Emese Mucsi

Milena Soporowska is a visual artist based in Poland. Her work explores, among other things, the intertwining of everyday life with magic and the occult, questioning the concept of home as a safe, familiar haven. She is interested in the combination of alternative medicine and psychoanalysis, and the overlap between Christianity, esotericism and folk spirituality.She graduated in Art History, presenting her master's thesis on the influence of spiritualistic and mediumistic photography on art in the light of Freud's category of unheimlich. She also studied photography, museology and psychotronics. Moreover, Milena is a graduate of the Sputnik Photos mentoring programme.Read more

Viacheslav Poliakov is a visual artist, photographer, graphic designer. He was born in 1986 in Kherson, Ukraine. Obtained a master’s degree in art education from Kherson State University. Now based in Lviv, Ukraine. His art practice exists on the intersection of documentary photography and design. He's interested in objects and spaces made by people, the historic background behind the urban landscape. Viacheslav is a finalist of Foam Talents, Vienna Photobook Festival, Circulations, Krakow Photomonth Showoff, Fotofestival Lodz Grand Prix, Prix Levallois. His works were published in the Foam Magazine, The British Journal of Photography, GUP magazine, Lensculture, The Washington Post.

Born in 2001, Chernihiv, Ukraine. Started doing photography in 2019. Graduated the cinematography faculty of the Kyiv National I. K. Karpenko-Kary Theatre, Cinema and Television University. In 2019 completed the MYPH school from Serhiy Melnitchenko and the concept photography course from Roman Pyatkovka in 2020. Member of UWPO and UAPP.

Benedetta Casagrande is an artist, writer, curator and educator working with photography. Her practice unfolds through slow research (term coined by Carolyn F. Strauss); slowness as a principle of observation, of attunement, of deceleration and constant repositioning, in an attempt to situate the human experience of the world within wider webs of relations, times and spaces. As a medium which is fundamentally based on encountering the world, she works with photography as a tool to enter in relation to the surrounding environment and its animal, vegetal and objectual elements, cultivating a relationship with the non-human. Her research reflects on the material histories of the photographic medium, investigating its role in the dynamics of environmental ruination and experimenting with sustainable darkroom techniques. Benedetta is the winner of the Luigi Ghirri Prize (2024), of FE+SK Book Award (2024), and received the honorable mention from the jury of the Francesco Fabbri Prize for Contemporary Arts (2024). She is the commissioned artist for Photo Città della Pieve 2025. Her first photobook, All things laid dormant (Skinnerboox, 2024) was shortlisted for the Arles Authors Book Award and Singapore International Photography Festival Book Award. Her work has been exhibited in national and international exhibitions, including Triennale Milano (Milan, 2025), Ph Museum Days (Bologna, 2024), Fotografia Europea, Palazzo dei Musei (Reggio Emilia, 2024), Photo Brussels Festival (2024), ADI Design Museum (Milano, 2023), INSTANCE (Shanghai, 2021) and Photo Ireland Festival (2019).

Romane Iskaria is a French photographer and artist working in Brussels, Belgium (1997). She graduated with a Master's degree in photography from ENSAV La Cambre in 2022 and a DNA (National Diploma in Plastic Arts) from INSEAAM Beaux Arts in Marseille in 2018. She also completed an exchange at the U-LAVAL Visual Arts school in Quebec, Canada. The photographer highlights the injustices and inequalities of invisible communities with a documentary and fictional approach. Her images, specific to “Care”, tell a story and allow her subjects to become aware of their painful stories. The artist uses photography and the field of video, but also textiles, sound, and sculpture to create immersive installations. She tells stories that take the form of a long-term investigation across several territories. Romane replays specific rituals and stories that also transcend borders, addressing questions around migration and exile. The photographer creates plastic forms allowing her to subvert the codes of documentary.

Carlos Trancoso is a Portuguese visual artist that works and lives in Porto. He uses the photographic gaze as a critical tool to understand how the human being relates to technology. His work aims to challenge established patterns of interaction relating to the creation of images in contemporary society. Although he mainly uses fictional approaches, his work incorporates a documental photography language with the expanded practice of creating cameraless images, mixed media and computer generated images. He is a founding member of Barda collective, which utilizes visual arts to foster social cohesion. He has exhibited at festivals such as Photoalicante, Backlight (2020), Photo Open Up, f/est Amarante (2022), Athens Digital Arts Festival (2023), Bienal da Maia (2021/2023) and Bienal de Fotografia do Porto (2025) . His works have also been exhibited in spaces such as Galeria FFAC, Galeria Dentro and MIRA FORUM in Porto, Casa do Capitão and XYZ Books in Lisbon and El Local in Madrid.

Jéssica Pereira Gaspar is a Portuguese transdisciplinary artist, born in Coimbra in 1996. She began her academic journey in sciences and technologies, which profoundlyinfluenced her methodology, research focus, and creative practice. She earned her Bachelor's degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Lusófona de Lisboa and her Master's degree in Visual Arts from Escola Superior de Artes e Design das Caldas da Rainha.‍Currently, she is pursuing a PhD in Science and Technology of the Arts at the Catholic University of Porto, where she is developing research on interfaces for interspecies communication and artistic co-creation with different organisms.Her practice centers on interactions with other-than-human entities and their dynamic agency, seeking to unravel the intricate relationships between living organismsand matter. By integrating multiple mediums such as image, video, sound, and organic materials as catalysts for immersive experiences, her work creates a space for reflection on the interconnectedness of all entities.‍ In 2022, she was awarded a scholarship for an art residency at RAMA, where she developed the solo exhibition Spectacular Instability. She also participated in Zonas deTransição (2023), a project by the PLMJ Foundation, showcasing Transmutations II, a piece later included in the foundation's collection. Her work has been featured in group exhibitions such as A Certain Practice of Attention (2023) and the XXII Biennial of Cerveira (2022). In 2024, her work was included in the Portuguese Emerging Art book, the Millennium BCP Young Art Award from which she was awarded the Portuguese Serigraphy Center Award.In 2025, she was one of the five artists to be selected to represent Porto and Ci.clo Platform in Futures Photography Festival of 2025.

Florine Thiebaud (b. 1992, France) is a photographer based in Marseille. With a post-documentary practice that combines photography and writing, she places a significant emphasis on publishing. She explores the notions of imprisonment and isolation, the passage of time, loss of control, identity, and her connection to others. From 2016 to 2019, she developed two projects focused on the consequences of the waiting for papers for exiled people in Greece, placing the relationship with the other at the heart of her practice.The first was the project Exils, which won the Roger de Conynck Prize and was exhibited at the Recylart Gallery in Brussels, followed by Breaking Point. The latter was co-published as a book in May 2022 with Stockmans Art Books, and was exhibited at FOMU in Antwerp and at the Contretype Gallery in Brussels as part of the .TIFF selection and Propositions d’Artistes. Developing her reflections on notions of imprisonment and isolation and their consequences, she is currently working on a project about families of incarcerated people, Des Ondes (On Waves), based on a personal story. This project has received support from the Fédération Wallonie-Bruxelles, and part of it was already exhibited in 2023 at the Delta Cultural Center in Namur as part of a group exhibition. In parallel, following confrontations with her own physical and mental limits facing depression, she developped a new series of self-portraits: Revenir (Coming back). Using once again repetitive imagery and a consistent aesthetic, she explores the intersection of vulnerability, isolation, and transformation through self-portraiture. Photographing herself during moments of crisis and depression, she seeks to capture the disconnect between her inner world and reality.

Julius Thissen (1993, the Netherlands) lives and works in Arnhem, NL. Their work investigates themes of community and representation, masculinity, sports, and competition. Originating from their background as a performance artist, Thissen's photographic practice aims to create narratives that explore the fine line between performing and failing. These themes are closely tied to contemporary performance-driven culture and the influence of societal expectations on behavior. Their work is deeply rooted in personal experiences as a genderqueer and transmasculine individual. Thissen strongly opposes the restrictive and often binary narratives imposed on transgender and queer individuals. Thissen has been nominated for the Hendrik Valk Prize, Arnhemse Nieuwe, and the Warsteiner Blooom Awards. In 2023, they received the Artist Basis Fund and, more recently, a Mondriaan Fund Artist Project Grant for their new project Bones of Graphene, Skin of Kevlar.