Ella Eßlinger is a trained architect with an independent and collaborative practice. She holds a B.A. from TU Munich and an M.Sc. from ETH Zurich. In 2023–24 she was part of the curatorial internship program at the Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA). As a member of ZAS*, she taught a visiting studio at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich in 2024. Together with Clara Richard Gostynski she developed the editorial project Nachglühen / Afterglow, (vol.1, 2022; vol. 2, 2024; Zurich: women writing architecture publishing). Her work has been exhibited at gta exhibitions (2023) and Swiss Art Awards (finalist 2025) among others.

Valentina Triet works with the medium of video. In her practice she deals with questions of how forms (of movement, orientation, of landscapes, architecture, capital, cultural and societal production) come into being. She completed her studies in Textual Sculpture under Heimo Zobernig at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Triet has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as Kunsthalle Winterthur, Neuer Essener Kunstverein in Essen, Forde in Geneva, and Felix Gaudlitz in Vienna. Her work has also been featured in group exhibitions at Galerie Neu and Sweetwater in Berlin, Alienze in Vienna, The Wig in Berlin, mumok in Vienna.

Paula Strunden is a transdisciplinary artist who studied architecture in Vienna, Paris and London and has worked for Raumlabor Berlin and Herzog & de Meuron Basel. She completed her design-led PhD within the European research network 'TACK - Communities of Tacit Knowledge' and received the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna Prize for Best Research Work 2023/24 for her dissertation on multisensory perception through Extended Reality (XR) models. Her XR installations have been exhibited internationally, including at the Royal Academy of Arts London, Eye Filmmuseum Amsterdam, Nieuwe Instituut Rotterdam and Museum der Moderne Salzburg, and have been nominated twice for the Dutch Film Award 'Gouden Calf'. As part of her research into female pioneers in the history of virtual technologies, Paula founded the xR Atlas educational platform and has lectured at the Architectural Association London, Bartlett UCL, Bauhaus University Weimar and the Academy van Bouwkunst Amsterdam, as well as running xR workshops at the V&A, Whitechapel Gallery London, UdK Berlin and Kunsthalle Vienna.

Dominic Schwab studied art and architecture at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and the Vienna University of Technology. He is currently conducting doctoral research on the digital reconstruction of spatial narratives at the Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck, where he also taught as a University Assistant from 2020 to 2025. He has been a guest lecturer at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna and regularly serves as a guest critic at academic institutions, including the Chair of Digital Architecture at ITA, ETH Zurich; the Institute of Architecture and Media at the University of Graz; and the Department of Architectural Theory and Philosophy of Technology at the Vienna University of Technology. He is a co-founder of VAS² – Vienna Architecture Summer School, the media art collective SO@P, and PARABOL – Association for Artistic Research. His work has been exhibited and published internationally. In 2023, he was awarded the MAK Schindler Scholarship at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles.

Uwe Brunner is an architect, educator, and researcher based in Vienna. He is a co-founder of SOAP, an online architecture practice, and a co-founder of the Vienna Architecture Summer School. Since 2019, he has been a faculty member at ./studio3, the Institute for Experimental Architecture at the University of Innsbruck. His current research explores the essay as a mode of critical spatial practice within digitally mediated environments. His work has been widely screened and exhibited, including at the New Media Art Museum La Gaîté Lyrique in Paris, Ars Electronica in Linz, the Santa Mònica Arts Centre in Barcelona, CPH:DOX – Copenhagen International Documentary Film Festival, and the Goethe-Institut in Beijing, among others.

Bianca Gamser (b. 1984, Graz) is a Vienna-based architect and art historian working at the intersection of art and architecture. Trained at the Vienna University of Technology and the University of Vienna, she develops installations and interventions addressing social, emotional, and environmental issues. Often conceived as ephemeral and/or site-specific, her projects reveal overlooked grievances and hidden potentials within everyday spatial realities. In addition to her artistic practice, Gamser engages in collaborative collectives and has taught design studios at the Vienna University of Technology. Her work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Vienna Biennale, Vienna Design Week, and the MAK Center Los Angeles.

Simona Ferrari is an architect working across different scales and formats. Practicing both independently and collaboratively, her work explores architecture and the built environment through building, photography, drawing, and writing. Simona studied architecture at the Politecnico di Milano and the Technical University of Vienna and received her Master’s degree from the Tokyo Institute of Technology as a Monbukagakusho fellow. She completed a Master of Fine Arts at the Zurich University of the Arts. Alongside her practice, between 2017-2023, Simona taught and conducted research at the Department of Architecture at ETH Zurich, Chair of Architectural Behaviorology, where she co-authored the book “Swiss Window Journeys: Architectural Field Notes” (gta Verlag, 2023). She was assistant curator of the Japan Pavilion at the 16th Venice Architecture Biennale (2018). Previously, she worked with Atelier Bow-Wow in Tokyo, leading several international projects, including the Search Library in Muharraq, Bahrain, installations and exhibitions at the Cultural Center of Chicago, Harvard GSD, the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo, the MAXXI Museum in Rome, and the Triennale di Milano. Her project “Landscape In-Between,” for the former industrial site of Acetati in Verbania, Italy, carried out together with Metaxia Markaki, was awarded in the 15th edition of the Europan architectural competition and subsequently developed as an urban plan commissioned by the municipality and involving the local community. Simona was an architect-in-residence at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles and at the Charles Moore Foundation in Santa Monica to conduct a research on gardens.

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Ting-Jung Chen's artistic practice focuses on the mapping of memory and identity in the acoustic territory and power system. She explores collective dialogue and tension under the influence of affective tonality through multi-channel sound, kinetic installation, and sculpture. Chen's work involves reinterpreting historical memories by deconstructing symbolic cultural artifacts and exploring the formation of discipline in the mapping process.

Veronika Eberhart is an artist, musician, and researcher working at the intersection of sculpture, text, sound, and moving image. Her practice unfolds through speculative gestures, navigating the space between archive and fiction. Grounded in feminist and class-based theories, her work draws on a background in sociology (University of Vienna and Copenhagen) and fine arts (Academy of Fine Arts Vienna).

Jakob Sellaoui is a US-born architect of Austrian and Algerian heritage who founded Studio Jakob Sellaoui in 2020. Within his practice the notion of collapse and crisis are reframed as opportunities for adaptation and change. The work explores the resulting spatial and material potentials he calls “Good-Enough Architecture”. Up to date the studio has realised projects in several scales and locations ranging from Nicaragua, Portugal, Austria, and the US.

Noemi Polo (b. 1990, Italy) is an architect and creative director specializing in spatial and experiential activations, working mainly in fashion, art and music. After receiving her master’s in architecture from the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, in 2018, she received the art and architecture fellowship by the MAK Center for Art & Architecture, which was followed by a teaching position at SCI ARC Institute of Architecture.

Alan Ríos-Cruz was born and grew up in Mexico. He graduated in 2015 from ITESM-CCM (Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education) in Mexico City, and worked as an assistant designer at the furniture and interior design company BLANGKAZ.

Alejandra Avalos-Guerrero is an architect and designer from Mexico City. Her practice and research span various scales, from buildings to public art installations and publications. Her work has been exhibited at the MAK Center for Art and Architecture, Harvard's Kirkland Gallery, and Mextrópoli. Alejandra holds a Bachelor of Architecture degree from Tecnológico de Monterrey and a Master of Architecture from Harvard University.

Jose Guillermo Acosta holds a Bachelor of Architecture from Monterrey Institute of Technology and Higher Education. As a co-founder of the artist collective WASA MX, he has been a guest lecturer in Fundamentals of Design at ITESM, a finalist in the Arquine Competition 18 “Mextrópoli Pavillion” in Mexico, and recipient of second place in the Razonarq “Peace Pavillion” competition. He currently lives and works in Mexico City.

Octave Perrault is an architect. He is the founder of the architecture practice Zeroth. His work with the art collective åyr has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; MAK Center, Los Angeles; Berlin Biennale; and Venice Biennale. He has written for AA Files, Perspecta, Harvard Design Magazine, e-flux, and L’Uomo Vogue.

Luis Ortega Govela (1988) is a Mexican architect, writer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles. He graduated from the Architectural Association School of Architecture London. He is the founder of Office LOG, a research-based design studio working across architecture, design and art. . He is theco-founder of ÅYR, an art collective which explores the complex evolution of the home and domesticity. The collective has exhibited internationally, including at theBritish Pavilion for the Venice Architecture Biennale and at the 9th Berlin Biennale of Contemporary Art.

He is the author of GARAGE a book on the architecture and image of the garage published by MIT Press which has now been translated into Russian by Strelka. The book was also adapted into a documentary and was part of the CPH:DOX festival official selection. He was a recipient of the MAK Center for Art and Architecture Residency in 2017. He has lectured at the Architectural Association London, TU Delft, Garage Museum Moscow and The Royal College of Art. He is currently working on his third book. 

Alessandro Bava is an architect and art gallerist based in Milan, Italy, where he runs ‘BB’ a collaborative spatial practice with architect and PhD Fabrizio Ballabio and zaza’, a contemporary art gallery showing international and italian emerging artists with a focus on queer practices.
He graduated at the Architectural Association in London with Pier Vittorio Aureli and has worked for Vito Acconci in New York. Bava practiced as an artist with the collective åyr he co-founded in 2014, making installations and exhibitions in various institutions in Europe and the US, reflecting on the radical changes brought about by the 'sharing economy' to the domestic space.
After dissolving the collective in 2018 he returned to practicing and researching architecture with a focus on installations, exhibition design and curation, interiors and urban design, while publishing his research on the politics, poetics and technologies defining contemporary space in international magazines such as e-flux and Mousse.
He has been teaching at the Bartlett School of Architecture from 2019 to 2021, with a design studio focusing on digital design, automation, and robotic fabrication. Currently he teaches at NABA in Milan a masters course on interior design.
Bava is also the founder of the ecology magazine ECOCORE which began in 2010 and has received the Sandretto Re Rebaudengo Serpentine Grant for emerging talent, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Arts Grants and the MAK Scholarship for art and architecture in Los Angeles.

Nicole Theresa King is an interdisciplinary artist, designer, and researcher whose practice bridges modern landscape history, design speculation, and materialist ecological thought. Her current work examines the environmental aesthetics and crisis imaginaries of Southern California in the twentieth century. The research asks how horticultural design, leisure infrastructures, and colonial ecologies produced a modernist paradigm that fused image and infrastructure into environmental imaginaries. It examines how these forms unravel the politics of nature in the Anthropocene amid contemporary ecological distress.

Nico’s work challenges landscape as medium, material, and infrastructure. Trained in art- and design-based research, Nico holds an MLA/M.Sc. in Landscape Architecture from BOKU Vienna (2012, with distinction of excellence), where her thesis examined Johannesburg’s post-industrial gold mine dumps as novel urban infrastructures, tracing their material and symbolic toxic legacy within apartheid urbanisms and conceptualizations of nature. A second master’s thesis at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (MA 2012, with distinction of excellence) investigated the spatial politics of Shoah memory in post-Nazi Austria in comparison to Israel. Whereas postwar Austria reconstituted itself as victimized nation despite its role as perpetrator, Israel emerged as survivor state. This contrast provided a lens for analyzing how the presence and absence of evidence shapes public monuments and materialities of memory.

She is currently completing her PhD in Art History, Theory, and Criticism with a concentration in Art Practice at UC San Diego, with a parenthetical degree in the study of human origins. Prior to arriving in San Diego, she received the START Award for Young Architects and Designers from the Austrian Federal Chancellery (2017-18). Her residencies include SOMA Mexico (2019) and the MAK Center for Art and Architecture in Los Angeles (2016-17). Nico was an ifk Junior Fellow at the International Research Center for Cultural Studies in Vienna at the University for Art and Design Linz (2025; 2025-26). She was a Wilbur R. Jacobs Fellow and a Mellon Fellow at The Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens in San Marino, California (2023–24) and the recipient of a Kate Neal Kinley Memorial Fellowship in Landscape Architecture from the Department of Fine + Applied Arts, University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign (2020-21). In 2025-26, Nico is a guest scholar at Humboldt University Berlin’s Cluster of Excellence "Matters of Activity: Image. Space. Material." as well as the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society at Munich University.

Publications include articles and book chapters on post-industrial mining landscapes (jovis, 2014; IUAV, 2012), crisis technologies in Southern California gardens (ifk now, 2025), the culture industry of horticulture (Metroverlag, 2014), and parks as monuments, social design ideals, and political ground (Callwey, 2015; Edward Elgar, 2018; Stadt+Grün, 2018).