Nadia is the principal investigator of the ERC-funded project Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad: Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943 (LAWHA), based at the Orient-Institut Beirut. Her publications treat cultural politics, artistic practices and the circulation of knowledge, including The Art Salon in the Arab Region: Politics of Taste Making, co-edited with Monique Bellan (2018), and The Syria-Iran Axis: Cultural Diplomacy and International Relations in the Middle East (2013/2015). She holds a DPhil in Modern Middle Eastern Studies from St Antony’s College, Oxford.   LAWHA examines the forces that have shaped the emergence of a professional field of art in Lebanon in local, regional and global contexts.  

Lebanon’s Art World at Home and Abroad (LAWHA). Trajectories of artists and artworks in/from Lebanon since 1943

At gd:c, Nadia is writing a book on LAWHA’s main research questions. Since the project relates context and artistic production at home and abroad, the question of connections and ruptures between these poles is an integral part of the analysis. By studying the nuances of artists’ migratory trajectories, networks and creation, she is analysing rather than presuming links and connections, paying close attention to the experiences of artists.  

Işıl Eğrikavuk holds an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a Ph.D. in communication from Istanbul Bilgi University. Işıl has worked at the Berlin University of Arts (UdK) since 2017 and was the co-winner of Turkey’s Full Art Prize in 2012. She founded the other garden, a research space that focuses on ecology, diversity, inclusivity and radical care in the UdK.   Işıl has participated in numerous international exhibitions and residencies and has published widely. Recent exhibitions and venues include Kunstraum Kreuzberg Bethanien, La Casa Encendida, the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Photography (2022), and the 11th Istanbul Biennial.   Işıl joined global dis:connect as an artist fellow.  

Gezi Park Protests

Işıl’s past research has been on community art practices and creating new forms of interconnectedness among different communities in the context of the arts. At global dis:connect, Işıl will focus on community practices from a beyond-human perspective and will focus on artistic research as a process-based method for alternative knowledge production.  

Claiton Marcio da Silva is an associate professor of history at the Universidade Federal da Fronteira Sul (UFFS), Brazil, with a PhD in the history of science. In 2023, he published The Making of Modern Agriculture: Nelson Rockefeller’s American International Association for Economic and Social Development (AIA) in Latin America (1946-1968), addressing U.S. private diplomacy during the Cold War. He also co-edited The Age of the Soybean (White Horse Press, 2022) with Claudio de Majo.

Towards a Soyacene: connecting soybean narratives of crists and change in Asia, European Union and Latin America

At global dis:connect, Claiton is exploring soybean production and exports as a fundamental dis:connectivity in globalisation, with a focus on political and socioenvironmental aspects. While historiography on the topic approaches these experiences of technological innovation and deforestation in a disconnected way, Claiton is proposing a transdisciplinary ethno-historical approach, connecting global experiences and arguing that the detours in this process (cheating, smuggling of inputs, etc.) are fundamental, not exceptional, parts of the process.