Working on the Unexpected

Siegmar Zacharias (host) is a transdisciplinary artist, activist, researcher, and death doula. She studies old herbal medicine. She develops queer-feminist collective practices of transformation as a training for unknown futures in art, radical pedagogy, and social justice. Siegmar collaborated with uncontrollable materials such as smoke, slime, and the human nervous system. She explores sound as a material force of vibration that connects humans and which transcends beyond human existence. During the pandemic, the online listening session WAVES was conceived – Listening Towards Social Bodies as collective mourning, enabling touch.
She organises platforms for learning and exchange with intersectional artists, activists and forward-thinking pioneers under the title Training for Political Imaginaries. Further works are: Drooling Lecture Series, Slime Dynamics, The Cloud: a cosmo-choreography made by animals, vegetables, minerals, humans, concepts and emotions., Invasive Hospitality. She received a TECHNE scholarship for excellency and innovative research to pursue her artistic doctorate undertaking Practicing Futures While Grieving. She teaches at several universities both nationally as well as abroad. Siegmar Zacharias was born in Romania and lives in Berlin.

Stefan Hilterhaus is the artistic director and co-managing director of PACT Zollverein, which he co-founded in 2002. He has also developed regional cultural concepts, worked internationally as a curator, performer, and choreographer, and is the initiator and participant in various national and international networks and committees. In addition to providing an international stage for contemporary art, PACT regularly facilitates exchanges between different forms of knowledge and practices, cultures, and disciplines. An extensive residency program is just as much a part of its work as long-term collaboration with the surrounding urban area.

Steffen Klewar studied acting at the Berlin University of the Arts and before that also comparative literature and theatre sciences in Bochum and Darmstadt. He co-founded theatre collective copy & waste and is now its artistic manager and stage director as well as having been its executive director since 2014. The collective was awarded the Fonds’ Tabori Prize in 2018. As an independent director, he additionally stages at municipal and state theatres such as Schauspiel Leipzig, Staatstheater Darmstadt and Theater Oberhausen as well as, with copy & waste, at independent (production) venues like HAU Berlin, Ballhaus Ost, Ringlokschuppen Ruhr and in “non-theatrical spaces” such as clubs, prefabricated high-rises, vineyards. and living rooms. His productions have been shown throughout the German-speaking countries as guest performances and at festivals. He is also a voice artist, for example working in audio books as well as in radio and television, hosts festival openings, award ceremonies and panels while regularly working at Rostock University of Music and Drama, as acting docent.

Tümay Kılınçel completed the pilot course Contemporary Dance, Context, Choreography at the Inter-University Centre for Dance at the Berlin University of the Arts and graduated with a Master’s degree in Choreography & Performance in Giessen. Since 2010 she has been working as a freelance artist in Frankfurt am Main, Düsseldorf and Berlin. As a teenager she gained her first stage experience at the FFT with the choreographer Ives Thuwis. She realised her own works in Berlin with the solo „Tümay Show – Suizidgefahr“ and the performance installation „Mein Haar“. In 2011 she was a danceweb scholarship holder for Impulstanz Vienna. She performed in „Romantic Afternoon“ by Verena Billinger and Sebastian Schulz. Since 2014 she has been touring with her production „Dance Box“, which was created at the Freischwimmer Festival and was shown at the FFT in 2015, among others.

In her work she deals with power relations, such as empowerment strategies. Project selection: Fachtag zu Tanz und Rassismus: „The Other Body“ (Schillertheater Berlin, 2020); „Dansöz“ (co-production with HAU, FFT, Mousonturm, Treibstoff Basel; 2019); Flausen Residenz (Theater im Ballsaal Bonn, 2018).

Chiara Marcassa is an author, dramaturge and costume designer from Treviso, Italy. In 2024, windpark books will publish her book Stressed/Desserts, which was presented with a performative reading in the Roter Salon of the Volksbühne Berlin and at the Frankfurt Book Fair. The project was realised in collaboration with Olga Hohmann and addresses ‘ways, means and pains of female* work’ in a novella. From 2022 to 2023, she was artistic co-director and curator of the IMPLANTIEREN festival. She works and dreams in four languages (German, Italian, English and Russian) and lives in Offenbach am Main.