Aug 07, 2023 · Megan Hoetger
Translator-Participants (biographies)
Raoul Audouin (born in 1991 in Toulouse, living in Copenhagen) is a FR/US shapeshifting graphic designer orbiting around Amsterdam. His practice revolves around writing, typesetting, printing, coding and building a wide range of commissioned and self-initiated projects, from books and websites to flutes, boardgames and kites. Under various pseudonyms he is involved in songwriting, music, political science and activism for institutional reform. https://raoulaudouin.fr
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Adel Ben Bella is a filmmaker and curator currently pursuing a PhD in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He holds a BA in Lettres Modernes Spécialisées from Université de La Sorbonne, and an MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. His work revolves around twentieth century colonial and postcolonial France and Algeria with a focus on activist and militant visual media within the context of the Algerian Revolution and Algerian national identity formation.
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Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. Recently, he published the poetry collection Clonal Hum and co-edited La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate], a posthumously assembled history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani. Omar’s writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, and The University of California Book of North African Literature. He currently lives in New York.
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Megan Brown is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Her teaching and research interests include post-World War II politics, decolonization, the histories of France and Algeria, and questions of citizenship. Her book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), interrogates the role of empire in the formation of integrated post-1945 European institutions. Her writing has been published in Modern & Contemporary France and French Politics, Culture & Society. She received her PhD in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
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Séverine Chapelle recently graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths University). She is working on wind, as an atmospheric current in which the flow of air and flow of capital intersect. She is currently focusing on role of maritime insurances for wind in colonial explorations and the transatlantic slave trade, and their present investments in offshore wind farms in the UK.
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simona dvorák is an interdependent curator, researcher and art historian based in Paris, France. She investigates how we can create spaces of communality in the cultural sphere, most notably as a curator with the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, founded by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina, and as curator within the Prospection and Social Innovation program within Department of Culture and Creation at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France). Concurrent to this, she also researches the politics of archives and memory from a decolonial, feminist perspective – as a ‘witness’ with Merv Espina for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, as well as in her role as guest curator at the Maison Populaire (Montreuil, France) where she works with Tadeo Kohan on the politics of oral history in the 2023 program actes de langage. Recently, dvorák was a fellow in the documenta fifteen Art and Education programme (Kassel, Germany), and she collaborated with Biljana Ćirić and Balkan...Projects on the conception of the public programme Walking with Water, imagined in relation to the Serbian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy).
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Hanieh Fatouraee is an a-disciplinary researcher, artist and architect exploring spatial knowledge systems in the middle east. She navigates around deconstructing dominating narratives through utilizing spatial/visual methodologies, poetic and superstitious investigation. Her current interests are focused on ancestral ceremonial practices of miracle-making, along with vasvas and its complex thresholds of wetness and touch. Her latest research explores infrastructural and environmental violence along the Helmand River in Afghanistan. She is a graduate of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University where she attended the Forensic Architecture studio.
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Alessandro Felicioli is a research master student in Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his bachelor degree in Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ with a thesis investigating the relationship between anarcho-individualism and Freudian psychoanalysis. His main interests concern the contemporary developments of Hegelianism, left-Hegelianism and Phenomenology in particular in the field of social relations and religious beliefs. Currently he is researching new Existentialist trajectories in the framework of Stirner’s Egoism and Phenomenology.
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Anik Fournier is the Curator of Archive and Research at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, NL) and teaches contemporary art theory at Base for Experiment Art and Research at ArtEZ (Arnhem, NL). Her current research and writing centers what she calls the ‘composite life-form of a work’, exploring how different archival registers and methodologies afford liveness: a capacity to create affective, relational, and embodied modes of encounter.
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Jill Jarvis is an assistant professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. She is author of Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), which won the MLA Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies, and currently writing Signs in the Desert: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective.
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Timothy Scott Johnson is a Professional Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the modern world. He is the English translator of François Ewald’s Histoire de l’état providence (The Birth of Solidarity: the History of the Welfare State in France). His current project examines the ways French and Algerian thinkers used the French Revolution of 1789 to interpret the process of decolonization.
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Augustin Jomier is a social and cultural historian of Modern North Africa (19-20th c.). Associate professor in the Arabic Studies Department at INaLCO (Paris), he teaches the Early Modern and Modern history of North Africa, and the Middle East.
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Anna Jayne Kimmel [PhD Candidate, Stanford University] is a performance studies scholar invested in the intersection of legal and dance studies, with particular attention to francophone histories and moments of public assembly. As a dancer, Kimmel has performed the works of: Ohad Naharin, Trisha Brown, John Jasperse, Francesca Harper, Rebecca Lazier, Olivier Tarpaga, Marjani Forte, and Susan Marshall, amongst others. Her writing appears in Performance Research, Lateral, The Drama Review (TDR), Dance Research Journal and The Brooklyn Rail. She currently serves on the board to Performance Studies international and as Reviews Editor of Performance Research.
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Corentin Lécine: I am a recent graduate of European Studies from the university of Amsterdam looking for ways to put in practice the knowledge accumulated throughout my education. I am committed to revealing neo-colonial processes, convinced that it is through information dissemination that Western civil societies can push their governments for reform and reparations. I dedicated my Master’s thesis to the imposition of European identity in European territories outside of geographical Europe (Outermost Regions), remnants of colonization in which local culture is trumped by ‘universal’ (i.e. western) values. By participating to the project Performing Colonial Toxicity, I thus aim at furthering my academic activism, encouraging concrete actions against epistemological forms of oppression.
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Natasha Marie Llorens (b. Marseille) is a curator and an arts writer based in Stockholm. Her most recent curatorial project is En Attendant Omar Gatlato: Epilogue at the CNAC Magasin, in Grenoble. Her current artistic research project on the Algerian socialism in the 1970s, conducted in collaboration with contemporary artist Massinissa Selmani, will be presented in initial form in November 2023 at rhizome gallery in Algiers. Llorens holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a PhD in modern and contemporary art history from Columbia University. She is professor of art and theory at the Royal Institute Stockholm since 2020.
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Miriam Matthiessen (she/her) is a researcher living in Amsterdam. She is primarily interested the intersections of maritime worlds, critical logistics, and urban political ecology. Together with Jacob Bolton and Eliza Ader, she co-runs the Abandoned Seafarer Map, an online counter-mapping project tracking the systemic abandonment of seafarers by shipowners and the shipping industry at large. She was a participant in the 2022 FieldARTS Transitional Waters Residency in Amsterdam, where together with Jacob Bolton she began developing a project about logistical timespace and infrarhythms. She holds a BSc in Political Science and Philosophy from University College London, and a RMSc in Urban Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
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Martine Neddam is an artist who uses language as raw material. Speech acts, modes of address, words in the public space were always her favourite subjects. She has been exhibiting text objetcs and installations in galleries and museums and created large size public commissions for the public space in different cities in Europe. Since 1996 she created on internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author remains invisible. 1996/2023 Mouchette, 2001 David Still, 2005 XiaoQian, etc.. She also experiments in the creation of platforms for online creative publishing and online shared environments.
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M’hamed Oualdi is a professor of history at Sciences Po-Paris. He teaches and studies the history of early-modern and modern North Africa. He is also the principal investigator of a research project ‘SlaveVoices’. Funded by a European Research council consolidator grant this project seeks to understand the experiences of the slaves of various origins in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean during the abolition era by studying their ego-documents. He recently published A Slave Between Empires. A Transimperial History of North Africa, Columbia University Press.
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Roxanne Panchasi is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2009) and the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a podcast channel she launched on the New Books Network in 2013. Her research and writing has explored: handwriting analysis in nineteenth-century France, the ‘uncanny’ rehabilitation of wounded soldiers in the aftermath of the First World War; history pedagogy; experimental and documentary cinema; nuclear weapons; and popular music. Pieces from her current project on the French bomb in empire have appeared (or will soon appear) in History of the Present, French Fiction and Film for Scholars of France (now Imaginaries), Jadaliyya, and Apocalyptica: the Journal of the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg.
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Alice Johnston Rougeaux is a researcher, editor, and communicator based in Amsterdam. She currently works for Sonic Acts and is a 2022–2023 FieldARTS resident, developing approaches toward environmental criticism with a focus on artistic research and political ecology. She is a Cultural Analysis graduate with a background in Literature, Anthropology and Political Science. Her research in the Environmental Humanities and Elemental Media takes up the politics and poetics of things that drift. Across disciplines, arts and media, Alice relates matter and energy to forms of expression.
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Adel Ben Bella is a filmmaker and curator currently pursuing a PhD in Modern Culture and Media at Brown University. He holds a BA in Lettres Modernes Spécialisées from Université de La Sorbonne, and an MFA in Film Directing from Columbia University. His work revolves around twentieth century colonial and postcolonial France and Algeria with a focus on activist and militant visual media within the context of the Algerian Revolution and Algerian national identity formation.
–––
Omar Berrada is a writer, translator, and curator whose work focuses on the politics of translation and intergenerational transmission. Recently, he published the poetry collection Clonal Hum and co-edited La Septième Porte [The Seventh Gate], a posthumously assembled history of Moroccan cinema by Ahmed Bouanani. Omar’s writing was published in numerous exhibition catalogs, magazines and anthologies, including Frieze, Bidoun, Asymptote, and The University of California Book of North African Literature. He currently lives in New York.
–––
Megan Brown is Associate Professor of History at Swarthmore College. Her teaching and research interests include post-World War II politics, decolonization, the histories of France and Algeria, and questions of citizenship. Her book, The Seventh Member State: Algeria, France, and the European Community (Harvard University Press, 2022), interrogates the role of empire in the formation of integrated post-1945 European institutions. Her writing has been published in Modern & Contemporary France and French Politics, Culture & Society. She received her PhD in History from the Graduate Center, CUNY.
–––
Séverine Chapelle recently graduated from the Centre for Research Architecture (Goldsmiths University). She is working on wind, as an atmospheric current in which the flow of air and flow of capital intersect. She is currently focusing on role of maritime insurances for wind in colonial explorations and the transatlantic slave trade, and their present investments in offshore wind farms in the UK.
–––
simona dvorák is an interdependent curator, researcher and art historian based in Paris, France. She investigates how we can create spaces of communality in the cultural sphere, most notably as a curator with the Initiative for Practices and Visions of Radical Care, founded by Nataša Petrešin-Bachelez and Elena Sorokina, and as curator within the Prospection and Social Innovation program within Department of Culture and Creation at the Centre Pompidou (Paris, France). Concurrent to this, she also researches the politics of archives and memory from a decolonial, feminist perspective – as a ‘witness’ with Merv Espina for the Rockbund Art Museum in Shanghai, as well as in her role as guest curator at the Maison Populaire (Montreuil, France) where she works with Tadeo Kohan on the politics of oral history in the 2023 program actes de langage. Recently, dvorák was a fellow in the documenta fifteen Art and Education programme (Kassel, Germany), and she collaborated with Biljana Ćirić and Balkan...Projects on the conception of the public programme Walking with Water, imagined in relation to the Serbian Pavilion at the 59th Venice Biennale (Venice, Italy).
–––
Hanieh Fatouraee is an a-disciplinary researcher, artist and architect exploring spatial knowledge systems in the middle east. She navigates around deconstructing dominating narratives through utilizing spatial/visual methodologies, poetic and superstitious investigation. Her current interests are focused on ancestral ceremonial practices of miracle-making, along with vasvas and its complex thresholds of wetness and touch. Her latest research explores infrastructural and environmental violence along the Helmand River in Afghanistan. She is a graduate of the Centre for Research Architecture, Goldsmiths University where she attended the Forensic Architecture studio.
–––
Alessandro Felicioli is a research master student in Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Amsterdam. He obtained his bachelor degree in Philosophy at the University of Rome ‘La Sapienza’ with a thesis investigating the relationship between anarcho-individualism and Freudian psychoanalysis. His main interests concern the contemporary developments of Hegelianism, left-Hegelianism and Phenomenology in particular in the field of social relations and religious beliefs. Currently he is researching new Existentialist trajectories in the framework of Stirner’s Egoism and Phenomenology.
–––
Anik Fournier is the Curator of Archive and Research at If I Can’t Dance, I Don’t Want To Be Part Of Your Revolution (Amsterdam, NL) and teaches contemporary art theory at Base for Experiment Art and Research at ArtEZ (Arnhem, NL). Her current research and writing centers what she calls the ‘composite life-form of a work’, exploring how different archival registers and methodologies afford liveness: a capacity to create affective, relational, and embodied modes of encounter.
–––
Jill Jarvis is an assistant professor in the Department of French and a member of the councils on African Studies and Middle East Studies at Yale University. She is author of Decolonizing Memory: Algeria & the Politics of Testimony (Duke UP, 2021), which won the MLA Scaglione Prize for French & Francophone Studies, and currently writing Signs in the Desert: Aesthetic Cartographies of the Sahara. With Brahim El Guabli and Francisco Robles, she is a founding member of the Desert Futures Collective.
–––
Timothy Scott Johnson is a Professional Assistant Professor of History at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. His work focuses on the intellectual and cultural history of the modern world. He is the English translator of François Ewald’s Histoire de l’état providence (The Birth of Solidarity: the History of the Welfare State in France). His current project examines the ways French and Algerian thinkers used the French Revolution of 1789 to interpret the process of decolonization.
–––
Augustin Jomier is a social and cultural historian of Modern North Africa (19-20th c.). Associate professor in the Arabic Studies Department at INaLCO (Paris), he teaches the Early Modern and Modern history of North Africa, and the Middle East.
–––
Anna Jayne Kimmel [PhD Candidate, Stanford University] is a performance studies scholar invested in the intersection of legal and dance studies, with particular attention to francophone histories and moments of public assembly. As a dancer, Kimmel has performed the works of: Ohad Naharin, Trisha Brown, John Jasperse, Francesca Harper, Rebecca Lazier, Olivier Tarpaga, Marjani Forte, and Susan Marshall, amongst others. Her writing appears in Performance Research, Lateral, The Drama Review (TDR), Dance Research Journal and The Brooklyn Rail. She currently serves on the board to Performance Studies international and as Reviews Editor of Performance Research.
–––
Corentin Lécine: I am a recent graduate of European Studies from the university of Amsterdam looking for ways to put in practice the knowledge accumulated throughout my education. I am committed to revealing neo-colonial processes, convinced that it is through information dissemination that Western civil societies can push their governments for reform and reparations. I dedicated my Master’s thesis to the imposition of European identity in European territories outside of geographical Europe (Outermost Regions), remnants of colonization in which local culture is trumped by ‘universal’ (i.e. western) values. By participating to the project Performing Colonial Toxicity, I thus aim at furthering my academic activism, encouraging concrete actions against epistemological forms of oppression.
–––
Natasha Marie Llorens (b. Marseille) is a curator and an arts writer based in Stockholm. Her most recent curatorial project is En Attendant Omar Gatlato: Epilogue at the CNAC Magasin, in Grenoble. Her current artistic research project on the Algerian socialism in the 1970s, conducted in collaboration with contemporary artist Massinissa Selmani, will be presented in initial form in November 2023 at rhizome gallery in Algiers. Llorens holds an MA from the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, and a PhD in modern and contemporary art history from Columbia University. She is professor of art and theory at the Royal Institute Stockholm since 2020.
–––
Miriam Matthiessen (she/her) is a researcher living in Amsterdam. She is primarily interested the intersections of maritime worlds, critical logistics, and urban political ecology. Together with Jacob Bolton and Eliza Ader, she co-runs the Abandoned Seafarer Map, an online counter-mapping project tracking the systemic abandonment of seafarers by shipowners and the shipping industry at large. She was a participant in the 2022 FieldARTS Transitional Waters Residency in Amsterdam, where together with Jacob Bolton she began developing a project about logistical timespace and infrarhythms. She holds a BSc in Political Science and Philosophy from University College London, and a RMSc in Urban Studies from the University of Amsterdam.
–––
Martine Neddam is an artist who uses language as raw material. Speech acts, modes of address, words in the public space were always her favourite subjects. She has been exhibiting text objetcs and installations in galleries and museums and created large size public commissions for the public space in different cities in Europe. Since 1996 she created on internet virtual characters who lead an autonomous artistic existence in which the real author remains invisible. 1996/2023 Mouchette, 2001 David Still, 2005 XiaoQian, etc.. She also experiments in the creation of platforms for online creative publishing and online shared environments.
–––
M’hamed Oualdi is a professor of history at Sciences Po-Paris. He teaches and studies the history of early-modern and modern North Africa. He is also the principal investigator of a research project ‘SlaveVoices’. Funded by a European Research council consolidator grant this project seeks to understand the experiences of the slaves of various origins in North Africa and the Western Mediterranean during the abolition era by studying their ego-documents. He recently published A Slave Between Empires. A Transimperial History of North Africa, Columbia University Press.
–––
Roxanne Panchasi is Associate Professor of History at Simon Fraser University in Canada. She is the author of Future Tense: The Culture of Anticipation in France Between the Wars (Cornell University Press, 2009) and the founding host of New Books in French Studies, a podcast channel she launched on the New Books Network in 2013. Her research and writing has explored: handwriting analysis in nineteenth-century France, the ‘uncanny’ rehabilitation of wounded soldiers in the aftermath of the First World War; history pedagogy; experimental and documentary cinema; nuclear weapons; and popular music. Pieces from her current project on the French bomb in empire have appeared (or will soon appear) in History of the Present, French Fiction and Film for Scholars of France (now Imaginaries), Jadaliyya, and Apocalyptica: the Journal of the Centre for Apocalyptic and Post-Apocalyptic Studies at the University of Heidelberg.
–––
Alice Johnston Rougeaux is a researcher, editor, and communicator based in Amsterdam. She currently works for Sonic Acts and is a 2022–2023 FieldARTS resident, developing approaches toward environmental criticism with a focus on artistic research and political ecology. She is a Cultural Analysis graduate with a background in Literature, Anthropology and Political Science. Her research in the Environmental Humanities and Elemental Media takes up the politics and poetics of things that drift. Across disciplines, arts and media, Alice relates matter and energy to forms of expression.