Alexander’s focus within design has been related to the investigation of the public realm within complex urban contexts. Through Richard Sennett’s Fall of the Public Man, and Peter Brook’s The Empty Space, his work is framed around the theatrical relationship between actors and spectators within the city - because of this he formed a growing fascination for public spatial interventions that deal with notions such as temporality and phenomenology.

Allis (she/they) is a queer textile- and silverwork artist, based in Amsterdam. Her work embodies queer handmaking; handmaking as an essential part in forging queer identity and community. it is very body focused, expressive and usable. Her methodologies and materials preserve and expand upon an extensive history of women in textiles. it includes dying, printing, hand + machine sewing to form quilted fabrics as the base of her artworks, wherein they are  (re)made into patchwork(s) and wearable structures. The contrasting silverwork augments her practices by extending the wearability and closeness to body. it blends engraved designs with glass and embroidered connections.

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Anna Underowicz is a Polish artist and architect whose practice spans painting, installation, and emerging performative work. Her projects explore the tension between chaos and harmony, treating entropy and transformation as central creative forces. Through layered, intuitive processes, she uses art as a therapeutic and introspective tool, often drawing on personal experiences and emotional states. In addition to her visual work, she collaborates across disciplines—combining architecture, choreography, and somatic research in collective projects—and develops experimental spatial and artistic interventions.

Studio Antimundo was founded by artist Oscar Santillán to turn this vision into a practice. It is a space that welcomes collaborations across disciplines. The studio moves between science, new technologies, and ancestral knowledge, creating artworks that feel like forces from elsewhere. Studio Antimundo is envisioned as a matrix where diverse beings gather to imagine and test new realities.

Asefeh Tayebani is an artist with a special affinity for labour-intensive and repetitive work processes. In her creative approach, she strives to build a connection between jewellery as an aesthetic expression and jewellery as a means to convey messages beyond mere decoration. One common thread in her works is a focus on communicating personal experiences. She maintains a genuine curiosity about how individuals share their unique life stories and express their needs to one another.

For Asefeh, the act of creation is an integral part of a healing and restorative process. She finds immense joy in communicating through design and art, where she doesn't have to rely solely on her social skills and can transcend language barriers.

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We are Co-Formations, made of Theo Colin (Scotland) and Héloïse Floc'h (France), a collaborative design duo that works across scales and disciplines with a focus on context-specific projects. Our social design approach spans from object to public space. Within our work, we are greatly informed by site, testimonial and archive research, and we often see our role as facilitators of conversations around various places. We are both deeply collaborative designers and therefore work mostly on a project basis. Past topics include: memory and dementia, mobile cooking, public space activation, arts festival seating scenography, and post-industrial rehabilitation.

She creates eerie settings where non verbal and unclear forms of expressions question the conventional notions of communication.

Constanza holds an MA in Arts & Design from Sandberg Institute, Amsterdam.

Eszter Kiss is a textile and fashion researcher and designer based in Amsterdam. She holds a BA in Textile Design from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie and an MA in Fashion Studies from Parsons Paris. Her work engages with garment-making through the lenses of history, sociology, and culture. Working across research, design, and publishing, she examines how cultural narratives and historical contexts shape contemporary fashion discourse.

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Kim graduated in 2018 from the Design Academy Eindhoven. During her study she developed a strong interest in material research with glass and pattern design. With her designs she's looking for the connection between man and space. They have an element of surprise and leads to an interaction with the viewer. The colours, shapes and structures always have an reference to the beauty of nature. Kim desires to bring this all together in images and make people wonder.

Laura Dubourjal (1994) is a French visual artist and fashion designer. Having grown up in a family of actors, she often uses linguistics of the theatre world to question the power of characters and the performativity of our every day interactions. She explores different thematics of identity and performance in her multidisciplinary work, using media that include performance, video works, interactive audio-visual installations, fashion design, textile and written text.

Dubourjal’s practice intersects between exploring the paradigm of fabricated role-plays of non-binary identity representations. Her artistic interest diverges from re-imaging archetypes of gender socialization, to exploring dialectics of the inner feminine monologue and its translatable political value. She often draws references from classical theatre techniques by excavating fragments and examples of emotional memory, behavioural landscapes and visual fabulations. Her performative practice is currently developing towards interactive role playing methodologies and thinking through the form of the open rehearsal as a space to reclaim. The works of social activist and dramaturge Augusto Boal are an important influence in her questioning of the boundaries and hierarchies within the form of performance itself. Dubourjal’s practice is situated between interdisciplinary research as cross-media experimentations, pushing boundaries of design, performativity and visual narratives. With divergent media play, Laura’s work involves viewers in a dialogue on the transgressive nature of the identificational protocols.

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LAYCO develops reusable medical devices focused on maternal and newborn health, to make it more sustainable and improving access to care worldwide.

Their first product, vela®, is a reusable vacuum extractor developed in collaboration with more than 200 gynecologists worldwide. With the same ease of use as a disposable pump, vela® can be reused up to 100 times, is easy to sterilize, and is suitable for both high- and low-resource settings. To achieve a simple-to-use yet reusable design, they have developed two new techniques for which patents are pending.By using vela® instead of disposable alternatives, hospitals can reduce CO₂ emissions by up to 40% and medical waste by 98%. Moreover, improved access to vacuum extraction in low-resource settings could decrease intrapartum stillbirths by almost a quarter, as demonstrated in a study by Nolens et al.

Leyla (all pronouns) is an artistic researcher and art educator with a practice of facilitating workshops that engage participants with art or activism through creative methods. For example, they use zine making, fiber arts and crafts or, recently, listening sessions to open up conversations and encounters around museum spaces and visual art pieces.

Leyla graduated from an MA in Art and Performance Research Studies (UvA) where they researched the potential of performance art as a mediation tool in museum spaces. Recently in Amsterdam she facilitated workshops on themes such as “Archiving Queer Personal Stories” (Framer Framed) and “Radical Quilting” (Anarchist Bookfair, Otherwise Wageningen). As an active member of grassroots group Dyke March Amsterdam he regularly organises events and the yearly Dyke March protest for and in collaboration with the anarchist, queer community.

Margherita Soldati is an Amsterdam-based artist, researcher and co-founder of Absurd Beings and Burning Steps, working across performance, installation, and writing. Her practice operates at the intersection of ecology, immunology, and political infrastructures of care. She approaches the body not as subject matter but as a research apparatus and a site where environmental, agricultural, and medical systems become legible through contact. Her work explores how regimes of optimisation, sterility, and control shape organic life and human subjectivity. Working across greenhouses, laboratories, and exhibition spaces, she develops embodied methodologies that test proximity, exposure, and incompatibility. Drawing on scientific collaboration and critical theory, she engages material processes such as cultivation, extraction, and contamination, treating plant, soil, blood, and other matter as active participants in relational ecologies. Rather than resolving tensions, her practice sustains those between care and control, intimacy and antagonism, survival and system.

She graduated from Gerrit Rietveld Academie in 2018, and she is currenly finishing a MA in artistic research at KABK. Margherita has taught and mentored at Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Textile Museum Tilburg, Ateliers ’89 (Aruba), ArtEZ Zwolle, and within European initiatives with Waag Futurelab. Her work has been supported by Mondriaan Fonds, Stimuleringsfonds, and Amsterdam Fonds voor de Kunst, including the Talent Development Grant and 3Package Deal (2022), and has been presented internationally across Europe, the USA, Russia, and the Caribbean.

Mel Keane is a composer, visual artist, and designer from Dublin,  Ireland. Over the last several years, he has been an active practitioner and audience member within the DIY music scenes of Ireland, Lisbon, and Amsterdam.  He has published music, primarily on Irish label wherethetimegoes, and performed live extensively across the continent of Europe in venues such as Cafe OTO (London), Les Enstants Chavires (Paris), MAAT (Lisbon), and  The National Concert Hall (Dublin) under his birth name, as Frog of Earth, and as a member of Princ€ess (ensemble) and NECK (duo with Seán Being).

He has worked as a designer within the cultural sector for over a decade, producing artwork and design for organisations and artists like Radio Al Hara, Crack Magazine, Ghostly International, Maria Somerville, Sandberg Instituut, The Dutch Art Instituut, Elaine Howley, 4AD, Suzanne Kraft, and Bullion.

He has an MFA (Master of Fine Arts and Design) from the Design Department at Sandberg Instituut, Amsterdam.

Visual and conceptual artist Nathan Favot is the creator and manager of Black Magic Darkroom (BMDR), an analogue photography darkroom dedicated to classic and alternative analogue techniques. We want to provide a space for artists and amateurs to learn all the crafts associated with analogue photography.

I’m an artist, eco-haptonomist and design researcher with a special interest the many ~ and often ambiguous ~ ways in which we can relate to ourselves, the environment  and other species.

With my experiential research, gatherings and fieldnotes I try to answer the question: ‘what it is like to feel’ and ‘how we can experience our relationallity to the living and material world differently and more meaningfully’.

Rosa Smits (NL, 1990) is intrigued by the social, tactile, and procedural nature of weaving. Driven by a fascination for societies that coexist harmoniously with each other and its environment, her work revolves around two profound questions: how to live and how to work together? Her creative approach sometimes extends beyond her individual vision, as she invites local inhabitants to participate in the artistic process, resulting in the birth of a new collective language. This exchange of gestures, knowledge, and ideas, fosters new tactile and social connections.

The influence of the environment reflects in Rosa’s choice of materials and her working process. The artist prefers to work with sustainable fibers or materials she encounters, dyeing her threads with dyes extracted from plants, food, herbs, and earth. Characteristic of Rosa’s textiles is their roughness and purity: the structure of the fibers, threads, and materials used always remains visible. Often, her works are made site-specific and always result from collaborations: with others, with the environment and with the behaviour of the used material; thus, the process and chance are essential aspects of Rosa’s work.

Ruben Jurriën's fashion practice focuses on making visible and empowering bodies and identities that too often fall outside the norm of the fashion industry. The work proves that inclusive fashion does not have to be monotonous, but also innovative and sustainable. The clothing visualizes a research and advocacy for an inclusive fashion world with an innovative sizing system that fits a wide range of body types, with on-size customizable elements. These tools not only make the clothing comfortable, but allow the garments to grow with you. Hereby, the life span of the garment is significantly extended. The work is an explosion of love and positivity that celebrates childlike optimism and fuels it (again) in our adult lives. The design practice balances between couture and ready-to-wear and, in addition to fashion collections, develops comics and objects that focus on the power of being soft.

Smaragda Nitsopoulou is a sequential visual artist, researcher and film director working between Amsterdam and Athens. Her research centers on mnemonic representations of life and death in both personal and collective frameworks. Through filmic narratives and three-dimensional, installative forms, she addresses psychosocial and geopolitical structures, visual culture, and their discontents. Using quotidian vernaculars, found footage and natural resources, she creates interactive works that evoke a shared experience of absence among the living.

Sofie Leenen is a designer and a maker exploring objects, furniture, custom design and research.

Her work aims to shape traditional making methods more durable for the future.the projects highlight crafts that are usually not visible or where knowledge of specific craftsmanship is even slowly disappearing. By researching the origins of development and to combine with modern innovations it allows to balance old and new possibilities within one object. The result is a bespoke and tailor-made design with a story. A significant part of these final objects is the study of materials and crafts, which often takes the form of archives, but also elaborate designs such as decorative objects, furniture, and interior textiles. She worked on projects such as: braided weave, seasonal curtains, frontal profiles, window scala and color behavior.

As an artist, I am drawn to archives as a source of inspiration for storytelling. The preservation, accumulation, sorting, and cataloguing processes make the structure of the ‘archive’ inherently incomplete and always open to new interpretations.

Through my work, I build on an archive not rooted in reality but one that thrives on found images and the framing of ephemeral moments. The archive, seen as a repository of information, contributes to the construction of what we perceive as truth. It reflects a tangible past: its position is concrete and radiates untouchability and authority. It forms a material basis for a collective memory and a shared identity.

By appropriating and using found material, another possible reality that had been pushed out of sight becomes visible.

My work explores these narratives through the lens of textile techniques, particularly quilting and printing. Techniques that prioritise the use of recycled and repurposed materials to create a visual and textual object that interweaves different stories and perspectives.

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The New Sewing School is a start-up Sewing School offering mixed level courses taught in English in Amsterdam. Our classes are theory based, practise-led to give students the confidence to become an independent sewist.

Our aim is to share a our creative space and knowledge with accessibility and inspiration.

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D A T A S K Y is a project developped at the Care Design Lab and supported by the Stimuleringsfonds.

Zuza Banasińska (1994) is an artist and filmmaker from Warsaw, based in Amsterdam. In their practice, they are interested in the reproduction of images and how these enable the reproduction of systems, subjects and bodies. They engage with this theme through the lens of embodying and queering archives. In their essay films and installations, they employ a multi-layered approach that incorporates found and recorded, staged and documentary, footage to construct intricate ecosystems. These serve as spaces for interrogating and destabilizing entrenched notions of identity, gender, and representation.