Abdessamad El Montassir’s practice is at the crossroads of art and research. He lives and works between France and Morocco and is currently a fellow at the Villa Medici – French Academy in Rome.
Abdessamad El Montassir is a bearer of stories whose practice is deeply rooted in the vast landscapes of the Sahara: he approaches land not merely as a backdrop but as a living entity. An interlocutor in memory and witnessing.
His work is an investigation into something that escapes us. He gives forms to silences and a texture to mutism. Because El Montassir is a historian without archives, an argonaut of the great outdoors and a track hound of the territories.
His work resembles an anthology of poems, is like a scientific novel and exists as a song of transmission. At the same time, he highlights the capacity of plants and non-human elements to act on the world, even transforming or influencing it.

Ana Cabral, born in São Miguel, Azores, holds a degree and a master’s degree in Chemical Engineering from the University of Porto. In parallel to her specialization, she was an actor in the film by Cláudia Varejão Lobo e Cão.

Armando Lulaj is a visual artist, writer and filmmaker. His research is oriented towards accentuating the border between economic power, fictional democracy and social disparity in a global context. In 2003 he co-founded DebatikCenter of Contemporary Art in Tirana. His works have been shown at the Prague Biennial (2003, 2007), the 6th Berlin Biennial (2010), the 52nd Venice Biennial (2007), the 63rd Berlin International Film Festival (2013), the National Theater in Tirana (2013), and he represented Albania at the 56th Venice Biennial (2015). Recent solo exhibitions have been presented at Zone of Contemporary Art at Academy of Art in Szczecin (2024) and at ZETA Contemporary Art Center in Tirana (2024). The book Broken Narrative: The Politics of Contemporary Art in Albania, written by Lulaj and Marco Mazzi, was published in 2022 by punctum books.

Atelineiras is a transdisciplinary collective formed in 2020, in São Miguel, Azores, consisting of Beatriz Toste, Carolina Amado, Inês Falcão and Xico Xico.  

Within this collective, they seek to consolidate artistic structures informed by their own perspectives on collectivity, the approach to audiences and the free experimentation of artistic techniques that accompany the progress of each member of the collective. As Atelineiras promote events, performances, workshops, exhibitions and collaborations with other artists, collectives and associations, which reflect the collective’s goal: to intervene and shake the Azorean cultural panorama. Their work is based on the development of individuality, with the goal of reaching a sustainable and progressive collectivity, questioning more and more what is ar

Bani Khoshnoudi was born in Tehran and raised in the United States. She studied architecture, photography, and film at the University of Texas at Austin and then at the Whitney Museum’s Independent Study Program. Her films, installations, and photographs have been shown at festivals, museums, and art centers around the world, including the Centre Pompidou, Fondation Cartier, ICA London, and the Serralves Foundation in Porto. In 2022, she received the Herb Alpert Award in the Arts for Film/Video. In 2024, her work was exhibited at the 60th Venice Biennale as part of the installation “Disobedience Archive” in the central exhibition, Stranieri Ovunque.

Best-known for her videos and animated films combining drawn art, music and occasionally scratched or reworked cinematic images, the work of Camille Henrot (born 1978, lives and works in Paris) blurs the traditionally hierarchical categories of art history. Her recent work, adapted into the diverse media of sculpture, drawing, photography and, as always, film, considers the fascination with the “other” and “elsewhere” in terms of both geography and sexuality. This fascination is reflected in popular modern myths that have inspired her. The artist’s impure, hybrid objects cast doubt upon the linear and partitioned transcription of Western history and highlight its borrowings and grey areas. Camille Henrot’s work has been exhibited in France at the Centre Pompidou, the Paris Museum of Modern Art, the Palais de Tokyo, the Espace Paul Ricard, the Jeu de Paume, the Cartier Foundation, the Louis Vuitton Cultural Space, the Foundation Maeght, the collections of Saint-Cyprien, the Museum of Fine Arts of Bordeaux, Crac Alsace, and abroad at Sungkok Art Museum in Seoul, the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Center for Contemporary Images in Geneva, the Hara Museum in Tokyo and Oi Futuro Cultural Center in Rio de Janeiro. Camille Henrot won the Silver Lion at the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013, the Nam June Paik Award 2014, the Edvard Munch Art Award 2015…

Catarina Fernandes is a native of São Miguel. She is 36 years old. A transdisciplinary artist, she graduated in Fine Arts and in Socio-educational projects. She came across the performing arts in 2008, and in 2011 she dedicates to singing and composition. In 2012 she went to France to advance her studies. She uses video projection for the first time in 2017, but it is in 2022 that she falls in love with filming, directing and editing. She is interested in exploring the interchanges between different artistic expressions and considers intimacy and intuition as sources of inspiration. The feminist premise “people are political” is her guide.

Catarina Nogueira completed the first year of the Cinema / Moving Image course at AR.CO. Her artistic practice and essayistic work propose contemplative and transcendental experiences.

Doplgenger é o nome de uma dupla de artistas de Belgrado, Isidora Ilić e Boško Prostran. O trabalho que desenvolvem enquanto Doplgenger aborda a relação entre arte e política, explorando os temas da imagem em movimento e as formas da sua percepção. O duo baseia-se nas tradições dos filmes experimentais e de avant-garde, e também do cinema expandido, tirando partido de algumas características destes modelos tradicionais para intervir na linguagem mediática existente.Para além do trabalho com imagem em movimento, também realizam instalações, performance, escrita, palestras e debates. O trabalho da dupla foi exibido em: Videobrasil Biennial, São Paulo; Festival International des Cinémas Différents et Expérimentaux ,em Paris, EXiS – Experimental Film and Video Festival, em Seoul, European Media Art Festival, em Osnabrück entre outros.

Enar de Dios Rodríguez is a visual artist interested in ​​demonstrating how economic, sociopolitical, historical, and environmental aspects intersect with each other. Through the use of a diverse range of media, including video, photography, and installation, her recent projects have focused on acts of territorialization, examining their origins, repercussions, and the requisite technologies of control essential for their execution. Enar’s artistic practice is research-based, rooted in interdisciplinary investigations, wherein the selective process of existing visual and textual material serves as a starting point for an exploration of the poetic and its political applicability. Understanding art as an affective form of knowledge-production, and inspired by feminist, posthumanist, and decolonial perspectives, her projects ultimately aim to creatively sabotage the imposed future.

Igor Bošnjak lives and works in Trebinje (Bosnia & Herzegovina) as a visual artist and filmmaker. He works on interdisciplinary research, addressing history, migrations, surveillance and image-time relations as key references in the experience of contemporary society. He is mainly working within the media fields of contemporary art: moving images, video, film, 3D animation, installation and photography.
His works have been exhibited at: Whitechapel Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Wien; Istanbul Museum of Modern Art; Chelsea College of Arts, London; National Center for Contemporary Art & Museum of Modern Art Moscow and many other institutions. His films and video works were screened at: Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin; School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.); Ballroom Marfa, Texas; Galleria d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Bergamo and many other places.

Igor Simić is a Serbian-American artist who completed his studies at Columbia University in New York. He is the co-founder and creative director of Demagog Studio in Belgrade, which produces video games with an eco-critical focus. In 2022 his visual art was featured as part of Manifesta 14, while his video game The Cub was an official selection as part of the gaming section at Tribeca Film Festival. His award-winning short films and videos have shown at Alternative Film Video in Belgrade, Edinburgh International Film Festival, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and many other places. Simić is represented by Galerie Anita Beckers in Frankfurt.

Born in 1990 in Agadir, Ilias El Faris studied directing at Paris VIII. He shot his first short film, Azayz, in Super 8 , which won the Jury Prize at Doclisboa 2016. In 2017, Ilias directed Roujoula in Casablanca, the city where he grew up. The film competed in the international competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival and received the Grand Prix for Short Film at Cinemed, as well as the Jury and Screenplay Awards at the Tangier National Festival. In 2018, Ilias participated in the Locarno Filmmakers Academy. In 2019, on the beach in Casablanca, Ilias made Sukar in 16mm. The film toured international festivals and won around ten awards (Jury Prize & FranceTV Prize at the Champs Elysées Film Festival, Cervantes Award in Rome, Dakar Short Grand Prize, etc.) In 2023, he is one of the talents of the short film festival. Ilias also practices film photography. He is developing his first feature film.

Isabel Medeiros (Ponta Delgada, 1998) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice moves between performance, video, sculpture, installation, and photography, reflecting on memory, communication, and the presence of the body in space. She holds a Master’s degree in Aesthetics and Artistic Studies – with a specialization in Cinema and Photography (NOVA FCSH, 2023), and a BA in Multimedia Art – Installation and Performance (FBAUL, 2019), having also studied at the Art Academy of Szczecin in Poland. She was one of the winners of the first edition of the Nova Vaga Award and participated in the exhibition Corpos Magmáticos (2024) at vaga – espaço de arte e conhecimento. Her work has also been presented at the Carlos Machado Museum (Do tempo e das nuvens, 2024) and at the Horta Public Library (Memórias do Vulcão, 2023), among other contexts. Her pieces often incorporate materials such as glass, fungus, basalt, or ice, crossing archive and transformation. She lives between Ponta Delgada and Lisbon, sustaining a practice attuned to impermanence, poetic gesture, and the contamination between times and materials.

Jane Jin Kaisen (b. 1980, Jeju Island, South Korea) is a visual artist, filmmaker, and researcher based in Copenhagen. Her multidisciplinary practice spans video, installation, performance, and text, combining interdisciplinary research with a poetic and feminist approach. Her work addresses themes such as memory, migration, spirituality, islandness, and the reimagining of myths, exploring the intersection between lived experience and political histories. She represented Korea at the 58th Venice Biennale with the film installation Community of Parting (2019), and has held solo exhibitions at institutions such as Kunsthal Charlottenborg (Copenhagen), Art Sonje Center (Seoul), and The Image Centre (Toronto). She holds a PhD in artistic research and studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts, UCLA, and the Whitney Independent Study Program.

Born in 1972 in Mulhouse, France
Lives and works between Paris, France and New York, New York, USA
Located at the intersection of heterogeneous temporalities, geographies, and realities, Laurent Grasso’s films, sculptures, paintings, and photographs immerse the viewer in an uncanny world of uncertainty. The artist creates mysterious atmospheres that challenge the boundaries of what we perceive and know. Anachronism and hybridity play an active role in his strategy, which entails diffracting reality in order to recompose it according to his own rules. Fascinated by the way in which various powers can affect human conscience, Grasso seeks to grasp, reveal, and materialize the invisible, from collective fears to politics to electromagnetic or paranormal phenomena. His work reveals what lies behind common perception and offers us a new perspective on history and reality.

Since the 1960s, Lynn Hershman Leeson has worked prolifically across media to reveal and intervene on the technological infrastructures of our social world. Using sculpture, film, video, installation, performance, drawing, painting, net art, and experiments with interactive technologies like CCTV and online interfaces, Hershman Leeson repurposes the content and form of mainstream media to provocatively investigate identity, surveillance, and the role of media subcultures in resisting censorship and political oppression. Hershman Leeson has been at the forefront of artistic technological experimentation since her earliest works, incorporating touch screen technology as early as the 1980s, artificially intelligent voice recognition in the early 2000s, and biotechnology throughout the 2010s.

Maria Emanuel Albergaria, 1962, Ponta Delgada. Studied arts, social anthropology and education sciences. She was a primary school teacher (1989-2006). She worked on the television programs “Icarus” and “Sesame Street” (1990-91) and directed “O Rapto dos Gémeos das Cavernas” (1st Prize of National School Video Festival, 1997). She was coordinator of the Educational Service at the Museum Carlos Machado, (2006-11). Among her work she wants to highlight the installation “Uma Casa na Floresta” Ponta Delgada (2011), the participation in the educational services MUNHAC - National Museum of Natural History and Science, Lisbon (2011-13); the coordination of the team working on  Intangible Cultural Heritage, at the Carlos Machado Museum. She also develops art-community projects: “Caminhos do Chá”, “Sete Cidades - Além da Paisagem” and “So that the Sky Does Not Fall on Us” (2013-18); Co-author of works: “Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco, o fotógrafo da Maia” (2021) and “Chá nas Açores, uma tarde na Gorreana”, 2023, Araucária editions. Co-curator of the exhibition “Laudalino da Ponte Pacheco, the photographer who was there”, MCM, 2024. She is a member of the technical team of the National Plan for the Arts, since 2019.

Maria João Sousa was born in Porto. She is a filmmaker currently living in São Miguel, in the Azores. She graduated in Psychology and later in Cinema from the Escuela Septima Ars in Madrid (2011). She applies psychology to film, motivated by behavioral and psychosocial contexts, assuming the need to observe, inform and share sensations that lead to interventions mediated by art. Founder and artistic director of projects for the Cultural Association Symbolic Symbol.

Artist and also psychoanalyst, Paz Corona is a member of the Ecole de la Cause Freudienne and the World Association of Psychoanalysis. She uses several mediums, including painting, photography, sculpture and film. In 2015, she presented “Face to Face” at the Alliance Française in Delhi and the Harrington Street Arts Centre in Calcutta, India. She participated in the group exhibition “Le temps de l’audace et de l’engagement” at the IAC in Villeurbanne (France) and in “Sèvres Outdoors” at the Jardin de la manufacture in Sèvres (France) in 2016. In 2017, her work was shown in a solo show at the gallery Les filles du calvaire. In 2019, she presents several films in a solo exhibition at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Brooklyn. In 2021, her film “Santiago 1973-2019” received the Special Jury Prize at the International Short Film Festival in Clermont-Ferrand, France. The same year, her film “Atacama” was shown at La Quinzaine de la Vidéo at the Galerie Imane Farès in Paris. Her works are regularly presented at international fairs.

Ricardo Grelha was born in 1995, in the city of Faro. He graduated in History from NOVA University of Lisbon – School of Social Sciences and Humanities (NOVA FCSH), but not wanting to pursue an academic career, he decided to change course and follow his passion for cinema. At the end of the last academic year, he completed the Cinema/Moving Image course at Ar.Co, in Lisbon.

Sandra Medeiros was born in 1996, in the island of São Miguel, Azores. She finished the Scientific and Humanistic course in Visual Arts. Between 2014 and 2023, she was distinguished with honorable mentions and worked in several projects, including collective exhibitions and graphics, such as “The Travels of Life”, “Fragility”, “The Beautiful”, “Poetry Damned”, “Lord Holy Christ of Miracles - Drawings of the Party”. Currently, she works in photography.

Soya the Cow is a sex-positive, feminist, and vegan drag creature who dances, sings, and speaks out for the liberation of all beings—human and non-human. Breaking the binaries of gender and species, Soya was born to inspire and to challenge the status quo. She fights for animals and for all whose voices are silenced, confronting toxic systems of oppression with love, freedom, and a demand for climate justice.
Soya is the alter ego of Daniel Hellmann, a Swiss artist whose interdisciplinary practice moves between performance, music, activism, and queer ecology. With Soya the Cow, Hellmann has developed a multifaceted body of work that critically engages with veganism, speciesism, and feminism, blurring the lines between art and activism, utopia and parody.
Since her debut at the Animal Rights March in front of Berlin’s iconic Volksbühne in 2018, Soya has appeared in a wide range of artistic contexts: from her theatre production Dear Human Animals (2020) and her electro-pop album Purple Grass (2021), to mainstream media platforms like The Voice of Germany (2021), the exhibition project Planet Moo (2022), and ongoing digital performances on social media.

Vladislav Knežević is an artist and director. Primarily involved with audio-visual experiments, he creates works using video material, digital photography, micro-animation, stereoscopic 3D techniques, and generated electronic sound in efforts to realise new experiences of viewing film media. The focus of his interests includes concepts that are related to marginalised categories of reality, the perception of new media images, digital aesthetics, utilitarian-fantastic constructs and the effects of technological-scientific research on human experience. Since 1988 he has been involved with experimental and artistic film, and his works have been shown at over 200 festivals and exhibitions in Europe, the United States, Australia, Japan and Brazil.

Willian da Fonseca Júnior was born and raised in Volta Redonda, in the interior of the state of Rio de Janeiro and graduated in physical education from UniFoa (Brazil). As a child he became orphaned of both parents and moved to Lisbon in 2019, where he worked in various places and in different professions. He writes poetry.  Currently he lives in São Miguel in the Azores archipelago and teaches soccer to children at a sports center in Rabo de Peixe.

Zé Castanheiro (Barrosa, 2003) is a multidisciplinary artist working with both visual and sound media. After training as an Audiovisual Technician and spending a year working in the field, he moved to Berlin where he deepened his interest in electronic music and the production of events — the area he currently works in. In September 2024, he joined ARCO to further pursue his studies in Cinema.