Fallon Mayanja is a composer, sound artist and performer. A graduate of the post-diploma programme in Sound Arts at the Beaux-Arts of Lisbon and the master’s programme at INA GRM (Groupe de Recherches Musicales), Fallon explores alternative modes of perception. Their practice is characterised by the construction of listening environments that draw upon the porosity of touch, the tangibility of sound and intangibility of sight. Fallon thus mobilizes different relationships with our environment and social, inter-relational, and self-reflexive ideas. From narratives that navigate through Chaos, the artist constructs poetical landscapes from queer and black diasporic experiences. Disrupting conventional approaches within immersive sonic explorations and manifesting the relationship between fictional existences and cultural experiences, the listening zone temporarily deviates from common sense by carving out a sound space as a “committed act of relationship, of interaction, within its ecosystem”. Reconfiguring the hierarchies of meaning and feeling, the work opens and announces a collective space of affection, f(r)iction and perception.

Morgane Baffier is an artist-lecturer whose surname derives from the ancient Occitan “bafa” meaning “swindle”, and this information may be important in understanding her work. Using graphics, fabricated images, and internet videos, she elaborates all manner of metaphysical theories and reflections, developing them to the point of absurdity. In a bid to deconstruct knowledge, she appropriates the codes used in business, the media, and intellectual circles, and mocks, with finesse and humor, the systems of power and authority that condition access to speech.

Cheryl Ann Bolden is an artist, collector and archivist. She is the descendant of six generations of African Americans. In 1998, she moved to Paris and founded Precious Cargo, a nomadic museum that brings together historical objects that transmit stories of the African diaspora. Her artistic practice is primarily based on objects which carry memory. She works with original objects and documents which bear witness to the trade of enslaved people as well as to the periods of segregation and colonialism in the United States and in Europe. She regularly holds events in different communities, in middle and high schools, inviting participants to interact with the archives, to “activate” them, touching them and appropriating them in order to engage with and experience the history they contain, inciting both dialogue and reflection. By “reactivating” objects normally destined for a museum environment, C.A. Bolden gives the public – issued from the diaspora or not – the possibility of reappropriating these elements and their memory, in an intimate and, paradoxically, dedramatised way. Rejecting the idea of the inaccessible archive kept behind glass, C. A. Bolden instead brings hers to life, through performances, installations and collages.

Boryana Petkova was born in Sofia, Bulgaria in 1985 and graduated from the National Academy of Arts, Sofia in 2011, as well as from ESAD Valenciennes in France in 2015. Performance is her primary medium: “Initially, I used my body as a symbol of protest, often through acts of self-destruction. Later, through performance, I began to transform self-destruction into self-reconstruction. The marks of my personal history became lines, connecting my body to the collective human experience. Rejecting categorization, my aim is to use my work not to create boundaries, but to dissolve them.” Some of her recent exhibitions and performances include No Blood relations, Sofia Arsenal Museum of Contemporary Art, (Sofia, 2024); SIS with Iskra Blagoeva, Galerie S (Paris, 2024); Mother tongue, live performance, Residency Unlimited Governors Island (New York, 2023); Needles in a Haystack, National Gallery (Sofia, 2023); Fait Machine, Musée International des Arts Modestes (Sète, 2023); Gulliver’s sketchbook, KAI10 Arthena Foundation (Dusseldorf, 2022); and Hyperdrawing, duo show with Katrin Strobel, curated by Joana Neves, Frac Picardie (Amiens, 2022).

Iskra Blagoeva was born in 1978 in Sofia. She has a master’s degree in painting from the University of Applied Arts, Vienna. Her artistic practice includes painting, installations and performance, and draws upon her interest in myths and their reappropriation by feminist perspectives. Her work thus revolves around the image of the woman and the concept of femininity, seeking to develop other paths of development and definition, outside stereotyped cultural representations.. I. Blagoeva has taken part in group shows in Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Slovenia, Serbia and Bulgaria. In 2012, she was a resident in the International Villa Waldberta, Munich. She has also received awards from the St. Cyril and St. Methodius International Foundation and GRAD European Centre for Culture and Debate. She has participated in Viennacontemporary and Manifesta 14.