Find here a series of interview taken during Room To Bloom’s 5 day program in Palermo, this was part of a longer mentorship scheme where members of the Room to Bloom community and mentors accompanied 5 emerging feminist artists in their professional development.
Zeliha B. Cenkci, with their artists name Hz. Zallelujah, (b. 1995, Antalya, Turkey) lives in Berlin, Germany. They studied Philosophy and Literature at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul, Turkey, during which they worked as a translator, editor and journalist for various publishing houses and media organisations. Their poems, critiques and interviews have been published in well-known literary magazines in Turkey and America. Their first book, Odalar ve Şehir, was published by May Publishing (Rooms and Cities, 2018) and was awarded at the Arkadaş Z. Özger Poetry Awards in 2018. They produced the documentary Ritalin: Academic Drug, which was screened at various film festivals in 2020. They took part in the 17th Istanbul Biennial, Poetry Channel Project with their poems during 2022. After living in Istanbul for 8 years, they migrated to Berlin, Germany due to the rising political oppression in Turkey. Currently, they continue their second Master’s degree at Freie Univeristat Berlin on the Interdisciplinary Studies of the Middle East. On the one hand, the artist works as a workshopper at the Mobile University for Migrant Workers, organised by European Alternatives. Alongside their literary interest, they has a passion for photography, collage art and hip-hop. They are interested in decolonizing the working-class struggle, eco-feminist movements and intersectionality.
film maker: Tiziano Locci
Hailing from a small town in Pakistan and currently living in Rome, Italy. In my work, I deconstruct the concepts of ethnic identity, belief systems, and limited values that are prevalent in our childhood and adult cultures. In my work, often based in Asia and the subcontinent, I explore the different relationships between oppression and expression, violence and inspiration. Exploring issues as diverse as social justice and stereotypes, my work reproduces familiar visual and aural signs that I assemble into new, conceptually layered installations. While I use a variety of materials and processes in each project, my methodology is consistent. Each project often consists of multiple works, often in different media, grouped around specific themes and meanings.
As an interdisciplinary artist & researcher my work is centered on practices for inhabiting damaged ecologies and imagining multispecies livable futures. This operates on both micro and macro scales: from inhabiting wounds of individual bodies to collectively inhabiting ongoing histories of exploitation and displacement, paying attention to emergent patterns and weaving between them. All my work emerges out of encounters with humans and nonhumans within situated ecologies. I shapeshift between theory and practice and different artistic mediums to activate magic, the sensing body and collective imagination and to make space for mourning and flourishing amidst the residues of disruption. I’m interested in queer cosmovisions, symbiosis and alchemical processes of mutability. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Performing Arts and the Moving Image at the University of Lisbon, supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology while living in Catalunya. My background includes living and working communally across many human-drawn borders, from high rural mountains to the urban seaside. I have completed the IB Diploma at the Mahindra United World College of India in Maharashtra, India (2011-2013); an undergraduate in theater and public action at Bennington College, Vermont, USA (2014-2018); and a masters in sensorial language and poetics of play/synchronicity and meaning making with Teatro de los Sentidos in Barcelona, Catalunya, Spain (2018-2020). I have participated in trainings, conferences and workshops around environmental grassroots organizing, sustainability, expressive arts therapies, physical theater, clowning, somatic practices and medicinal plants. I have experience in theater education for both children and adults and have created and performed in gardens, pine forests, meditation spaces, schools and streets. I have also been deeply involved in regenerative farming projects as well as in seed and food sovereignty initiatives. I enjoy going on walks and drinking herbal tea every single day.
Inspired to a great degree by religious artefacts, rituals as well as pornography, Lahjij anchors her gaze in the creativity of marginal communities encountered on Sex Cams’ platforms, queer parties or traditional ceremonies still in place in Morocco. Referencing spiritual imagery, her drawings focus on universal human experiences like desire, sex, death, and unfold quasi-iconic images and memento mori. Lahjij pursued a BA in Fine Arts, a BA in Film Studies and a MRes in Visual Arts at Pantheon-Sorbonne University, as well as a MRes in Arts & Languages at EHESS, Paris. She currently is PhD fellow at EHESS, Paris. Recent exhibitions include Premio Vittorio Viviani, Nova Milanese (2022), Youmein Festival, Tangier (2022), Prix de dessin Pierre David-Weill, Académie des Beaux-Arts - Institut de France, Paris (2022), 100 artisti a Palazzo Fani, Tuscania (2022). Her work has been published in ManbouZine, issue3, edited by Haven for Artists, Beyrut. Yasmine currently lives and works in Gorizia, Italy and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France.
Alda Mohr Eyðunardóttir was born and raised in Torshavn, Faroe Islands, and is a master student at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts in Copenhagen. Eyðunardóttir is fascinated by arts and crafts, and their use of various materials. The materials used in her work often refers to Faroese culture and craftsmanship: for example, weaving, fishing gear and sheep’s wool. But her works are not woven with the thoroughness and precision that often characterize textiles in traditional Faroese culture nor are the artist's sculptures portraying the landscape in a traditional way. In other words, the work is alluding to something else: to the back story – a narrative about maintenance of one’s own culture when you’re far away from it. A challenge Faroese people have always faced in terms of being a small country in relation to others. Words and language play a special role in Eyðunardóttir’s practice. The titles of the works are small poems in themselves. While some titles are poetic and emotional texts, others are short and direct. The titles and the interaction between them shed light on a variety of topics. These include the relationship between materiality and mentality, and how many emotions can be associated with something material like a knitted hat or a ball of wool. Other titles refer to the relationship between psychology and nature, and the Faroese identity created from those two. Common to all of them is that they have ambiguity and are at first written in Faroese. Translations give them other ways of existing but they still maintain the original meaning for those who know.
Andrea Davis Kronlund is a photographer and visual artist. Her work explores the meeting of the personal, cultural and political in black women’s hair. She is a founder and creative director of krullmag.com and has an extensive background in the creative and culture industries, including teaching and formerly running an art gallery. She is currently an exhibitions producer at the National Museums for World Culture, Sweden. Born at Christmas, hailing from Kingston via New York and based in Stockholm, Andrea is a serious multi-tasker so all of the above is being done concurrently. Her work has been presented at the Brooklyn Museum, the International Center of Photography, Bibliothéque Nationale Paris, The National Library of Sweden, Kulturhuset, Gallery Erik Axl Sund, Stockholm, and The Arts Council of Sweden.
(interview is in french) Saadia Gacem is a PhD student in legal anthropology, her research focuses on the Family Code in Algeria. She is directing her first documentary film, Felfel lahmar ("Piment rouge"), in 2019. Saadia Gacem leads with Lydia Saidi and Awel Haouati the project Archives des luttes des femmes en Algérie (Documenta fifteen). She co-founded the feminist magazine La place, whose number 0 was published in March 2022 by Motifs.