IMPACT26

In this contribution, Manischa Partowi explores how attachment and disappointment become aesthetic phenomena in the negotiation of a shared reality, focusing on the friction between individual affective experience and public conditions of spectatorship.

Manischa Partowi is a researcher whose work focuses on affective strategies and hybrid forms of spectatorship in contemporary art – particularly at the intersection of performance, installation, and digital media.

Reading from a new book project called ›UNDERPLANET‹, Xenia Benivolski considers friction as a material event and a social method tending towards unexpected forms of being together.

Xenia Benivolski is a writer, curator and researcher at LUCA/KU Leuven working between sound studies and visual art, with a focus on how sonic and material forms carry political and spiritual histories.

›Art without b/order‹ focuses on the methods and implementation of the work with oppressor identities. In this contribution, Achal Dodia shares insights from his own projects on addressing masculinity with young adults, building a stitching corner in community libraries, and gender in school classrooms.

Achal Dodia is an artist, educator and a writer from New Delhi, India. Dodia uses arts to enable the development of ground reality stories of resistance, equality and freedom in various community spaces.

Diana Odhiambo presents ›Jowi gi Ndalo‹: Inspired by the Luo legend of ›Nyamgondho, it is a work in progress that brings movement, storytelling, and research together to explore how ancestral memory lives in the body and offers other ways of relating to our environment and the unseen.

Diana Odhiambo is a Kisumu-based Kenyan dancer, choreographer, and educator whose practice explores African dance and embodied knowledge as living links between past, present, and future.

Benson A'kuyie is going to present his latest solo work ›[GN-z33/6°]‹, which premiered in February 2026.

Benson A'kuyie is an interdisciplinary artist who moves in the fields of dance/movement, music/sound and performance.

In her contribution to the assembly, Claire Vivianne Sobottke speaks about her current research, ›GOAT SONG‹ (Greek: tragōidía — tragedy, literally “goat song,” from tragos, “goat,” and aoidē, “song”).

GOAT SONG is a choreographic and musical investigation into the history and practice of hunting. Claire Vivianne Sobottke approaches hunting in her work as a ritualised act of killing, raising questions of violence, hierarchy and domination. Through embodying hunter figures: masculinities that are socially sanctioned to kill, she explores how gender becomes entangled with violence, and how masculinity is put in the service of death.

Claire Vivianne Sobottke is a Berlin-based artist working across choreography, music, voice and performance. She conceives of her work as a site of resistance and undoing and understands the body as a turbulent accumulation of concepts, collective and personal histories, traumata, memories, projections, identities and magic.

In ›Emigration as Friction‹, Evghenia Gritsku explores friction between identities, languages, memories and social realities as a potentially productive force in the reconstruction of identity and the emergence of new forms of belonging.

Evghenia Gritsku is a visual artist and Ph.D. researcher who works across photography, ceramics, installation, video and performance, exploring migration, identity, memory, belonging and emotional adaptation. The main themes in Gritskus artistic practice are social issues such as emigration, loss of home and inequality. All these themes are personal and based on her own experience.

Through ›Life Doesn’t Grow in Banks‹, Abhijit Patil wants to ask what happens when seeds and the knowledge they carry are separated from the people, soil and ecological relationships that nurture their growth and evolution.

Abhijit Patil is an artist and farmer based in the Western Ghats of India. He is using seeds, photography and community practices to work towards more equitable food systems, labour practices, and biodiversity on the ground.

Thomas Pausz presents ›Double Capture‹, a recent experiment that turns greenhouses into multispecies instruments, amplifying the sounds and vibrations of pollinators. Pausz situates this project within his ongoing series of work ›Vegetal Media‹.

Thomas Pausz is an artist and researcher at the Intelligent Instruments Lab in Reykjavík, exploring the poetics and ethics of multispecies coexistence through experimental media practice.

In his contribution, Eliabu Mbonimpa shares experiences of using visual storytelling to document and preserve endangered oral narratives. He also presents how this creates new ways to carry Indigenous identity, cultural knowledge, memory, and difficult histories across generations.

Eliabu Mbonimpa is a Tanzanian artist, curator, and museum educator working across visual storytelling, cultural heritage, and museum practice. The focus of his practice is on documenting, preserving, and making endangered oral traditions accessible to contemporary audiences.

Through a participatory lecture-performance, Akshay invites the audience to negotiate an AI’s proposed change to an industrial cooling system, asking who benefits, who carries the risk and who has the right to say no.

Akshay Makar is an industrial climate technologist and founder of Net0link AI. He works at the intersection of artificial intelligence, cooling infrastructure and human decision-making.

In authoritarian political environments, Balkan artistic collectives develop original collaborative actions within larger students’ and citizens’ movements. Despite a complete lack of public funding, and controlled media, they succeed in offering not only counternarratives but also experimental forms of collaboration with citizens assemblies, professional associations and those institutions that dare to test limits of freedom, knowing that this “grey zone” will end soon and that they will be forced to do their work outside of institutions.

Coming from a European semi-periphery, Milena Dragicevic Sesic is a feminist, cultural activist, researcher, scholar and networker. Her work connects artists, civil society and cultural spaces in an active relationship, in the Balkans, Arab countries, India and South East Asia.

Ecaterina Stefanescu and Sam Eadington from Other People’s Dreams present an interdisciplinary methodology and body of work that advocates for participation in architecture as a symbiotic mode of practice. Together, they offer insight into an interdisciplinary methodology of research and co-design, in which long-term collaborative making enables iterative engagement, learning, and intervention within communities experiencing deprivation and social tensions.

Other People’s Dreams is a collaborative action research office and educational framework that engages in a critical, situated and durational way with communities in the northwest of England, operating in the fields of architecture and socially engaged art.

Najia Fatima examines in this contribution a women's craft development scheme in Pakistan. The scheme is led by the architect, Yasmin Lari, as a continuation of neocolonial development policies that recode structural inequality as individual inclusion while leaving underlying social and material hierarchies intact.

Najia Fatima is an artist, researcher and architectural writer. Her work engages with contemporary South Asia, tracing how material violence, social hierarchy, and militarization are built into everyday life.

Drawing on her work monitoring information operations in Ukraine, Japan, and Taiwan, Maya Sobchuk presents a lecture-performance on how the architecture of the information space is manipulated to blur the line between war and peace — and how even our everyday emotions, like nostalgia, can be foreign-manufactured.

Maya Sobchuk is an Ukraine-born, Tokyo-based researcher and digital rights activist, investigating how foreign states weaponize media to divide societies from within and justify aggression.

Anastasiia Gulak explores the parallels between urbanism and communications to demonstrate how co-design and multi-level dialogue between wartime Izyum, Kharkiv, and Tübingen can transform 'friction energy' into a driving force for creating new spatial models with global potential.

Anastasiia Gulak is a Kharkiv-based architect who has led a female-led practice since 2010. Since 2017, she and her team have worked with international partners on human-centric spaces, from rebuilding Ukraine’s critical infrastructure to visionary urban initiatives.