Porto, 2010, Ana Pedrosa
ANA PEDROSA qualified as an architect at the University of Porto in 2007. Her interests lie in spatial practices across architecture/art/urban experiences; participatory, indeterminate design processes; and architectural objects seen in relation to the inhabitant and the landscape. Her experience includes hybrid projects articulating design and action such as Bonding Spaces–Europan 9, and interdisciplinary public space interventions such as Space of Encounter and Porto Community.
ANDREA GIBBONS has spent most of her working life in Los Angeles, working with Latin American refugees on asylum and immigration issues, and with SAJE fighting displacement and environmental injustice, and helping to create the Figueroa Corridor Community Land Trust. Through SAJE she was also part of the founding of the US Right to the City Alliance. She is an editor with PM Press, associate editor of CITY, contributor to drpop.net, and completing a PhD in geography at LSE.
ANJA KANNGIESER is a cultural geographer, who is involved in political and social collectives in Australia and Germany. She has been working on examining the intersections between aesthetics and activism, specifically German activist groups that use aesthetic techniques as a means of articulating their dissent. She is also involved in the future archive project, and works with installation and radio.
ANTHONY LUVERA is an Australian artist, writer and educator based in London. His first book Residency was published by Belfast Exposed Photography in August 2010. www.luvera.com
BRUNO RINVOLUCRI is a research assistant at Cambridge University’s World Oral Literature project. He also produces radio programmes for Resonance FM.
Lea & Brenda Mayo (2010); Moira, Mostyle fabric stall (2009), Dalston Market, Carolin Teo
CAROLIN TEO'S photographic work, exploring themes of identity, paradox, affiliation, alienation and home, has been exhibited in galleries in Montreal, Brussels, Vancouver and London. www.carolineteo.com
DAVID KNIGHT is an independent designer, researcher and tutor. His critical projects about the contemporary built environment have been exhibited and published internationally. In parallel to his practice, he teaches at University of East London and Kingston University, and has been a guest tutor at the Architectural Association, the École Spéciale d’Architecture (Paris) and the Royal College of Art. The author thanks Zig for his advice in the writing of this text. (www.dk-cm.com)
DAVID ROSENBERG leads historical walks of the East End and Islington. He works part-time as a teacher in an inner-city primary school in Islington. In recent years he has created the Islington local2global project bringing together local history, geography and global citizenship issues. This is being accessed by 9-10 year olds in several Islington schools. He also works as a freelance writer and editor, and has contributed several articles on history and current affairs for Channel 4 and other websites. He has been active in the Jewish Socialists’ Group since 1976 and is on the editorial committee of Jewish Socialist magazine. He is currently completing a book on Jewish responses to Mosley’s Movement in Britain in the 1930s, which will be published in 2011 by Five Leaves Publications. www.eastendwalks.com
DEEPA NAIK Has worked with Art for Change, public works and the Serpentine Gallery, while co-ordinating projects with Irit Rogoff (Goldsmiths) including: De-Regulation (MuHKA 2006, Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art 2007); A.C.A.D.E.M.Y: Learning from the Museum (Van Abbemuseum 2006); SUMMIT: non-aligned initiatives in education culture (Multitude e.V. 2007); and Eye Witness (Birkbeck School of Law 2008). She continues to explore a set of questions that have resulted from her interest in post-colonial theory, the intersection of cultural movements and legal systems, critical art practice and alternative pedagogies. In 2007, together with Trenton Oldfield, Deepa Naik formally established This Is Not A Gateway, a not-for-profit organisation that creates platforms for critical investigations into cities. www.thisisnotagateway.net
ELIZABETH FONSECA is an environmental engineer with over 14 years’ experience specialising in the design, implementation and review of contaminated land and water investigations, risk assessments and remediation strategies, as well as developing and implementing pollution control techniques in industrial processes. She has worked both in the private and the public sectors in the United States and England, and is currently the Environmental Quality Manager for the London Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham.
i am here, London, 2009, Fugitive Images
GILLIAN McIVER is a UK-based Canadian writer, filmmaker and artist. She studied history and philosophy before moving to Europe and training in photography and filmmaking. She has made many site-specific projects with the Luna Nera group, as well as Places, a collection of short films about sites including Mikhail Bulgakov’s Moscow flat, a Berlin bunker and the Paris catacombs. Her work has been screened and shown in exhibitions in the UK, Canada, Russia and around Europe. www.artsite.org.uk
JASON WAITE is the founder of the International Guerrilla Video Festival and an independent curator currently based in London. www.igvfest.com
JILLY TRAGANOU is an architect (PhD University of Westminster) and Assistant Professor in Spatial Design Studies at Parsons The New School for Design. Her work examines space and architecture in intersection with the fields of cultural, media and design studies, currently focusing on design’s role in the configuration of national and post-national identities. She is the author of The Tôkaidô Road: Traveling and Representation in Edo and Meiji Japan (RoutledgeCurzon, 2004), has published widely, and lectured and participated in conferences internationally.
Oxygenator, Grzybowski, Square, Warsaw, 2007, Konrad Pustola
JOANNA ERBEL is a sociologist and photographer, completing her PhD at the University of Warsaw’s Institute of Sociology on the role of non-human actors in urban transformation in post-socialist cities. She is a member of the team of the quarterly journal Political Critique (Krytyka Polityczna) and co-founder of Duopolis Association.
JOEL CADY graduated from London’s Bartlett School of Architecture in 2009. He has since had a solo exhibition at the Bartlett and designed and built an architectural materials library for the Sorrell Foundation at Somerset House, London. He works in London for the architects/lighting designers Pippa Nissen Studio ZNA.
JONATHAN ROKEM is an urban planner and PhD candidate at the Department of Politics & Government at Ben Gurion University of the Negev. His research interests focus on spatial and social critical analysis of cities. He works as an urban planning consultant specialising in community engagement with NGOs and the private and public sectors. A graduate in philosophy and geography from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, with a masters degree in urban studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science, he formerly held the Project Manager position of the Advocacy Participation and NGOs in Planning (www.apango.eu) EU-funded project at the Town and Country Planning Association in London, UK.
From the series Sites of Africa, 2001 - present, Joy Gregory
JOY GREGORY is a photographer and video artist of Jamaican descent who was born and raised in the UK. A graduate of Manchester Polytechnic and the Royal College of Art, and the recipient of numerous awards, she maps social and political aspects of culture and history, with a particular interest in cultural difference. Her work has been exhibited all over the world, shown in many biennales and festivals, and is included in the UK Arts Council Collection, Victoria and Albert Museum, Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, Australia, and Yale British Art Collection. www.joygregory.co.uk
From Under Gods: Stories from Soho Road, 2007-2009, Liz Hingley
LIZ HINGLEY is a photographer who documents political and social issues, with an interest in alternative modes of community living. A graduate in editorial photography (Brighton University, 2007), she recently completed a two-year scholarship with Fabrica research and communications department in Italy. She is currently studying for an MA in Social Anthropology at University College London, and is also working on projects with the Royal Society of Arts. www.lizhingley.com
MATT BELCHER recently completed an MSc in spatial planning at the Bartlett School of Planning, University College London, having previously graduated in geography. His research interests are interdisciplinary, focusing on urbanity, architecture and the often-overlooked processes that contribute to the continual evolution of the built environment.
MAX HACKE is a 3rd year RIBA Part 1 student at the Architectural Association. His work has focused on cities and their infrastructures, and his most recent project is a reflection on how cities like London can provide spaces for smaller communities to generate individual identities. He has received the Alexander Memorial Travel Award.
NIKOLA MIHOV works in the fields of photography and video art. He has held solo exhibitions in Sofia, Paris, Zagreb, London and Berlin and participated in numerous international group exhibitions and film festivals. In 2009 he received the Photo School Award at the 6th international photography biennial “Phodar”, and in 2007 the Award for Photojournalism in the Bulgarian Photographic Academy’s annual contest. His work has been published in the prestigious French photography magazines PHOTO and Reponses Photo. www.nikolamihov.com
New section of sewer under Brixton, London, 2000, Paul Dobraszczyk
PAUL DOBRASZCZYKis an art historian, focusing on visual culture in 19th-century Britain. He currently works at the University of Reading on the AHRC-funded project Designing Information for Everyday Life, 1815-1914. He has published widely on such diverse topics as the London sewers, urban transport, advertising, industrial architecture, maps, the design of census forms, and industrial ruins. His first book is Into the Belly of the Beast: Exploring London’s Victorian Sewers.
PIPPA KOSZEREK is an artist and curator based in London. She is one of the founders of POST, the UK network for artists who respond to place, and of Island Projects, an ongoing curatorial collaboration exploring notions of urban experience and the city.
ROHINI MALIK OKON is a writer based in London. Over the past 15 years she has written numerous articles and essays on contemporary art and visual culture, with a particular interest in cultural difference, performative practices and the relationships between art, public space and civic dialogue. Published works include a series of essays in Performing Difference (Artsadmin, 2004), an interview with artist Joy Gregory in Objects of Beauty (Autograph, 2004) and a chapter in Art of Negotiation (Arts Council, 2007). She is currently Project Manager at Stream, a creative production agency commissioning collaborative public art projects across the London Borough of Greenwich. Previously, she was Projects Curator (Education and Research) at Iniva, and co-ordinated the AHRC funded research project Translating the Image - Cross Cultural Contemporary Arts at Goldsmiths.
RUHANA ALI is a community organiser with London Citizens and is responsible for working with and developing 25 different member institutions in Tower Hamlets. She also works as senior organiser for the Muslim community with Citizens UK, the national organisation that aims to teach and train leaders in the art of politics in action. She read Social Policy, Criminal Justice and Psychology at the London School of Economics, where she was involved in the Living Wage Campaign through her Sabbatical post at the Students’ Union.
SHELINA ZAHRA JANMOHAMED is the author of Love in a Headscarf, a humorous and irreverent memoir about growing up as a Muslim woman. She is also the award-winning blogger spirit21.co.uk.
SOMMER SPIERS is a consultant in the development, regeneration and design of urban areas. She has been involved in implementing a framework for cultivating uses on disused sites in London, research for regeneration of Portobello Road Market and an urban development workshop in Istanbul. She has a masters degree in city design and social science from the London School of Economics and Political Science and has practiced as an architect in Auckland and Melbourne.
STEFANIE BRAUN is a curator at The Photographers’ Gallery in London.
STEVPHEN SHUKAITIS is an editor at Autonomedia and lecturer at the University of Essex. He is the author of Imaginal Machines: Autonomy & Self-Organization in the Revolutions of Everyday Life (2009) and editor (with Erika Biddle and David Graeber) of Constituent Imagination: Militant Investigations // Collective Theorization (2007).
TRENTON OLDFIELD Has worked for over a decade in non-governmental organisations specialising in urban renewal, cultural and environmental programmes. He was Coordinator of the Thames Strategy – Kew to Chelsea, Strategic Project Manager at Cityside Regeneration, and a Community Development Worker in North Kensington. Alongside his formal work he has continued to explore questions about cities via personal projects, including installations in the public realm, film, guest editing and guest lecturing, and has been active on the boards of the Westway Development Trust, London Citizens and Subtext. Current projects include research for a book that unearths the socio-political history of fences/railings in London, part of an attempt to find a way beyond the existing conventions around ownership, specifically land ownership in the 21st century. Trenton Oldfield formally established the not-for-profit organisation This Is Not A Gateway with Deepa Naik in 2007. www.thisisnotagateway.net