Marion Breton, Génération 90. Based in Berlin & born in Paris under the name of Marion — a name her grandpa saw as a bad omen: « Marion? Souillon » / slob/! In response to this initial curse, she sometimes named herself Ablana Thanalba (Hocus Pocus in Hebrew) as if she had to conjure the world and invoke a shared locus (loci, loca, in Latin: uterus) where she develops a special sponge-actor being. She sips and digests all kind of atmospheres and materials: videos, poetry, texts or writings. But, on second thought, she would rather be a slob in her barrel; a barrel where she could pick up and put bits of everyone that she found on her way and realize the conditions of an unproductive life, a Sisyphean reform of inaction.
Tom Nobrega speaks with an accent even when he speaks his own tongue. He uses two hearing aids, has seven titanium nails in his ankle, wears contact lenses and has three artificial teeth. He doesn’t have a home, doesn’t have a cell phone and he is never exactly sure where in the world he is going to be in the next months. He was born in Sao Paulo, Brazil, but has more than one name and nationalities, including the official, affective, and mythic ones. He is a compulsive traveler and does a lot of not exactly useful things, such as making strange utterances in languages that do not exist, losing an unbelievable amount of objects, finding amulets, reading astrological charts, writing poems, making repetitive gestures and playing instruments he cannot play. He is currently committing himself to the Unknown University, a mysterious university without a fixed place that guides his steps even when he is not paying attention to it.
Barbara Marcel (Rio de Janeiro, 1985) is a filmmaker and visual artist based in Berlin, whose works investigate the relations between nature, its cultural histories and colonial imaginaries. In her artistic research PhD at the Bauhaus-University in Weimar, Marcel is investigating the essay-film as a historiographical tool for decolonized thinking with and through images, with the Botanical Garden Berlin-Dahlem and its plants being her current material of study.
Recent exhibitions include: Tropic Matters V240 Amsterdam (solo show, 2017), Omonoia, Athens Biennial (2016); There will come soft rains, GMK Berlin (2016); Vision and Fear Station, Galerie für Zeitgenössische Kunst Leipzig (2015); On Projection, Kühlhaus Berlin (2015); Through the looking screen, 175 Gallery Seoul (2015); Desvenda, Galeria Marta Traba – Fundação Memorial da América Latina, São Paulo (2013); Return to Forever, TZB Gallery of the Czech Centre Berlin (2013).