Alina Schmuch (*1987) devises artist’s books and video installations. Her ongoing video series on water infrastructures explores the way landscapes, architecture, technology, and physical bodies intersect with visible and hidden infrastructures. Schmuch studied media art at Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG) and has been a fellow at the Jan van Eyck Academie in Maastricht. She was part of the Hydromedia artistic research project, the residency ALTERLIFE, and is currently participant of BPA // Berlin Program for Artists. Her work has featured in a variety of exhibitions and screenings, including at Urbane Künste Ruhr, Neuer Berliner Kunstverein, the Akademie der Künste Berlin, ZKM Karlsruhe, Rupert in Vilnius, Sonic Acts in Amsterdam, PLATO in Ostrava, and the 15th Architecture Biennale in Venice. Among other awards she received the Award for Documentary Photography of the Wüstenrot Stiftung, the Bremen Award for Video Art and the Visual Arts work stipend of the Berlin Senate.

Anna Jermolaewa (b. 1970, Leningrad) works primarily in the mediums of photography, video, and installation. Her main interest is the analysis of functional structures of society and social systems in everyday life. She continually focuses on the basic conditions of human existence and the nature of man, capturing the relationship between the individual and the masses, freedom and restriction, power and powerlessness. Jermolaewa graduated from the University of Vienna in 1998, and the Vienna Art Academy in 2002. Since 2019, she has been a Professor for Experimental Art at University of Art and Design Linz, Austria. Anna Jermolaewa represented Austria at Biennale Arte 2024, and has had solo exhibitions throughout the country. Her works are part of various collections including the Stedelijk Museum, Friedrich Christian Flick Collection, Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma, MUMOK—Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Museum Startgalerie Artothek, Tyrolean State Museum, and the Vehbi Koc Foundation.

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.

Anastasiya Yarovenko (*1983, UA/AT) lives and works in Vienna. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna (2015) and holds an MA in Theory of Literature and Comparative Studies (2006). Anastasiya has received several prizes and grants such as Prize of the Kunsthalle Wien, START scholarship of the Federal Ministry for Culture of Austria and she is also a recipient of the MAK Schindler Scholarship Program (USA). Yarovenko participated in School of Kyiv - Kyiv Biennial (UA) in 2015 and other international biennial. Her work has been presented at international exhibitions such as Lentos Kunstmuseum (AT), xhibit (AT), Köttinspektionen Uppsala (SE), Sculpture Park in Vienna MQ (AT), Württembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart (DE), Mackey Apartments, Los Angeles (USA), Kunsthalle Wien (AT), Odessa Museum of Western and Oriental Art (UA), Nest (NL) and others. Anastasiya was a Guest Professor of the Experimental Art Class at the Art University Linz in 2023/2024.

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).

Petrit Halilaj understands exhibitions as a way to alter the course of personal and collective histories, creating complex worlds that claim space for freedom, desire, intimacy, and identity. His work is deeply connected to the recent history of his native country Kosovo and the consequences of cultural and political tensions in the region, which he often takes as a starting point for igniting countercurrent poetics for the future. Rooted in his biography, the projects encompass a variety of media, including sculpture, drawing, text, and performance. Often incorporating materials from Kosovo and manifesting as ambitious spatial installations, his work transposes personal relationships, places and people into sculptural forms. Halilaj’s work can be seen as a playful and, at times, irreverent attempt to resist oppressive politics and social norms towards an untamed celebration of all forms of connectedness and freedom.

In 2013, Halilaj represented Kosovo for the country’s first appearance at the Venice Biennale. In 2017, he was invited to participate in the 57th Venice Biennale by the curator Christine Macel, where he was awarded Special Mention by the Jury. That same year, he was awarded the Mario Merz Prize, which resulted in a major commissioned project he presented in 2018 at the Zentrum Paul Klee, Bern and at Fondazione Merz, Turin, Italy. He also received the Kunstpreis Berlin granted by the Akademie der Künste, Berlin (2023). He is member of the Akademie der Künste der Welt from Cologne, Germany. He is currently a professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts de Paris, France, where he shares his class with Alvaro Urbano.

Álvaro Urbano’s work involves an archeology of desires and past intentions. By creating atmospheres that replicate specific spaces and architectural gestures, the artist explores the narratives that are embedded in these built bodies. Urbano borrows strategies from theater and filmmaking–such as lighting, sound and costumes–in order to explore new formats of immersiveness, his projects are often structured as scenes or sequenced chapters. The interweaving of different media is used to generate situations that approach liminal and oniric dimensions transforming the exhibition space into a vessel of phantasms and apparitions. Álvaro Urbano lives and works between Berlin and Paris.