Luísa Telles is an artist and researcher working with archives and historical collections. Her multidisciplinary practice investigates social memory, overlooked histories, and the body as an agent of resistance. She has lived and worked in São Paulo, Lisbon, Hamburg, and Berlin, and was awarded a full-time DAAD research grant for her Master’s at HfbK Hamburg. Her work has been presented in collaboration with institutions such as Künstlerhaus Sootbörn, MOM Art Space, Goethe-Institut Paris and Deichtorhallen Museum, with support from Deutsche Börse für Fotografie, Hamburgische Kulturstiftung, Karl H. Ditze Stiftung, Behörde für Kultur & Medien, among others. Telles has published, organized debates, and lectured at institutions including Kunstsammlung NRW, Kunstverein Hamburg, Kunstverein Lüneburg, Academy of Arts The Hague, and Leuphana Universität.

Border Bodies

The project “Border Bodies” investigates the displacement of tropical plants from South America to Europe during colonial expansion. Many of these species survived in Europe thanks to the construction of greenhouses such as Munich’s Palmenhaus, one of the largest in the world. Their migration is inseparable from histories of imperial power, economic exploitation, and biopiracy, which continue to shape inequalities between the Global South and the North. My project combines artistic research and production. I will study collections at the Staatliche Naturwissenschaftliche Sammlungen Bayerns and the Botanischer Garten München-Nymphenburg, focusing on species native to the Brazilian rainforest.This project builds on previous research developed at archives and botanical gardens in Hamburg, Kiel, and Leipzig, from where I produced installations combining photography, sound, textiles, and porcelain. “Border Bodies” thus reframes botanical collections as spaces where colonial epistemologies can be revisited and reimagined.

Martin Dusinberre is a professor of global history at the University of Zurich. He has authored Mooring the Global Archive: A Japanese Ship and its Migrant Histories (2023) and Hard Times in the Hometown: A History of Community Survival in Modern Japan (2012). His research interests include the histories of migration and empire in the Asia-Pacific region as well as reflections on archival methodologies in a digital and global age. He is also interested in experimental forms of historical writing and performance. Since 2020 he has been a member of the editorial board of Past & Present.

Kate Stevens is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Her research focuses on histories of cultural, environmental and economic exchange in the colonial and postcolonial Pacific. Her first book Gender, Violence and Criminal Justice in the Colonial Pacific 1880-1920 examines sexual violence across different colonial legal systems. Her other projects explore multispecies and environmental histories of the Pacific, including women's roles in whaling worlds, coconut oil from the Pacific to the global economy and urban histories of Suva.

Shipworm modernity: marine borer dis:connecting ports and oceans from the 19^th century to the present

This project traces shifting human relationships to the multispecies assemblage of shipworm and wood in the Pacific Ocean, considering their role in making, unmaking and remaking coastlines and sea. Shipworms were emblematic of the tensions between connection and disconnection in the ocean in the colonial and postcolonial era, as they moved with ships at the same time as disrupting shipping infrastructure. I examine indigenous understandings of shipworm, sometimes valued and farmed for food, alongside colonial anxieties over their threats to oceanic connectivity.