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.

Erika is a Brazilian lecturer, curator and researcher in photography and visual culture based in London. She has a PhD in history (visual culture) from UNICAMP, with a séjour doctoral  at EHESS, Paris and a postdoc at the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of São Paulo. She has taught at Birkbeck College and the University of Bedfordshire and has authored papers on Latin American photography, photography and gender, war photography, as well as three recent books on these topics.

Dis:connecting histories of photography: the transits between Latin America and Europe in the 1970s and 1980s

My project treats the dis:connections between Latin American and European photography between the 1970s and early 1980s. Departing from the Latin American Photography Colloquia (1978, 1981), it analyses archival findings resulting from research carried out in Brazil, Latin America and Europe, which is focused on public European spaces where Latin American photography circulated, such as publications and exhibitions, and how they promoted specific cultural transfers between Latin America and Europe related to the international institutionalisation of photography.

Martin is a dramaturg at the Schaubühne Berlin and an author, director and curator. In 2018, he founded a Erinnerung als Arbeit an der Gegenwart (Memory as work on the present), international interdisciplinary platform that explores how the performing arts can contribute to remembrance. Martin studied economics and sociology at the LMU Munich, the Zeppelin University in Friedrichshafen as well as at UC Berkeley and Cambridge. His research interests include organisation theory and refugee studies. He has taught global urban studies in Munich, Berlin, Friedrichshafen and elsewhere.   Martin joined global dis:connect as an artist fellow.

Recording absences, tracing trajectories: the prosecution of theatre makers in Nazi Germany

Because of their progressive agenda and avant-garde aesthetics, many theatre-makers were in danger before Hitler' seized power in 1933. That’s why the subsequent purge of theatres was swifter and more radical than in other milieus. While thousands of artists fled Germany, many more made their way, benefitting from job opportunities and massive Nazi investment in theatres. 1933 therefore marks a profound rupture in the history of German theatrical institutions and aesthetics. It simultaneously meant a disconnection from international communities of practice and, for the refugees, an expansion of global networks.