Elena Biner
Elena Biner is a Swiss artist living and working in Copenhagen. With a background in visual communication and a strong foundation in storytelling, her practice sits at the intersection of visual arts and performative spaces, specialising in immersive experiences. In her work she blurs the line between reality and fiction, using narrative and material-based formats in order to explore themes of social interaction, human connection, and the necessity of rituals and
transitions. Since 2012, Elena has been one half of the artist duo Last Oblivion, creating large-scale immersive installations that focus on longing bodies in spaces of transition. Their recent works have been exhibited in cities including Prague, Vienna, Copenhagen, and Gothenburg.
In addition to her collaborative work with Last Oblivion, Elena is a founding member of the collective Vibrant Matter, which organises hybrid events in unconventional and non-venue spaces around Copenhagen—most recently in 2023 at an old transformer station. Over the past few years, she has also developed visual universes for theatre, including contributions to productions such as SIMILI by AVA, a dance and animation performance.
Gloria Zeppilli
Gloria Zeppilli is a visual artist, film and theatre director, co-founder of the scientific journal IMPURE. Journal of Art and Anthropology. She is part of the artistic duo UCCI UCCI (together with Salvatore Crucitti), whose artistic research is elaborated in performative, visual and cinematographic works.
“Art as an archive of what is hidden and in danger of extinction”
The artistic duo UCCI UCCI was born in 2020 with the intention of developing artistic research in dialogue with anthropological, ethnographic, interspecies and archival practices and studies. At the basis of their work there is an intertwining of sociocultural analysis and aesthetic exploration, which translates into a stratified artistic language.
The works emerge from immersion in specific territories, activated in their anthropological and environmental significance. These are not decontextualized objects, but shapes that absorb and restore the urgencies of the place in which they are born. Biographies, territories, oral memories and community gestures constitute the levels of a hypertextual and choral narrative.
Through a relational practice, with the landscape and human and non-human communities, UCCI UCCI connects aesthetics and ethnographic research, generating poetic and theoretical tensions. The work is a liminal space, where reflections are both political, cultural and sensitive.
The aim is to bring out submerged cultures, subcultures, what is disappearing or what is on the fringes of the visible, through performative and visual works that feed on the complexity of the contexts and relationships that run through them.
www.ucci-ucci.com
ucciucci [dot] info [at] gmail [dot] com (ucciucci[dot]info[at]gmail[dot]com)
Jo Dahlbäck
Jo Dahlbäck is a theatre maker, scenographer and costume designer based in Stockholm/Berlin, working in theatre and performing arts. Their practice is rooted in queer methodologies and collective processes, exploring how performance can challenge power structures and social norms. They are particularly interested in challenging normative understandings of time by proposing ecological and queer temporalities.
They work with spatial dramaturgy, transformation and transparency, often in immersive and participatory settings. Collaborations are central to their approach, most notably as co-leader of Friends for Fun, a queer performing arts collective. The collective’s maximalist works engage audiences in playful yet critical explorations of politics and identity, addressing unsexy topics such as redistribution of wealth or authoritarian tendencies in a humorous way.
Dahlbäck has collaborated extensively across the Nordic region. They hold a BA in Scenography from the Norwegian Theatre Academy and have taken further courses linking performing arts and politics. Dahlbäck continues to develop projects that merge artistic research with social and political engagement, embracing fluidity and transformativity.
Johannes Purovaara
Johannes Purovaara is a dance maker, performer and musician who has worked extensively in the contemporary performance field in Finland and toured internationally. They have performed with Finnish National Theatre, Helsinki City Theatre, Finnish National Broadcasting Company YLE and Zodiak - Centre for New Dance, among others. Purovaara has a master’s degree in dance from the University of the Arts Helsinki from 2017. After working for 10 years as a freelance performer - as well as a janitor, a gravedigger, and a school assistant, to name a few - they are eager to begin the Performing Arts as Critical Practice-program in Malmö.
Purovaara examines the questions of precarity, hierarchies and historical and present-day social dynamics through the lens of a performer. Concurrently they are interested in bringing such concepts as contact, becoming and transformation onto stage in fantastical and playful forms. This they do with funding from the Finnish Helander Foundation. They are also a fellow of the Finnish Kone Foundation’s Saari Residency in 2026. In addition to the performing arts, Johannes releases music under the name ´raunio´.
https://johannespurovaara.com/
Juno Krogh Jonsson
Juno is an interdisciplinary artist from Sweden whose practice is an inquiry into the creative process itself, exploring physicality, sound, poetry, and technologies to unify them. Their work seeks to find new pathways for expression by treating composition, performance, and invention as a single, unified possibility space.
With a background in acrobatics and dance, including work with Riksteatern and the Royal Swedish Opera, and having performed as a solo musician across Europe and Asia, Juno combines a naive intimacy with a grounded physical presence. Their process is driven by a deep belief in art as a transformative societal force and a continuous search for how to enable and release that potential.
Petros Mandalos
Petros Mandalos is a theatre-maker, writer, and interdisciplinary artist whose work unfolds through queer perspectives on performance, memory, and resistance. His practice carries a trace of the small Greek village – not the sun-drenched postcard of whitewashed houses and eternal summers, but the everyday theatre of gossip, contradictions, and survival tactics where tenderness and absurdity walk hand in hand. Moving between theatre, visual storytelling, and installation, he creates hybrid forms that expose the cracks between the private and the political. He is the founder of The Tragic Irony, a collaborative platform that stages performances around urgent social and political questions, combining research, collective authorship, and postdramatic aesthetics. His current project, Kalypso Island, imagines a drifting territory where myth, mental health, and cinematic imagery intertwine, opening spaces for queer resilience and collective dreaming.
Salvatore Crucitti
Salvatore Crucitti is an Italian visual artist, film and theatre director. Co-founder of Impure Journal of Art and Anthropology and is part of the UCCI UCCI duo with Gloria Zeppilli. The artistic duo UCCI UCCI was founded with the goal of developing artistic research through an ethnographic approach. Sociological analysis and aesthetic exploration are essential tools for the creation of their language. Their works arise from immersion in a specific territory, activated in its anthropological and environmental dimensions. The work is not decontextualized or detached from the environment in which it exists but captures its emerging phenomena. Languages, stories, traditions, rituals, and landscapes of communities constitute the layers of their works, conceived as "hypertextual objects". Through a relational practice and the activation of anthropic landscapes, aesthetics and ethnographic research engage in dialogue. This dialogue aims to evoke unexpected theoretical and aesthetic short circuits that emerge from artistic practice, enabling a dimension where reflection is both poetic and political. Their work addresses cultural and social issues through an interdisciplinary and relational artistic practice, with the intention of evoking territories, subcultures, and hidden or endangered cultures. Artistic research is expressed through performative and visual works.
www.ucci-ucci.com
ucciucci [dot] info [at] gmail [dot] com (ucciucci[dot]info[at]gmail[dot]com)