Court of Honour, Franco-British Exhibition, London 1908 from Clare Burnett & Clare Odgers' contribution to CC Vol 3

Ana Kutleša graduated in art history and philosophy from the University of Zagreb. Her work with the association [BLOK] began in 2008, and since 2009 she has been a member of the curatorial team for UrbanFestival, a yearly festival of contemporary art in public spaces. Since the end of 2007 she has worked in Gallery Miroslav Kraljević, producing socially engaged projects and curating several exhibitions by younger generation artists. As the author of forewords, reviews and interviews she has collaborated with the Gallery SC, Secret Exhibitions project, Gallery VN, Gallery SC, web magazine Kulturpunkt, Journal Kontura, the magazine of art history students Kontrapunkt, the bi-weekly paper Zarez (Comma) and the magazine Život umjetnosti. She lives and works in Zagreb.

Ana Povoas trained as an architect at the University of Porto and worked in London as a master planner, experiencing the drift of the malleable semantics of urban regeneration discourses and agendas. She is currently a PhD candidate at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. Rooted in the concept of spatial justice, she is challenging the physical dimension of space as the primary matter of urban planning. In parallel, she is developing participatory cartographies, in the context of the Porto Festival she co-presented at the TINAG festival 2009. The ideal space of the inhabitants and the soft physicality of the public space are the resources of this urban investment. Spirit of ’68 is her anchor to London’s excesses, abuses, seductions and resistant energies.

Ashley L. Wong is an artist, cultural worker and researcher based in London. Originally from Canada, she completed an MA at Goldsmiths, University of London. She has lived in Hong Kong where she worked on a number of cultural projects and for media arts organisations. She is the founder of independent arts platform LOUDSPKR and co-founder of international research collective DOXA along with Yuk Hui. Her work has been presented in the Hong Kong and Shenzhen Biennale of Urbanism and Architecture (Hong Kong, 2009), Urban Nomad Festival (Taipei, 2009), Rencontre Internationale (Paris/Madrid/Berlin, 2009), New York (Asian Cultural Council, 2009), ARTe SONoro (Madrid, 2010), Clandestino Festival (Gothenburg, 2010), Sound@Media (Seoul, 2010), and This is Not a Gateway Festival (London, 2010). (www.loudspkr.org, www.doxacollective.org) 

Bojan Mucko is a student of philosophy, ethnology and cultural anthropology at the University of Zagreb. His work deals with cultural anthropological theories of identity and anthropology of space, and he is interested in methodological cross sections of humanistic disciplines and contemporary arts. He works as a freelance writer, researcher and visual artist.

Cristina Garrido Sánchez has an MA in urban sociology (Goldsmiths College, University of London) and a BA in visual arts (University of Barcelona). Her research is the intersection of art with social, cultural and political issues, especially how creativity can be a tool for questioning and eventually changing dominant contemporary realities. She has worked as a freelance researcher and curator for different projects and organisations in various international contexts, such as Post It City, Occasional Urbanities (CCCB, Barcelona 2008); Skill Exchange (Serpentine Gallery, London 2010) and the Franklin Furnace Archive (New York). She is currently working at the Centre for Urban and Community Research (CUCR), Goldsmiths, University of London, where she is undertaking research and evaluation of community art projects. She also works as a projects co-ordinator at Idensitat, a non-profit organisation based in Barcelona which commissions socially and politically engaged art projects. She has written for several catalogues and magazines and writes periodically about art and society in the magazine Encuentros.

Clare Burnett is a painter, sculptor and site-specific artist, based in London. She makes pared-down, abstract artworks which encourage people to engage visually, philosophically and creatively with their environment. In partnership with Clare Odgers, she devised and ran a film and art project about the 1908 White City Olympics, working with local schools and residents, to mark the centenary. (www.greatwhitecity.com, www.clareburnett.net)

Clare Odgers is a documentary filmmaker who helps young people use digital technology to give themselves a voice and express what they feel about the world. She has made films with schools across London, working most recently for local councils, Building Schools for the Future and the Victoria and Albert Museum. In partnership with Clare Burnett, she devised and ran a film and art project about the 1908 White City Olympics, working with local schools and residents, to mark the centenary. (www.greatwhitecity.com)

Claudia Loueiro graduated as an architect in 1974 at the Federal University of Pernambuco and completed her PhD in architecture and urbanism at the Faculdade de Arquitetura da Universidade de São Paulo in 2000. She is a retired lecturer from the Federal University of Pernambuco. Her interests lie in architectural design, architectural morphology and architectural theory.

David Boulogne is a French artist photographer, based in London, who documents and questions social issues and the medium of photography itself. (http://www.davidboulogne.com)

David Rosenberg is a writer, teacher, educationalist and tour guide (www.eastendwalks.com). He is the author of Battle for the East End: Jewish responses to fascism in the 1930s, published by Five Leaves Publications, and part of the Organising Committee of Cable Street75.

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. She teaches aesthetics and criticism in the Faculty of Design and Architecture at Dar Al Hekma in Jeddah. 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)

Demetris Taliotis is a conjectural theorist, a transdisciplinary artist and impromptu restauranteur. He is also the Director of APOTHEKE Contemporary Arts, Nicosia, Cyprus.

Evanthia Tselika is a researcher, visual producer and educator, currently undertaking research at Birkbeck, University of London, on social engagement and the arts-development in the divided centre of Nicosia. She has worked, exhibited and collaborated with various galleries and museums in London, El Salvador, Cyprus, Greece and Brazil.

 From the series Filipinas in Hong Kong, 2010, Marisa Gonzalez 

Fadi Shayya is a practicing urban planner and critical urbanist, living and working between Beirut and Arab countries. He is interested in public space as the spatial manifestation of power struggles and in landscape as the platform of post-modern urban planning. Fadi is the editor of At the Edge of the City and the co-ordinator of DISCURSIVE FORMATIONS, a Beirut-based critical think tank and research platform. (http://www.discursiveformations.net/)

Fouad Asfour is a freelance writer and editor, living and working between Vienna and Johannesburg. He has worked with various art institutions and was part of the editorial team of documenta 12 magazines, Kassel. Experiencing the production of contemporary art and culture, he has critically distanced himself from various forms of cultural hegemony, and he is currently examining ways to apply critical discourse analysis to conditions of production and teaching of contemporary art as part of his PhD thesis.

Hassan Mahamdallie is a senior officer at Arts Council England. He has a background in radical theatre and for many years was a campaigning journalist. He is the author of Crossing the river of fire: the socialism of William Morris (London: Redwords, 2008). He contributed to the publication Beyond Cultural Diversity: The Case for Creativity (Third Text, 2010). Hassan is the editor of Defending Multiculturalism: A Guide for the Movement (Bookmarks 2011) and is on the editorial board of the new journal Critical Muslim.

Henrietta Williams is based between the UK and Ireland. Using still photography and multimedia, her practice examines the built environment exploring ideas around regeneration, liminal spaces, borders and fortress urbanism. Alongside commissions her personal work has been exhibited widely in the UK and Ireland and featured in documentaries in the UK, Germany and Switzerland. (www.henriettawilliams.com)

Ivana Hanaček graduated from the University of Zagreb with a degree in history and art history. She has been working in the association [BLOK] since 2010 and, as a member of the curatorial team of UrbanFestival, she has been exploring aspects of contemporary art in public space. She has been actively engaged in curating since 2005 as a student member of the curatorial association Katapult 6, curating the programme of the photo gallery KIC. During 2006-07 she worked as a curatorial assistant in the Zagreb gallery Križić Roban. In cooperation with Klaudio Stefančić she initiatied Interzone, an international exhibition programme within Gallery Galženica (2009). At the end of 2009 she initiated the interdisciplinary research platform Secret Exhibitions, which does research on the mechanisms of censorship in the context of visual arts, and which was awarded the Chancellor’s Award and the award of the Croatian Designers Society in 2010. She has published reviews, critical art pieces and interviews in several Croatian magazines and newspapers. She works with the Croatian Photo Association on the Conceptual Photos in Croatia project. From 2010 she has also been engaged in pedagogical work and teaching art.

Jhon Arias (Bogota, 1979) is a Colombian artist, interested in the implementation, dissemination and teaching of arts from a modern, diverse and multimedia perspective.

Jo Anne Butler is an Irish artist and designer. Holding a first class joint honours degree from NCAD (National College of Art and Design, Dublin and the Academy of Humanities and Economics, Lodz, Poland) she has worked across a variety of public art disciplines. She began studying architecture at UCD (University College Dublin) in 2007 and currently studies at Arkitektskolen Aarhus, Denmark. This route from art towards architecture then became the starting point for Culturstruction, a collaborative art /design practice with Tara Kennedy. Recent work includes Polyvalency (2011) at the Irish Museum of Modern Art as part of an invited research residency and Conquested at Temple Bar Galleries, Dublin (2011). Jo Anne Butler has also worked as an arts project manager with Breaking Ground, the Ballymun Regeneration Limited per cent for art programme in Dublin, and is co-curator of Commonage, an architectural research project in Callan, Kilkenny, Ireland. (www.culturstruction.com, www.commonagecallan.com)

Juan delGado was born in Cartagena, Spain, and has lived and worked in London since 1994. His work explores urban territory, especially the physical and psychological impact it has on us. Focusing on traumatic experience such as violence, displacement and alienation, delGado has developed a body of work that includes The Wounded Image (1997-2003), Don’t Look Under the Bed (2001), Who Are You Entertaining to? (2002), Suspended Reverie (2006) and Le Rêve de Newton (2010). He produced The Flickering Darkness following a three-month residency at the Universidad de los Andes, Bogota, as part of the 2009 Visiting Arts Colombia-UK artist residency programme.

Judith Ryser, qualified as an architect and urbanist with an MSc in social sciences, is dedicating her cosmopolitan professional life to the built environment, its sustainability and its contribution to the knowledge society. Her activities in Paris, Berlin, Stockholm, Geneva (United Nations), Madrid and London in public sector posts, private practice and universities are focused on cities and development strategies with emphasis on Europe. Based in London, she researches, edits and writes books and articles, produces reports for international organisations and works on regeneration projects also with community groups. She speaks at international professional conferences, carries out consultancies and has published many books and articles. She was vice-president of Isocarp, led one of its urban advisory planning teams and is joint editor of the International Manual of Planning Practice. She is a member of the Chartered Institute of Journalists, the Urban Design Group and its editorial board, and the International Advisory Council of the Fundacion Metropoli for which she writes and co-operates in projects.

Lahary Pittman is a New York visual artist and photojournalist working in gelatin silver prints, film/video and pastels. His films and photographs have been screened and exhibited in New York and internationally including Britain, France, Australia and the Netherlands. Works from his series The Shifting Boundaries & Culture of Manhattan’s Lower East Side were exhibited at the 2010 TINAG festival. In the Delaware Art Museum’s Gordon Parks Arts Competition 2008-09, his film Rhythm and Pain won Best In Show in the film category and his gelatin silver print Succos on the Bowery was a jury winner in the photography category. He is a published photographer with works at auction and in public and private collections. Lahary Pittman has a background of social activism. He was formerly president of a United Nations NGO dedicated to using acupuncture for chronic health conditions worldwide, including Native American Indian reservations, and has received awards and recognition for this work in Spain and Austria.

Lana Salman is a researcher and consultant on urban development and economics, living and working in Beirut. She co-ordinated the Research Advocacy & Public Policy Program at the Issam Fares Institute of the American University of Beirut and has consulted for the United Nations and the World Bank. Lana is currently writing her thesis in urban planning on actors and masterplans in post-conflict societies.

Luiz Amorim is an architect and urban designer (PhD University College London) and Associate Professor at the Federal University of Pernambuco, where he co-ordinates the Advanced Architectural Studies Laboratory – lA2. His work is focused on the relationship between space configuration and behaviour, particularly regarding housing. He was a visiting Professor at the Taubman College of Architecture and Urban Planning, University of Michigan (2004), has published widely, lectured in Brazilian and European universities and participated in conferences internationally.

Marijana Rimanić (Pula, 1985) graduated from the University of Zagreb with a degree in comparative literature and art history. Since 2010 she has been working within the association [BLOK], as a member of the authorial team for the UrbanFestival and as a collaborator on the project of Lala Raščić, Damn Dam. In 2007 she co-initiated the curatorial association Wo_kolektiv, aimed at asserting critical and innovative curatorial practices. As part of the Wo_kolektiv she has curated several exhibitions: Visible and Invisible - Fragments of the City (Gallery Pravi Put, Zagreb, 2007), ALUdiranje (Touch On) (VN Gallery, Zagreb, 2008), Am I That Name? (SC Gallery, Zagreb, 2009). She participated in the realisation of the festivals Queer Zagreb in 2008 and Perforacije in 2009 and worked on the project Secret Exhibitions. She has worked on the realisation of the exhibition A Different Motovun in 2009 in Gallery 5 Tower in Motovun, organised by the Filip Trade Collection. From 2008 to 2010 she worked as a journalist in HRT's programme, Transfer, dedicated to contemporary art and the urban scene. Her articles have been published in the arts publications Zarez and Život Umjetnosti (The Life of Art). She has written the prefaces for the exhibitions of the younger generation artists. She lives and works in Zagreb.

Marisa Gonzalez is a photographer and video artist from Bilbao, Spain. She lives and works between Madrid and London. She graduated in music in Bilbao and in fine arts at the University Complutense, Madrid, and holds an MFA from the School Art Institute of Chicago. Her research focus in the last decade is the city, its memory and transformations, abandoned industrial architecture and its inherent concerns. She has done extensive work on Bilbao’s nuclear plant and the migrant transformation of Hong Kong. She has had more than 50 solo and 170 group exhibitions all over the world including Spain, Beijing, Bogota, Bamako, Hong Kong, New York, London, Germany, Prague, Vienna etc. (www.marisagonzalez.com)

Martin Slavin has lived in Hackney for over 20 years. He has worked with photography in journalism for most of that time. When London won the vote for the Olympics he thought this would make an interesting subject for publication. He joined with others to report on these developments. They set up the GamesMonitor website in 2006 to publish the results of their research. (www.gamesmonitor.org.uk/)

Miriam Metliss is learning officer at the University of Essex Collection of Latin American Art. A joint honours graduate in art history and hispanic studies (University of Nottingham, 2007), she has worked as client liaison for Christie’s Auction House, London (2008-10); at Visiting Arts, London (2007-08); and as education facilitator for the Other Worlds Project, Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Paraná, Brazil (2006). Since 2007, Miriam has worked with the Latin American migrant community in Southwark, Lambeth and Islington, and currently sits on the management committee of the Indo-American Refugee and Migrant Organization (IRMO). She has worked as alliances and education co-ordinator for Colombiage festival of contemporary arts (2008-10).

Mital Patel is a volunteer community campaigner based in North London. On finishing a degree in biochemistry in 2007 she became involved in the Wards Corner Community Coalition and has spent the last four years challenging the hierarchy of the planning system and inequalities of urban development. She has been a key organiser in many of the campaign’s successes including a precedent-setting win in the Court of Appeal. 

Nanna Nielsen is a visual anthropologist. She makes films mainly for exhibitions and humanitarian organisations. Over the last few years she has made filmic explorations on various forms of urban development and their effects on people living in the city.  

Richard Carter is in two minds: a professional architect and an amateur social theorist. By day, he tailors the bursting seams of contemporary citymaking, by night he is troubled by the cultural consequences of the commercialised sustainable regeneration industry. Raised in the Far West and graduating from the University of East London in 2002, following a deep draught of Danish social materialism and Polish emotional irrationalism, he strongly believes a proper resolution for the specificity of place can be found at the intersection of art with commerce, language, politics and the shared environment.

Robin Bale is an artist and writer from London. He makes improvised spoken word pieces. He studied sculpture at the Royal College of Art and has recently received a scholarship to study for a doctorate in fine art at Middlesex University, with the working title of ‘The Performer and the Polity’. (http://www.purgeglut.blogger.com, http://www.robinbale.blogger.com)

Romeo delaCruz has spent most of his life working with the cultural communities, governmental agencies, non-governmental organisations and academic institutions in the Philippines on culture and development. A former commissioner of the National Commission for Culture and the Arts, the Philippine’s highest policymaking body on culture and arts, he has an interest in cultural empowerment, indigenous peoples, tourism and cultural policy. He taught culture and tourism at the University of the Philippines and chaired the arts management programme of an arts and design college in Manila. After earning an MA in cultural and creative industries from King’s College London as a Chevening Scholar, he has decided to pursue a PhD on cultural regeneration and cultural industries at the University of Northampton.

Lost between the real and imaginary, Claudia still awaits her disappeared husband, 2005, Joana Hadjithomas & Khalil Joreige

Ruth Allen is a resident of Tottenham, North London, and has been involved in public speaking, organising and developing strategy for the Wards Corner campaign since it started in 2007. She is a social work practitioner, leader, educator and writer, mostly in the field of mental health. She is particularly active in professional leadership development, ethics and the links between British and international social work. Her focus is also on developing social work’s role in community empowerment. She is personally involved in a range of local community activities including being part of the residents’ associations movement in the London Borough of Haringey.

Siraj Izhar: My works are active social processes, generators of activity, which cut in and out of multiple aspects of contemporary life often involving intervention and activism, creating spaces for multiple and complex forms of participation. They are about the making of new structures for experience, not representation, the making of forms or formats for engagement. In particular these forms create a working space for a series of contestations: legal versus illegal, autonomous versus mass culture, individual versus collective. The concept of ecology is central to these engagements, which are based on a creative picturing of different social, cultural or political situations as visual ecologies. These entwine in real and virtual space to create hybrid ecologies differentiated for different aspects of contemporary life in the digital age. Mainstream society may be pictured as state-based consumer monoculture flowing in a uni-direction; autonomous realities more like concentric circles, creating complex eddies and ripples in the cultural landscape.

Tijana Stevanovic is an independent researcher who, after being a Chevening Scholar at UCL 2009-10, is neither based in London, nor in Belgrade. She takes off from the notion of being displaced and not-belonging to concentrate her research on the political dimension of participation in public space, its representational value as well as the agency of subjectivity within the community action. Previously, she has assisted teaching both MA and BA courses at the Faculty of Architecture, University of Belgrade, exhibited internationally, including Venice Architecture Biennale 2008. She assisted the research and preparation for TINAG 2010 festival, London.

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. . Trenton Oldfield formally established the not-for-profit organisation This Is Not A Gateway with Deepa Naik in 2007.  www.thisisnotagateway.net 

Vicky Casia-Cabantac defends the rights and welfare of migrant Filipinos as deputy secretary general of United Filipinos in Hong Kong. She was born in the Philippines but left her country in October 1992. She was a teacher and at the time a teacher’s salary was one-third of what she could earn as a domestic helper in Hong Kong. She sacrificed her family life to make a decent living for her children and her family in the Philippines. She was vice chairperson of the Migrants Sectoral Party in 2004. She is a member of the International Migrants’ Alliance and a member of the Gabriela Women’s Party. She participates in many congresses and conferences with immigrant workers and labour movements all over the world.  

Wing Shing Tang is currently Professor at the Department of Geography, Hong Kong Baptist University and Chair of the Hong Kong Critical Geography Group. His research interest is on the interrogation of Lefebvre, Foucault, Gramsci and others, and with local history, in order to construct a better informed understanding of urban (re)development in Hong Kong and other Chinese cities.

Yuk Hui is a PhD researcher for the Metadata Project (Leverhulme Trust) at the Centre for Cultural Studies, Goldsmiths, University of London. His research centres on the philosophy of technology and phenomenology, especially concerning the web and digital objects. He is the co-founder of DOXA, which is currently developing a research project on creative space and generating critical discourse on cultural industries in cities like London and Hong Kong. (www.doxacollective.org)