Industria Indipendente is a Rome-based performing, writing and visual arts collective founded by Erika Z. Galli and Martina Ruggeri. Their research is rooted in language: extended writing that inscribes itself in bodies, environments and surfaces; it becomes action and performativity; it liquefies and expands into sound, voice and light; it opens, contaminates, and blurs the boundaries between self and others, here and elsewhere. Their works always articulate questions and reflections: the ‘unproductive’ dimension of time, the creation of alternative and fictional worlds where communities and alliances are formed, a constant overturning and recreation of individual and collective identities. They have just debuted at the National Theatre of Rome with the show Left Hand, a performative, visual, and acoustic space.

Ivona Brđanović is a dramatist, queer-feminist activist, screenwriter and author. Born in Bosnia and Herzegovina, she lives in Zurich since 1991. After studying environmental engineering in Zurich, she graduated with a Bachelor’s degree from the Swiss Literature Institute in Biel and a Master’s degree in film/screenwriting from Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZhdK). She is the editor of GLITTER, the first queer literary magazine in the German-speaking world. In addition to regular performances and event hosting in Switzerland and Germany, she writes for series and publishes her own texts. Her focus are minorities, queer and migrant themes.

Le Nemesiache is a historical feminist group founded by Lina Mangiacapre in 1970. The group has never ceased to exist and carry out artistic and cultural activities, also giving ample space to political action with initiatives and events in Naples, the Campania region and elsewhere, in Italy and abroad.

Maya Olah, born in 1990 and raised in St. Gallen, studied German linguistics and literature and ethnology in Zurich and Vienna. She works as an author and teacher and develops concepts and texts for audio formats/performances and writes prose. Various oh her short stories have won awards, been published in literary magazines, and radio plays have been broadcast on the radio. She leads an interdisciplinary art project on the theme of the dance of death and has published the anthology Bailando Bailando. Ein Totentanz published by Vexer Verlag Berlin. She lives in Zurich and is currently working on her first novel.

Mathis Pfäffli (1983, Lucerne) lives and works in Zurich. He studied graphic design and illustration in Lucerne and Hamburg, as well as free art at the Institut Kunst in Basel. For his sculptures and installations he uses found objects from nature and industry, which he recombines and alienates. Just like his surrealistic drawings, they take up landscape, growth and decay. In doing so, the artist plays with existing images of the world, our language and environment. His works have been shown at Kunsthaus Baselland, Museum im Bellpark and Kunstmuseum Luzern, among other institutions. In 2023 he was a finalist for the Swiss Art Awards.

Michèle Graf (1987, Wetzikon) & Selina Grüter (1991, Zurich) are an artist duo living in New York, working with language and translation. They studied media arts at the Zürcher Hochschule der Künste (ZHdK) and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program. Recent exhibitions and performances include More Clock Work, Fanta-MLN, Milan; The Besieged Courtyard (Il cortile assediato), Istituto Svizzero, Milan; Clock Work, Kunstverein Kevin Space, Wien; Contradictory Statements, Kunsthalle Friart Fribourg; Sequences, Emily Harvey Foundation, New York.

MigrArt/DACZ (Deniz Damla Uz & Niştiman Erdede): MigrArt is a Zurich-based association founded by people who had to seek refuge and BIPoC (Black, Indigenous, and people of color) Artists. MigrArt activities are created with the involvement of community, firmly believing that art plays a vital role in connecting and empowering people from diverse backgrounds, identities, and affiliations, particularly those living in the margins. The Decolonial Art Collective Zurich is a long-term project of the association MigrArt, initiated by Niştiman Erdede. It offers space, network, resources and programs for refugee artists and cultural workers in Zurich and elsewhere to pursue their own artistic activities, network with the cultural scene and find space and time to build an artistic arch from their origins to the present.

Ramaya Tegegne (1985, Geneva) is an artist, researcher and cultural producer living and working in Geneva. Her research and practice attempt to reveal the mechanisms of a dominant model within the cultural fields and in our society by observing the economy, historicization and power relations through which they are constituted. She had solo exhibitions at Künstlerhaus in Stuttgart, Istituto Svizzero in Milan, Ludlow 38 in New York, Kevin Space in Vienna, and Fri Art Kunsthalle in Fribourg. In 2017, she launched Wages For Wages Against, a campaign for the remuneration of artists and better work conditions, which received a Swiss Art Award in 2022.

RM (formerly Real Madrid) is an artist collective founded in Geneva in 2015. The group’s works explore the intersections of sexuality, consumerism and identity through large-scale sculpture and installation projects examining social and political responses to stigmatised illnesses, focusing on sexually transmitted infection and disease. Their recent exhibitions include Auto Italia South East, London (2023), CEC Centre d’Edition Contemporaine, Geneva (2023), Swiss Institute, New York (2022), Centre culturel suisse, Paris (2021), Fondazione ICA Milano (2021), Centre d’Art Contemporain, Geneva (2021), Quadriennale Roma, Rome (2021), and others. RM was awarded the Swiss Art Award in 2018 and 2023.

Shirana Shahbazi (1974, Tehran) is an internationally recognized artist living and working in Zurich since 1997. Her work is represented in public collections worldwide, such as Aargauer Kunsthaus, Aarau; Guggenheim Museum, New York; Kunsthaus Zürich; MoMA, New York; Tate Modern, London; Sprengel Museum, Hannover. Exhibitions have been presented at international institutions, including the MoMA, New York; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; Barbican Art Gallery, London and the Venice Biennale. Together with Manuel Krebs, she has published various artist books and monographs. She was awarded the Prix Meret Oppenheim (2019).

Ursula Biemann is a Swiss artist and author, whose practice centers on fieldwork, often in Indigenous territories, and the creation of networks between different fields of knowledge. Her artistic practice reflects on the political ecologies of forests, oil and water, creating critical perspectives on the dynamics of extraction and also proposing alternative ecocentric modes of relating to the natural world. Biemann recently published the online monograph Becoming Earth on ten years of her ecological video works and writing with UNAL Bogota, and the book Forest Mind with Spector Books (2022).