Orizzontale is a collective of architects based in Rome, whose work spans architecture, landscape, public art and self-construction. Orizzontale has been promoting relational public space projects since 2010, giving shape to images of abandoned or unpublished cities. These projects have been a testing ground for new forms of interaction between inhabitants and urban commons, and at the same time an opportunity to test the limits of the architectural creation process. Orizzontale has built and developed projects in Italy, Spain, Germany, Austria, Greece, Ukraine, Portugal, Holland.

CHEAP is a public art project founded by 6 women in Bologna in 2013, it is a collective, a non-objective gaze, an association: the material it has chosen to investigate is paper – until now, it has found nothing more ephemeral. It mainly intervenes on the urban landscape, deals with contemporary languages; is committed to the search for a balance between curatorial practice and activism. CHEAP started out as a festival but had the good sense to become something more.

Claudio Morelli is a journalist, filmmaker and documentary photographer. Founder of Reversocollective and editorial director of VDnews. He has worked with major international magazines, collaborated for three years with Renzo Piano’s G124 project and numerous companies. He teaches at the European Institute of Design in Milan.

Arts of the Working Class is a multi-lingual street journal on art, poverty, wealth and precarity. It is published every two months and contains contributions by artists and thinkers from different fields and in different languages. Its terms are based upon the working class, meaning everyone, and it reports everything that belongs to everyone. Everyone who sells this street journal earns money directly. Vendors keep 100% of the sales. Every artist whose work is advertised, designs with us its substance.

A non-profit collective based in Marseille, they have been working since 2011 experimenting with a new approach to architecture. Using different resources and skills, their aim is to integrate the local population in a bottom-up creative process in urban development planning at different levels. Many of their projects have transformed public spaces, landscapes and buildings through construction workshops and creative interventions that replace the more common top-down methods of designing spaces.

Giulia Ricci has been part of the editorial staff of Domus since March 2018. She studied architecture at the IUAV University of Venice and the Milan Polytechnic, and was awarded an Erasmus scholarship at KU Leuven, Brussels. She carries out research and curating activities; she has contributed to several publications and is co-author of “Dante Bini: Mechatronics” (2016).

Created in 2018, Calypso36o21 is a women-led French and Moroccan collective founded by Justine Daquin, Zoé Le Voyer, Manon Bachelier and Sanaa Zaghoud. From 2019 to 2021, the collective ran, in particular, the program Out.of.the.blue.map, an itinerant curatorial research program operating from France, Morocco and the Netherlands. The program aimed to explore the liminality of Mediterranean [fluid + solid] territories. It was structured around a cycle of exhibitions, workshops, sound creations and the production of a participative lexicon.

Allen was born in Canada, lives in Europe, and is a Senior Researcher at the Critical Media Lab Basel, having previously held posts as Canada Research Chair in Infrastructure, Media and Communications at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design (NSCAD), Head of Research with the Copenhagen Institute of Interaction Design (CIID), and Assistant Director of the Culture Labin the UK. He has studied chemical and electrical engineering, music composition, media arts, and philosophies of technology in Canada, Scotland, New York, and Switzerland and has worked as a polymer chemist, an electronics engineer, and a museum designer. His PhD, entitled “Ways of Technical Knowing” and supervised by Siegfried Zielinski and Avital Ronell, developed a materialist epistemology and techno- aesthetics of natural and technical infrastructures. Allen is the founder and early activator of institutional forms, like community art and technology space, public-making (“publishing”) and media lab projects.

Fulu Miziki Kollektiv is an Eco-Friendly-Afro-futuristic-Punk-Assemble collective of artists who comes straight from a future where humans have reconciled with mother earth and with themselves. This multidisciplinary collective of artists is based in the heart of African, in the Congolese capital city Kinshasa. For several years now, it’s members have spent an amount of time conceptualizing an orchestra made from objects found in the trash, constantly changing instruments, always in search of new sounds.
Making their own instruments, performance costumes, and mask is essential to the approach of Fulu Miziki Kollektiv’s musical core ideology. Their unique sound supports a pan-African message of artistic liberation, peace and a severe look at the ecological situation of the Democratic Republic of Congo and the whole world. For Fulu everything can be recovered and re-enchanted.

Gaia Crocella studied Architecture in Sweden and India and holds qualifications in Architecture and Human Centred Design. She has considerable experience in using design and education to empower communities, foster a sense of belonging and integration.

This has been of particular relevance in her work with non-EU displaced communities. She initiated a live research project (Interdine, 2019) investigating the moral role of architecture in a world characterised by mass displacement, using discursive meals as a platform for integration through food. Through the act of hosting, Interdine subverted the relationship between the guest and the host. Interdine has been nominated for the RIBA Silver Medal 2018 and shortlisted in the YTAA 2020. Gaia collaborated in the development of the Global Free Unit classrooms in Lesvos and Izmir in 2019 and 2020. She led workshops that enabled students of architecture to work together with volunteers and local residents to explore, analyse and map the refugee camps and provide a holistic understanding of the social and built context in a sensitive and critical way. In London she works as an urban designer at Publica, where she contributes to the development of major public realm visions, strategies and policy guidance, working closely with the city’s communities and stakeholders. Gaia is also an Associate Lecturer leading a studio in Stage 1, BA Architecture at UAL Central Saint Martins while frequenting as a guest Lecturer at Umeå School of Architecture in Sweden.

Carlotta Novella is an artist, architect, teacher and host, part of London based practice public works. Having graduated from IUAV Venice, and after that from the MA Arch programme at Central Saint Martins, she has since developed a multidisciplinary practice which explores the idea of gathering and the new tools created by architects to foster participatory city making. Her work looks at how spaces, structures and rituals of food production and sharing can develop civic practices, promoting direct involvement and collective action, to transform and reclaim contemporary public life through conviviality.

She has been involved in multiple public works projects. These included, amongst others, WetLab with Assembly, We Are Cally for Islington Council, R-Urban Poplar, Desiccate with Care for the Istanbul Design Biennial, High Tea Roots for Lore of Blackfriars, the Rotherhithe Public Living Room, the drawing of The Ministry for Common Land for the British Pavilion at the 17th Venice Architecture Biennale and the Jersey Potato Connosseur with Fairland Collective.

Carlotta has taught at UAL, UCA Canterbury, UMA Sweden, and is currently full-time acting leader for the Year 1 BA Architecture at Central Saint Martins, as part of the Spatial Practice programme. Alongside her work with public works and teaching, Carlotta is currently developing two research projects connected to her land of origin: The Scrematura Atlas and the Contrade Archive