Workshop details
Socialist Ecologies: Speculative Methods for Retrieving Lost Futures
Workshop at BOARC and Manchester School of Art, May 18th-21st
​
​
Participants
Sarah Edith James
Manchester Metropolitan University
Workshop co-organizer
SHORT BIO and LINK TO PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE
Sara Blaylock
University of Minnesota Duluth
Workshop co-organizer
​Sara Blaylock is Associate Professor of Art History at the University of Minnesota Duluth and author of Parallel Public: Experimental Art in Late East Germany (MIT Press, 2022). Other research has appeared in edited volumes, including Model Collapse: European Contemporary
Art in a Time of Democratic Crisis (Manchester University Press, 2025), journals such as Third Text, and in exhibition catalogs, including Made in Germany? (Harvard Art Museums, 2024). She is currently writing a book on the art and visual culture of the Riot Grrrl movement called Double Dare Ya: A How-To History to Activate, Customize, and Authorize Your Feminist Self.
Katerina Korola
University of Minnesota Twin Cities
Katerina Korola is an art historian and media scholar whose work explores the history of photography through an ecological lens. She is currently Assistant Professor of German Media at University of Minnesota, Twin Cities and will begin a new position as Assistant Professor of Media Historiography at UC Berkeley in July 2026. Her book-in-progress, Picturing the Air: Photography and the Industrial Atmosphere, tells a history of air pollution as a photographic problem.
​
Lutz Koepnick
Vanderbilt University
Lutz Koepnick is the Max Kade Foundation Chair of German Studies and Professor of Cinema and Media Arts at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, where he also directs the joint-Ph.D. program in Comparative Media Analysis and Practice (CMAP). Trained in aesthetic theory, film studies, and art and literary criticism, Lutz's writing over the last years has focused on how contemporary artists work in different media to explore geological deep time and reconsider the relationship between the human and the nonhuman. One of the central aspects of this work is to feature art as a forum to complicate our understanding of dominant timescales and probe generative assemblies of different memories, tempos, and rhythms.
​
Phillipe Pirotte
Städelschule Frankfurt
Philippe Pirotte is a Brussels-based curator and art historian whose work foregrounds research-driven, context-responsive exhibition-making. His curatorial practice engages transnational histories, with particular emphasis on memory, postcolonial conditions, and emancipatory imaginaries across the Global South and Europe. He serves as Professor of Art History and Curatorial Studies at the Städelschule in Frankfurt and was a member of the Documenta Commission (2019–2022), contributing to the selection of Indonesian collective ruangrupa for Documenta 15. Pirotte has held key institutional roles at the Rijksakademie, Kunsthalle Bern, and Städelschule/Portikus, and co-directed the 2024 Busan Biennale, Seeing in the Dark. His projects integrate archival inquiry, collaborative frameworks, and critical historiography, exemplified by the forthcoming multi-sited exhibition project Spectres of Bandung.
​
Christopher Williams-Wynn
Freie Universität Berlin
Christopher Williams-Wynn is a historian of modern and contemporary art, with a focus on the intersections between art, media, and politics in the Americas and Europe. He is the author of Arts of Control: Cultural Production and Systems Thinking During the Cold War (forthcoming with MIT Press), and his articles have featured in Art Journal, Grey Room, and The Art Bulletin, among other venues. His research has been supported by institutions including the European Research Council, Max Planck Gesellschaft, and Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. He is currently an Alexander von Humboldt Foundation Fellow at Freie Universität Berlin.
​
Valentin Diakonov
Whitworth Manchester
Valentin Diakonov is the curator of Modern and Contemporary art at the Whitworth, University of Manchester. He served as curator at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, in 2016-2022, organizing group projects (Congo Art Works/Chukotka Art Works, The Fabric of Felicity, A Beautiful Night for All the People) and solo shows by Rasheed Araeen, Juergen Teller, Sophia al-Maria and others. In 2022-2024 he was critic in residence at the Core Program in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, where he organized Houston Hauntology, a three-day symposium on the esoteric, the hidden, and the ephemeral in Houston’s visual culture at TransArt Foundation. In the Whitworth, he curated MaÅ‚gorzata Mirga-Tas (2025, traveling from Tate St Ives), Performing Trees (2025-2027), Delaine Le Bas: Un-Fair-Ground (2026). As an art critic, he published reviews and articles in many Russian- and English-language publications, such as Frieze, e flux Criticism, Glasstire, Burnaway, and others.
Imani J Brown
Forensic Architecture
Imani Jacqueline Brown is an artist, activist, and architectural researcher from New Orleans, based in London. Her work investigates the “continuum of extractivism,” which spans from settler-colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production, ecological collapse, and climate chaos.
 In mapping the vectors of violence that cut across extractive zones, she traces constellations of solidarity and imagines paths to ecological reparations. Among other things, Imani is a PhD candidate in Geography at Queen Mary, University of London, and a Research Fellow with Forensic Architecture.
Emilia Terracciano
Manchester University
Dr. Emilia Terracciano is a lecturer in Modern Art History in the Art History Department at the University of Manchester. She specialises in the histories of global modernism focusing on the arts and visual cultures of modern and contemporary South Asia and its diaspora. She is the author of Art and Emergency: Modernism in Twentieth-Century India (IB Tauris, 2018). Her writings have been published by journals around the world. Emilia has written for Oxford Art Journal, British Art Studies, Paul Mellon Centre and Yale Centre for British Art, Jhaveri Contemporary, Met Breuer, Ashmolean, British Museum, Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, Marg, Take on Art, The Caravan, Art Monthly and Mousse Magazine. In 2023 she curated the exhibition ‘Imprinting Nature: Simryn Gill’s Naga Doodles’, Linnean Society of London and ‘Nasreen Mohamedi: Works from the Glenbarra Museum Collection’, which toured Mumbai, Vadodara, New Delhi, and Goa.
Under contract with Reaktion (Botanical series) she is writing the book Mimosa Pudica: The Sensitive Plant.