’27 bid book team between 2021 and 2022, he focused on the opportunity to leverage Oeiras’ bid to European Capital of Culture 2027 as a participatory groundswell, giving real agency to communities and individuals, opening up the possibility of artistic exploration and expression on their own terms.

http://www.a-reserva.org/

Secondment destination:
TBC