Danaé

Visual artist, burned-out climate activist, educator. Born in 1987 in Warsaw, Poland. Graduate of the University of Arts in Poznań , majoring in Photography. She heads the Second Studio of Photography (together with Dr. Mariusz Filipowicz) and the Studio of Photography Basics at the Faculty of Graphics of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. A member of the Pracownia Wschodnia Association, the Program Council of the Pracownia Wschodnia Gallery, and the P.H.U. Sitex collective. She is interested in grassroots practices of self-organisation and resistance. She navigates the conceptual realm that exists both within and beyond the binary oppositions foundational to the construction of Western civilization (‘culture versus nature’ and ‘art versus science’). She employs various strategies – visual art, academic research, activist experience – to transcend, deconstruct and rethink these binaries, bringing seemingly heterogeneous fi elds of knowledge to life. Although her practice is based on abstract ideas, the artist always remains close to material reality, focusing on ways of understanding (and feeling) how parts of the ecosystem live and die and how they affect each other.

Emilia Martin is a Polish artist and photographer based in The Hague, Netherlands, where in 2022 she graduated from Photography & Society Masters at the Royal Academy of the Art. Working with photography, writing, and sound, she explores how the stories we tell shape the realities we inhabit. She investigates mythologies and tales, and how they fluctuate and shift throughout histories. Through her work, she aims to complicate the binary understandings of fiction and truth and their established aesthetics. Her process is based on careful research and personal, often playful approaches, through which she questions dominant narratives. The belief in storytelling is rooted in her upbringing, where she engaged with both rural mythologies and urban narratives. She grew up between two different realities: a remote farm belonging to her grandmother in rural Eastern Poland and a heavy industry coal mining urban region in the West of the country. The clash between these two realities, the narrative of extractivism against rural mythologies and the proximity of nature, formed a place that continues to ground her artistic practice. Her work is inspired and informed by her rural Polish ancestry and intersectional feminist approaches.

Milena Soporowska is a visual artist based in Poland. Her work explores, among other things, the intertwining of everyday life with magic and the occult, questioning the concept of home as a safe, familiar haven. She is interested in the combination of alternative medicine and psychoanalysis, and the overlap between Christianity, esotericism and folk spirituality.She graduated in Art History, presenting her master's thesis on the influence of spiritualistic and mediumistic photography on art in the light of Freud's category of unheimlich. She also studied photography, museology and psychotronics. Moreover, Milena is a graduate of the Sputnik Photos mentoring programme.Read more

Ignacio Navas (b. 1989 Tudela, lives and works in Madrid) creates computational, generative and interactive projects based on photographic image to research how dominant structures—political, economic, or social—are made present and shape our everyday affairs. With this approach, Ignacio explores the possibilities that emerging technologies, computing, and new media offer to the photographic medium. His recent work has received support from several grants and institutions, including the Visual Arts Creation Fellowship (Community of Madrid, 2024) and the Plastic and Visual Arts Fellowship (Government of Navarra, 2024). His images and interactive installations have also been part of initiatives such as Plat(t)form at Fotomuseum Winterthur (Switzerland, 2024), the Photoworks Digital Programme (UK, 2023), the Return2Ithaca Residency (Greece, 2023), and the FUTURES European Photography Platform (Netherlands, 2022). Ignacio believes that contemporary creation cannot be understood without actively engaging in its own management. This conviction drives him to lead collective initiatives such as La Embajada (2024–), a platform to showcase projects created within the Spanish territorial context in the unofficial circuit of the Rencontres d’Arles festival, or El Local (2023–), an independent space for contemporary photography in Madrid.

Carlos Trancoso is a Portuguese visual artist that works and lives in Porto. He uses the photographic gaze as a critical tool to understand how the human being relates to technology. His work aims to challenge established patterns of interaction relating to the creation of images in contemporary society. Although he mainly uses fictional approaches, his work incorporates a documental photography language with the expanded practice of creating cameraless images, mixed media and computer generated images. He is a founding member of Barda collective, which utilizes visual arts to foster social cohesion. He has exhibited at festivals such as Photoalicante, Backlight (2020), Photo Open Up, f/est Amarante (2022), Athens Digital Arts Festival (2023), Bienal da Maia (2021/2023) and Bienal de Fotografia do Porto (2025) . His works have also been exhibited in spaces such as Galeria FFAC, Galeria Dentro and MIRA FORUM in Porto, Casa do Capitão and XYZ Books in Lisbon and El Local in Madrid.

Karol Szymkowiak (b. 1983) is a photographer, photobook artist, curator and educator based in Poznań, Poland. Self-taught photographer, specializing in documentary photography and photo collages - work with archives. His work revolves around themes such as environmental problems, military and civil defence, physical and mental immobilisation. He is constantly fascinated by finding surrealism in faithfully recording reality using photography. As a photographer, he has participated in over a dozen group exhibitions. Since 2015 he is art curator of a long-term photography documentary project The Września Collection (Kolekcja Wrzesińska) whose patron is the Mayor of the City and Municipality of Września. As part of his work on this project, he is collaborating with leading Polish photographers to create photobooks and exhibitions about his home town of Września. Karol is a member of The Association of Polish Art Photographers (ZPAF) and a scholarship recipient of the Marshal of the Wielkopolska Region in the field of culture. He is also a lecturer in photography at the Institute of Art of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw.

Florine Thiebaud (b. 1992, France) is a photographer based in Marseille. With a post-documentary practice that combines photography and writing, she places a significant emphasis on publishing. She explores the notions of imprisonment and isolation, the passage of time, loss of control, identity, and her connection to others. From 2016 to 2019, she developed two projects focused on the consequences of the waiting for papers for exiled people in Greece, placing the relationship with the other at the heart of her practice.The first was the project Exils, which won the Roger de Conynck Prize and was exhibited at the Recylart Gallery in Brussels, followed by Breaking Point. The latter was co-published as a book in May 2022 with Stockmans Art Books, and was exhibited at FOMU in Antwerp and at the Contretype Gallery in Brussels as part of the .TIFF selection and Propositions d’Artistes. Developing her reflections on notions of imprisonment and isolation and their consequences, she is currently working on a project about families of incarcerated people, Des Ondes (On Waves), based on a personal story. This project has received support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, and part of it was already exhibited in 2023 at the Delta Cultural Center in Namur as part of a group exhibition. In parallel, following confrontations with her own physical and mental limits facing depression, she developped a new series of self-portraits: Revenir (Coming back). Using once again repetitive imagery and a consistent aesthetic, she explores the intersection of vulnerability, isolation, and transformation through self-portraiture. Photographing herself during moments of crisis and depression, she seeks to capture the disconnect between her inner world and reality.

Zoe is a photographer from Co. Antrim, now living in Edinburgh. Zoe is interested in the relationship between humans and the environment, as well as the systems of classification that we use to make sense of the world around us. She works on long term photographic projects, drawing on scientific and historic research as well as lived experience to tell a story about a place or subject. Her background research has been informed by photography’s history as a tool of imperialism and this is something that she works to recognise and subvert within her photographic practice. She currently teaches on the Stills School, an alternative education programme for young people and is a visiting lecturer at Queen Margaret University. She has received funding from Edinburgh City Council and the Richard & Siobhan Coward Foundation and was recently included in Fantasy Island, a publication documenting the last 50 years of photography in Ireland. Zoe participated in PhotoIreland's New Irish Works III between 2019 and 2021.

Nuno Alexandre Serrão is a Portuguese photographer and director whose work explores the relationship between natural landscapes and human-made structures, combining cinematic formalism and raw storytelling. Led by curiosity, he often creates or documents non-linear narratives about uncomfortable and ambiguous topics that challenge comfort zones and encourage reflection, ultimately provoking questions about what is fundamental or emergent. His work has gained international attention, and is published in established media outlets like HuffPost, Público, Expresso, L’Hémcycle, Cosmopolitan, Marie Claire, and GQ. It has also been exhibited in cultural institutions such as Fotogalerie Friedrichshain in Berlin, ImageNation in Milan, ArtIcon in Paris, and the National Museum of Finland. His short films and commercial projects have been recognized at festivals like Aesthetica, Caminhos do Cinema Português, FUSO, and Inshadow Festival. Critics describe Serrão’s work as ‘pursuing the beauty that emerges at the intersection of nature and humanity’ (Ana Marques Maia, Público, 2024). Claire Ducresson-Boët describes his landscapes as ‘places of passage and transition where time seems to stand still, offering a moment of quietness before life resumes.’

Nayara Leite (b. 1989) is a Brazilian artist and writer based in Bergen, Norway. She holds an MFA from the Bergen Art Academy and an MA in Photojournalism & Documentary Photography from the London College of Communication. Nayara works across text, performance, film, photography and installation. Through autobiographical narrative, political news, archival material and letters to close friends, she produces a portrayal of the reality in which the LGBTQ+ community lives in Brazil and in Norway. She has exhibited and/or held performances at Bergen Kunsthall, Palmera, Lydgalleriet, Isotop, Bergen Kjøtt and KODE 2 in Bergen; Preus Museum in Horten; Studio 17 in Stavanger; Oslo Negativ, Kunstnerforbundet and Kunstnernes Hus in Oslo; and Momentum Biennale in Moss.‍