Santiago Martinez Benedetti

He approached photography as a self-taught artist after earning a diploma in Graphic Design and Art Direction from NABA Milan in 2014. In 2015, after spending one year in Tbilisi (Georgia) working on a documentary about Abkhazian refugees, he returned to Italy and joined the photography collective CESURA, where he remained for two years. During this time, he worked as an assistant to photographer Gabriele Micalizzi and collaborated with Alex Majoli (MAGNUM) on the production of several major exhibitions. While at CESURA, he shifted away from a photojournalistic approach, developing a long-term, research-driven photographic practice with a strong focus on photobooks. After leaving the collective in 2017, he began working as a freelance photographer. His journey took him first to Siberia, where he worked on the project I Don’t Try to Feel Awake Anymore. In 2019, in Oklahoma, where a chance encounter with Kristal and her son Skyler led to Love Mom, an ongoing project that explores the sometimes toxic relationship between a mother and her son while also reflecting on emptiness and the profound solitude embedded in the vastness of the American suburbs. In 2020, driven by the need to find a place to call home, he moved from Milan to a small village of 50 inhabitants in the Val di Noto. There, he began working on All These Goodbyes, a body of work that serves as both self-reflection and the story of an escape. In the spring of 2021, he spent three months in Denmark collaborating with photographer Jacob Aue Sobol (MAGNUM) on the production of his book James House (2022). In 2022, he was selected as one of the 25 winners of Italian Panorama, an open call organized by Vogue Italia and PhotoVogue. In January 2023, the Penumbra Foundation (New York, USA) awarded him a full scholarship for its Long-Term Photobook Program.

Toma Hurduc is a documentary photographer, currently working in Bucharest. His attention was first focused on representing local underground communities and movements, which he strongly feels related to. Nowadays, his narratives are often built on top of the personal experience and relationship with the subject matter, therefore the factual truth is often mixed with the meta, imaginative truth, aiming to question the human perception of reality, dread, anxiety, ephemerality and the construction of memory. Having an academic background in Cinematography, Toma is highly interested in the way light forms images, choosing to work regularly on 35mm black and white film, as a way to render the surreal he sees in ordinary life. Toma’s work has been exhibited both collectively and solo in Romania and abroad and he has been part of multiple mentorship programs, most recent being with Annie Leibovitz and IKEA.

Dev Dhunsi (b. 1996) is a multimedia artist working at the intersection of photography, textiles, and installation. Utilizing water and movement as central elements in his projects, he creates works that invite reflection on complex themes such as identity, belonging, migration, social justice, and injustice. Through his art, Dhunsi provides space for stories that are often overlooked or suppressed, illustrating how historical, cultural, and political forces shape our lives and experiences. Addressing global issues like migration and colonialism as well as personal experiences of loss and belonging, he creates works that connect past and present, diverse geographies, and identities. His work encourages viewers to reflect on how we understand and relate to the world around us as he simultaneously look at the world through a lens of queer theories and diasporic gaze. Recent exhibitions include: Fotogalleriet (Oslo; NO), Mint abf (Stockholm; SE), MELK (Oslo; NO), Kunstnernes Hus (Oslo; NO), National Sports Museum in Stockholm (SE; Stockholm).

Ondřej Kubeš (* 1999) is a Czech visual artist working primarily with documentary and staged photography, installation, drawing and performance. His intimate, poetic archive-based artworks examine topics of personal memory, identity, affection, trauma, queerness and family relations. Kubeš’s work has been exhibited in the Czech Republic, Germany, Italy and Belgium. He completed his master's degree at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague at the Photography II. studio led by Alena Kotzmannová.

Jeroen De Wandel uses photography as a starting point to create new images from all sorts of material (photographic or otherwise), using his own photography in different shapes, contexts and meanings. His artistic work often starts from a personal need to react within a social context / our society. A common thread is the functioning of our brain: how we deal with zeitgeist, with information, with manipulation, with technology and how all this reflects back on our psychological well-being. Depending on the angle and location, he uses different techniques, from photography and collages to installations, sculptures and spatial interventions. He showed work in FoMu (BE) and Circulations (FR) and recently had his first solo show (2024). Follow at @jeroen_de_wandel for recent work

Malte Uchtmann (*1996 in Hamburg) is a photographer and media artist based in Leipzig, Germany. Using different visual media he is interested in how concepts of knowledge, truth and reality are expressed and affect our perception and behavior. His work has been awarded the German Photo Book Prize and was shortlisted for the C/O Berlin Talent Award 2023. He is currently part of the Photography and Media Class and the Expanded Cinema Class of the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig.

Raisan Hameed (*1991) is an Iraqi-German multimedia artist based in Leipzig. He is currently a Meisterschüler with Prof. Tina Bara at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, after completing his Diploma in Photography. His work has been featured in various international exhibitions, including the Prix Photoforum Biel, Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and the Carte Blanche Exhibition in Paris. Hameed's practice is defined by a subtle and metaphorical visual language, profoundly impacted by his personal experiences of loss, trauma, and displacement. At the heart of his work is the transformation of intimate visual memories into universal narratives, as exemplified in one of his most acclaimed projects, Zer-Störung. Recontextualizing damaged family photographs that bear the scars of his hometown, Mosul, Hameed explores the destruction inflicted upon his family while reflecting on human themes of resilience and survival.

Independent Ukrainian documentary photographer currently residing and working in Kyiv, Ukraine. Master degree in International Economics of the Institute of International Relations of Kyiv National University. He has pursued photography since 2008. Since 2012 member of the Ukrainian Photographic Alternative (UPHA) and since 2014 of the Ukrainian Association of Professional Photographers (UAPF). In 2014 - 2019, he was the official photographer of the President of Ukraine. Founder of “Untitled” online magazine and co-founder of Ukrainian Street Photography group. Member of PEN Ukraine since 2022. Author of the photo book “Anamnesis” (2020) and art-book “Maidan Faces” (2020). Since the beginning of full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine concentrated mostly on documenting war crimes and impact of war on civilians.‍

Constantin Schlachter’s research takes place through an exploration of interior and exterior landscapes. Nature, the invisible and matter are dominant entities in his work. His experimental approach to the techniques he employs aims to put a less anthropocentric world into perspective, and to re-enchant nature. This mysterious entity that takes hold of each viewer in its own way, because it’s eloquent for everyone, but never entirely translatable. Through different media linked to photography, he questions matter and its synesthetic power. By inverting the scales, colours and textures of the elements presented, he induces a confusion of senses in the viewer, revealing deeper ones. His images invite us to let go, to enter a contemplative state in which we can project our emotions. His cosmic and telluric images, in which matter plays a predominant role, merge the microcosm and the macrocosm. In the course of his work, the artist increasingly seeks to erase his own presence to highlight that of his subject. Constantin Schlachter was born in Altkirch in 1992 and graduated from Les Gobelins in 2014. He lives and works in Paris.