— BIOS

Bios

Sophia Bardoutsou is a composer, researcher, and educator based in Rotterdam. She treats composition as a social practice, working at the intersection of acoustic sound, digital media, and interdisciplinary collaboration. By employing interactive media and indeterminate structures, she foregrounds audience participation. As a doctorate candidate at Codarts University for the Arts, her project “The resonance of vocalising” explores how vocal and listening practices can envision ecologically sustainable futures amid climate and social challenges.

Caroline Brünen’s practice is anchored in photography and extends into text, audio, and video. Her work interrogates the social inscriptions of power, examining how political, economic, and social forces shape spatial conditions and lived realities. Driven by an interest in social, ecological, and gender-based (in)justice, she uses photography and related media to explore structures that tend to remain unnoticed. Therefore, her work engages with perspectives that are frequently overlooked within dominant narratives.

Marie Donike’s artistic practice unfolds at the intersection of cultural history, everyday aesthetics, and social interaction. Her works are often site-specific, taking shape as walk-in installations, performative interventions, or participatory scenarios. At the core of her practice lies the question of how community emerges – through rituals, shared meals, or collective memories. Donike draws inspiration from gastronomy and snack-bar culture, recontextualizing their visual and social elements to evoke moments of irritation, humor, and reflection. Her installations create spaces of conviviality and invite audiences to become part of a temporary community. With a fine sense for atmosphere, resonance, and the interplay between art and everyday life, Donike’s works foster moments of exchange, belonging, and shared experience – small islands of togetherness within the dynamic field of art, society, and nature.

Elizabeth Gallón Droste (Bogotá) is an artist, writer, and educator. Through arts of listening—writing, sonic-visual essays, installations, and listening sessions—she works with multiversal elemental ecologies, what they create and transmit. She asks how these forces unsettle be-longing and re-mediate becoming within the cosmo-planetary weave, staying close to dispersed traces—rhythms, materialities, residues—as offerings. Working with territo-rivers and extractive zones, she activates telluric–oneiric and anarchivist strategies, unlearning with intra-entities through collaboration. She is a postdoctoral researcher at HCU Hamburg’s Center for Spatial Cosmology and part of the duo ~pes. She is author of "Utica under the murmuring waters (2024, Oreri) and her work has been part of documenta15, Meandering (TBA21), RAW Material Dakar. Her PhD research, Voicing Rivers Atrato (Freie Universität Berlin, 2024), followed voicing–listening practices with Atrato River and communities.

Zora Arose Ritz conducts artistic and ethnographic research at the intersection of Visual, Environmental, and Digital Anthropology. Using experimental audiovisual and embodied practices—microscopy, animation, 3D landscapes, and performance—Zora explores posthuman and collective agencies and relationalities within hydrosocial environments.

Since 2025, Zora works as a research assistant in Visual Anthropology at the University of Bern, while pursuing a practice-led PhD on coral-AI-human assemblages. Their collaborative experimental film BLESSED ARE THOSE WHO GRIEVE (2025) was screened at several international festivals. Their multidisciplinary works SWEATING SYNTAX (2025) and MOISTURIZER (2025) have been developed and exhibited at the Art & Science Residency KÜNSTLERISCHE TATSACHEN.

Joanne Rodriguez is a water enthusiast, curator, and doctoral research fellow at the Global Heritage Lab at the University of Bonn.Her curatorial practice critically examines power structures within exhibition spaces and connects them to ecological concerns and collective modes of working. Her research focuses on sustainability and climate justice, with particular attention to the strategies and knowledge-transfer practices of German art institutions. In 2025, together with Nada Rosa Schröer, she curated the exhibition like a river, grief wants to move and flow, which explored processes of collective grief and eco-social transformation by centering the Rhine as a living organism.

Riikka Tauriainen is a visual artist and researcher whose installations, films, and sculptures explore ecology, oceanic literacy, and gender politics. Working between art and science, she investigates water phenomena and material kinships through feminist and posthumanist lenses. She is a doctoral candidate at the University of Bern and researcher at EcoArtLab, Bern Academy of the Arts. Based in Zurich, she holds an MFA from Zurich University of the Arts.

In her artistic practice Maud van den Beuken (NL / DE) maps and measures the porous spaces between the binary defintions of land and water. Working closely with scientists, engineers and policy-makers in the fields of physics, watermanagement and cartography, she poetically reflects on Western ways of knowing today’s environment. For the past eight years, she has been specifically engaging with rivers, such as the Kaveri, the Mississippi, the Elbe, the Rhine and the Maas.

Besides the formal context of the arts, her work primarily manifests itself in public spaces, mapping archives, scientific conferences and universities, through interventions, sculptures, installations, maps, (audio)walks and videos. Van den Beuken completed a residency at the Jan van Eyck postgraduate institute in Maastricht (NL) in 2023.

Her work has been exhibited internationally at TENT, Rotterdam (NL), United Nations Water Conference 2023 in New York (US), EIGHT/ΤΟ ΟΧΤΩ in Athens (GR), EENWERK Gallery (NL), IJsselbiennale (NL) and the Special Collections Department of the Utrecht University Library (NL).

Vivian Hernandez is a multimedia artist and educator exploring the convergence of hydrofeminism, poetry and digital technologies. Through multimedia installations, she explores the form of storytelling combining hydrological analysis. She welcomes social and decolonial methodologies into her artistic practices, such as "walking with" as a methodology that can expand sensory engagement. The collective physical and conceptual explorations of landscapes, led by the river as narrating subject, emphasizes discourses on fluidity, instability, and plurality. She critically views the roll of technology and the social impact on marginalize groups, particularly from the migration and diaspora experience she has encountered during the years in which she has been living in Germany. She is Alumna from the Rosa Luxemburg scholarship. Her master thesis, Sonic Cartography (University of Arts Bremen, 2024) focus the relationship between the Llobregat river in Spain and its extractive history to develop a performance and an installation. She has experience as a media educator and has experience as a teaching assistant for seminars dealing with hydrofeminist and artistic practices.

Constanza Javiera Ruiz is a dance artist and performer with a background in sociology, born in Chile and currently based in Cologne. With a focus on a decolonized perspective, her work explores human and more-than-human connections, culture, and identity, celebrating life through dance. In 2023, she took part in IMPACT: Ecologies of Attention, and in 2025 in Labverde "Speculative Ecologies" in Manaus, Brazil. She is a co-founder of .DENCUENTRO tanzkollektiv, creating dance works such as SINP’A (2020), SINP’A Documentary (2021), and Portalen (2023). In 2020, she created ON:Joy together with M. Mercedes Flores, presented at tanz nrw 2021. Since 2020, she has been a member of maiskind queer artistic collective.

DENCUENTRO is a dance collective that was founded by Amanda Romero, Constanza Ruiz, and Greta Salgado, .DENCUENTRO has been exploring ritual and artistic practices across South America and Europe since 2018. The collective researches and interweaves body, dance, and lived experience as sites of knowledge production. Their first work-in-progress was presented at tanz nrw 19 and other festivals. In 2020, they premiered SINP'A at tanzhaus nrw, followed by SINP’A_docu in 2021, co-produced by Theater im Ballsaal. Through dance research and interdisciplinary exchange, .DENCUENTRO questions colonial and Eurocentric value systems, sharing embodied practices and proposing diverse body-based forms of knowledge. Currently, the members are following different paths while continuing to develop practices of embodied knowledge, ecology, and anti-colonial, pro-Palestinian activism in Europe.