Biographies

Beatrice De Blasi is Head of Communications and Development Cooperation at Fondazione Altromercato. She studied photojournalism at the International Center of Photography in New York and Communication Science at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Since 2005, she has been documenting fair trade development projects with Altromercato’s producer partners across Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Her photographic reports highlight the often-invisible work of women, farming cooperatives, and artisans, focusing on sustainable development, human rights in conflict areas, and community strategies to face climate change. Recent projects include Terra e Libertà (Guatemala, 2024) and Dulcita, uno zucchero che vale oro (Ecuador, 2021). Her major exhibitions include Ricamare l’Identità (2006), Fair Lands (2010), and Amazzonia: le Custodi della Biodiversità (2019), the latter created with Shuar and Achuar communities in the Ecuadorian Amazon.

Fondazione Altromercato works to fight social, economic, and climate injustice through sustainable development and fair trade, promoting a culture of peace, solidarity, and human rights.

Giulia Fabbri is a researcher at Sapienza University of Rome, where she earned a PhD in historical-literary and gender studies in 2020. She is the author of Sguardi (post)coloniali. Razza, genere e politiche della visualità (Ombre Corte, 2021), co-curator of Intersectional Italy (Routledge, 2025), and curator of Narrazioni dall’Antropocene. (Pre)visioni della crisi ambientale nella letteratura e nella cultura visuale (Edit Press, 2024). She has published in Italian and international journals, and her research interests include gender studies, post- and decolonial studies, multispecies feminist theory, ecocriticism, and studies on the Anthropocene.

Samy Manga is a committed writer, eco-poet activist, ethno-musician, and Cameroonian artist. He is the promoter of Ecopoetry: writing in support of ecology and biodiversity. Founder of the association Écopoètes International, he is also the artistic director of the cultural space ArtViv-Projet in Lausanne. He is known for his ecopoetic and decolonial works, as well as for articles published in ecological journals and media. Samy Manga has received several awards, including the Grand Prize for African Poetry in French from FIPA (2021). He was a finalist for the Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie (2024) and the Richelieu Literary Prize for Francophonie (2025).

Marie Moïse Marie Moïse is a lecturer in Intercultural Communication and Gender Studies at John Cabot University in Rome. Italian-Haitian, she works on Black diasporic memory, practices of resistance, and community healing from a decolonial feminist perspective. With this approach, she conducts workshops and produces content for various academic, educational, and cultural institutions. Among her most recent works are Memorie da sottopelle. Laboratorio di coreo/grafie decoloniali and Black Trastevere. Passeggiata decoloniale. As a translator, she has overseen, among others, the Italian translations of Women, Race and Class by Angela Davis and Where We Stand. Class Matters by bell hooks. She is co-author of Empower_ED. Un toolkit per contrastare le discriminazioni nelle scuole secondarie (Capovolte, 2024) and Stronger Peripheries. Building a Southern Coalition in Performing Arts (DINÂMIA’CET-Iscte, Artemrede, POGON, 2024).

Letizia Gaja Pinoja is a PhD candidate in the Department of International History and Politics at the Geneva Graduate Institute. Her doctoral research explores the colonial history of Swiss chocolate from the late 18th century onwards. It reflects on the broader implications of how this history has been neglected in contemporary discourse. Alongside her dissertation, she works as a research assistant on the SNSF-funded project Chemical Crossroads: Agrarian Transitions, Pesticide Controversies, and International Governance, 1940–1970.

Braida Thom is a PhD candidate in the research group Agroecological Transitions at ETH Zurich, where she is working on the social and environmental impacts of differently organized coffee value chains in Brazil and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Before she started her PhD, she did research on cocoa production and worked with cocoa farmers in Côte d’Ivoire and Ghana. Braida studied agricultural sciences and is passionate about using participatory approaches to tackle social-ecological challenges. In her research, she is interested in combining qualitative and quantitative methods and including a human dimension by giving voices to the different actors in the food system.

Il Pasticciere Trotzkista was born as an online atlas dedicated to the representation of cakes in cinema, a potentially infinite collection of images reflecting on the subtextual meanings of these sweet creations often charged with a strange dark power. Since 2022, Il Pasticciere Trotzkista and Caterina Gabelli, with the collaboration of Alessandro Calabrese and Matteo Baratto, have decided to transform this register of cakes into a real festival, thus giving life to the Pasticciere Film Festival: a cycle of domestic and semi-clandestine screenings whose protagonists are the cakes staged in films; an imaginary world that overflows into reality, where approximately every month a different film is shown with a cinema cake that becomes real, presented and served to a small audience of fans. The ‘festival’ presents itself as an opportunity for an evening of cinema and surprise desserts, the secret refuge of a few hours, a place where sweets become something more than a comforting and sentimental commodity.