Space Afrika

Space Afrika is a musical duo composed of Joshua Tarelle Reid and Joshua Inyang, originally from Manchester. Their sonic research stems from post-industrial urban experience, the legacy of the African diaspora in England, and an aesthetic sensibility that merges the languages of dub, ambient, and field recording. From their debut, their approach has stood out for its extreme rarefaction and, at the same time, its deeply political nature: the tracks are often constructed as emotional collages, where voices, urban noise, silence, and analog samples give shape to mental landscapes suspended between documentation and introspection.

In 2020, they release “hybtwibt?”, a raw and meditative mixtape in which protests, monologues, sirens, and city sounds become sonic material for a radical reflection on trauma, race, and resilience. In 2021 comes “Honest Labour”, considered their masterpiece: a layered and melancholic work where the influences of British electronic music merge with spoken texts, spoken word, and samples that evoke intimacy, memory, and loss.

Their live sets and installations, often conceived as non-performances, reject the idea of spectacle in order to create immersive and contemplative experiences. They collaborate with artists such as Rainy Miller, Mica Levi, and Richie Culver, and present works in hybrid contexts, between music, visual art, and sound design. Their practice moves at the edges of song form, transforming acoustic space into social and environmental reflection.

Heavy traffic

Heavy Traffic is an independent literary magazine founded by Patrick McGraw in New York, with art direction and graphic design by Richard Turley. From its very first issue, the magazine has stood out for its visceral and radical approach to contemporary storytelling, presenting short fiction and experimental texts that reflect the tensions, pace, and fragmentation of urban and digital imagination. Each issue takes shape as a hybrid object: part magazine, part visual artifact, where written word coexists with a graphic aesthetic that is sharp, pop-infused, and deliberately excessive.
The writing published by Heavy Traffic is described by its editors as a real-life version of the infinite scroll: a sequence of sharp, fast-paced micro-narratives, sometimes violent or unruly, but always charged with palpable expressive tension. Often fragmented, the stories are inhabited by borderline characters, hyper-contemporary settings, and situations that are either surreal or brutally real. The use of slang, linguistic distortion, and the absence of moral or academic filters give the magazine an unmistakable and disruptive voice within the literary landscape.
The texts are accompanied by wild layouts, typographic choices that challenge readability, and a deliberately jarring visual construction — echoing the aesthetics of punk, rave culture, ’90s tabloids, and web 1.0. But this aesthetic is anything but decorative: it mirrors the narrative disorder of the present age, amplifies its dissonances, and invites the reader into an immersive, alienating, at times hallucinatory experience.
Each public performance by Heavy Traffic turns reading into a performative act, where authors’ voices overlap, break apart, and multiply in a continuous flow, evoking a prose that behaves more like noise than narrative. Based in New Yorkbut with a profoundly transnational perspective, the magazine welcomes emerging and outsider writers from multiple disciplines, generations, and contexts, building an open, untamed, and constantly evolving editorial community.
Heavy Traffic is not just a container for texts, but a cultural project that dismantles the rules of literature, challenges the book as form, and redefines the very idea of the magazine in the twenty-first century.

Carmen Villain

Carmen Villain, pseudonym of Carmen Maria Hillestad, is a Norwegian-Mexican composer and music producer based between Oslo and London. After an international career as a model, she emerged as one of the most distinctive voices in the contemporary ambient scene, developing a sonic poetics that weaves together natural landscapes, intimate atmospheres, and existential tension. Her work is marked by a refined use of acoustic instruments, field recordings, analog synthesizers, wind instruments, and digital percussion.

Her musical journey began with dream-pop and shoegaze influences, later evolving into an ambient sound infused with fourth world, dub, and drone elements. Albums like “Both Lines Will Be Blue” and “Only Love From Now On” exemplify a singular sensibility, capable of translating mental states into elegant and immersive sonic environments. In “Only Love From Now On”, Carmen constructs a hypnotic and circular universe, where sounds move like liquid memories, suspended between the personal and the collective.

Her collaborations include artists such as Jana Winderen, Biosphere, and Jenny Hval, and she works with labels such as Smalltown Supersound and Longform Editions. Her live sets unfold as sonic rituals in which the audience is immersed in a dilated, meditative time — one deeply attuned to the invisible material of sound. Carmen Villain composes with and for space, crafting experiences that resemble contemplations, dreams, and acts of deep listening.

Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith is a poet, curator, theorist, and a central figure in contemporary literary experimentation. Born in New York and trained as a sculptor at the Rhode Island School of Design, he revolutionized the concept of poetic writing by founding the idea of “non-creative writing,” where the act of transcription and copy-paste becomes a poetic, critical, and philosophical gesture. Works such as Day, Soliloquy, and Fidget rework existing texts—from news reports to a full day of spoken words—to reveal the invisible behind the obvious.

In addition to writing, Goldsmith is a performer and professor at the University of Pennsylvania. He has taught and lectured worldwide, promoting a vision of poetry as an act of thought that traverses languages, media, and platforms. He served as the MoMA Poet Laureate in 2013 and has collaborated with artists such as Alva Noto, Laurie Anderson, and Vito Acconci. His work challenges any romantic notion of authorship, proposing a poetics of selection, archiving, and lateral thinking about language.

UbuWeb

UbuWeb is the largest and most influential digital archive dedicated to experimental art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Founded in 1996 by Kenneth Goldsmith as an act of cultural resistance against the closure of institutional archives and academic elitism, UbuWeb is an independent, free, non-commercial platform making key works in concrete poetry, sound poetry, avant-garde cinema, conceptual art, and intermedia experimentation accessible.

Over time, UbuWeb has grown into an online library of the avant-garde, an informal and radical “shadow library” fueled by scans, digitizations, bootlegs, personal archives, private collections, and rare materials. All content is hosted without profit, advertising, or algorithms, openly resisting market, copyright, and platform logics that dominate the digital economy. Its deliberately raw aesthetic—basic HTML structure, bare interface, artisanal hypertextual logic—is integral to its philosophy.

UbuWeb hosts works and documents from hundreds of artists and movements, from John Cage to Henri Chopin, Carolee Schneemann to Vito Acconci, Marcel Duchamp to Laurie Anderson, and Guy Debord to Kathy Acker. It contains experimental films, rare audio recordings, theoretical essays, artist book scans, video performances, visual scores, sound collages, vintage magazines, and multilingual poetry collections. More than a simple archive, UbuWeb is a constellation of marginal knowledge and a critical platform questioning the very ways knowledge is accessed and transmitted.

In over two decades, UbuWeb has become indispensable for artists, curators, researchers, students, and enthusiasts of radical art. It is used in hundreds of university courses worldwide, cited in international essays and exhibitions, and remains a bastion of cultural autonomy in the digital age. Curated and updated by Kenneth Goldsmith with the help of an informal network of collaborators, UbuWeb is a living archive: constantly evolving, in dialogue with contemporary languages, the history of the avant-garde, and the very idea of editorial utopia.

Katherine Korbjuhn

atherine Korbjuhn is a creative director and strategist of German-Swiss origin, active between New York and Paris. With a background in visual semiotics, publishing, and art direction, she has collaborated with fashion brands, artists, and international magazines to shape projects that merge aesthetics and content into multifaceted cultural experiences. Her vision navigates between editorial language and contemporary branding, with particular focus on the intersection of fashion and critical thinking.

Having worked with Schiaparelli, Chloé, and System Magazine, she is currently Chief Brand Officer at Haus Labs by Lady Gaga, where she guides the visual and strategic narrative of a brand aiming to redefine inclusive beauty. Her projects are characterized by a strong sense of aesthetic direction, articulating complex visual identities with precision and coherence.

Korbjuhn approaches creative work as a space for social reflection, where visual form is not mere representation but a construction of discourse. She collaborates with artists, writers, directors, and musicians, contributing to visual and conceptual imaginaries that traverse genres and disciplines. Her work is simultaneously reflective and pop, sophisticated yet accessible, strategic, and deeply narrative.

Bill Kouligas

Bill Kouligas is a musician, designer, and curator, founder of the record label PAN, one of the most influential platforms for sonic and visual experimentation over the past fifteen years. Born in Athens and raised in London, he lives and works between Berlin and New York. His trajectory consistently and radically crosses different worlds: from avant-garde electronic music to contemporary art, from editorial design to interdisciplinary curation.

Founded in 2008, PAN has become an international reference point for genre-defying sound aesthetics, promoting artists such as Yves Tumor, Amnesia Scanner, Eartheater, Heith, Anne Imhof, Arca, Pan Daijing, and many others. Kouligas conceives PAN not merely as a record label but as a visual and theoretical ecosystem. Every release is accompanied by graphic and textual research extending into exhibitions, installations, live performances, and publications. His approach merges curatorial rigor and experimental drive, transforming sound into a theoretical medium. His projects are often presented in museums, institutions, and festivals such as ICA London, Berghain, ZKM Karlsruhe, MoMA PS1, Unsound, and CTM, exploring the boundary between performance and immersive environment.

As a sound artist, Bill Kouligas has released work under various aliases and collaborated with key figures in the experimental scene, exploring hybrid forms of noise, drone, abstract electronics, sound poetry, and industrial ritual. His vision consistently focuses on deconstructing musical language as sign, surface, and vibration. Simultaneously, he develops editorial projects, artist catalogs, and art-related content, bringing PAN beyond traditional music circuits. His work represents a rare synthesis of radical aesthetics and curatorial depth.

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi is a curatorial duo founded by Francesco Urbano and Francesco Ragazzi, active internationally since 2008. Their approach is marked by a transdisciplinary vision, blending contemporary art, writing, architecture, fashion, new media, and performance into complex, site-specific exhibition practices. Based between Paris and Venice, they have curated projects at institutions including the Venice Biennale, Tate Modern, ISCP New York, MMCA Seoul, Centre d’Art Genève, Kunsthalle Winterthur, and Zuecca Projects.

The duo is known for the project The Internet Saga, a curatorial platform founded in 2015 for the Venice Biennale, exploring the temporal and narrative dimension of art in the digital age. Their significant works include exhibitions and public programs dedicated to Jonas Mekas, Kenneth Goldsmith, Pauline Curnier Jardin, Haroon Mirza, Tsai Ming-liang, and the curation of Chiara Fumai’s archive, one of the most radical figures in contemporary Italian performance art.

Francesco Urbano Ragazzi approach curation as a form of writing, where every exhibition is an open text, a dramaturgy of images, spaces, and bodies. Their shows do not merely present works but create situations in which the audience is invited to rethink time, language, and vision. Their practice draws from philosophy, critical aesthetics, gender studies, and media theory, engaging with cultural power and the archive as political form. Their work is deeply collaborative, oriented toward creating temporary communities, liminal spaces, and contact zones between art and life. In this sense, every project becomes a research process, investigating the possibilities of artistic narrative in the present.

Lucinda Chua

Lucinda Chua is a composer, singer-songwriter, instrumentalist, and producer of Sino-Malaysian descent, born in London. Her musical education began with the Suzuki method, which emphasizes learning through imitation and listening, fostering a deep sensitivity to sound as emotional gesture and non-verbal communication. Chua stands out for a musical approach that blends strings, voice, minimal electronics, and introspective sound design, creating rarefied and intensely intimate sonic landscapes.

After collaborating as a cellist with artists such as FKA twigs, she began a solo path that led her to release the EPs “Antidotes 1” and “Antidotes 2”, where she developed a poetic voice both fragile and powerful, made of silences, breaths, and whispered melodies. In 2023, she released her debut album “YIAN” on the label 4AD: a deeply personal and spiritual work in which the concept of diasporic identity becomes musical and imaginative material. The album’s title, which means “swallow” in Chinese, is a metaphor for return, flight, and the circular movement of belonging.

“YIAN” is structured as a narrative suite that moves through grief, reunion, and metamorphosis. Tracks like “Echo”, “Golden” and “Grief Piece” intertwine classical instrumentation, ambient structures, and a vocal writing style that evokes the enchantment of the most emotionally resonant minimalism. Her performances are often conceived as multisensory experiences: moments of suspension that merge image, light, and sound to open a space of deep and meditative listening.

Lucinda Chua is an artist who reflects on forms of intimacy, cultural inheritance, and the relationship between trauma and beauty. Her music is an invitation to vulnerability — an introspective journey shaped by detail, by imperceptible sound, by the smallest gesture. Her work represents one of the most sensitive and original voices in today’s ambient-pop landscape.