Artists, critics, curators, writers, filmmakers - the festival participants - will discuss the conditions surrounding the (im)possibility to work, as well as reflect upon and deal with questions of (trans)gender, working conditions, politics and the perspective of different communities and institutions engaged in the field of contemporary art. It is not a question if gender matters (it does!), but rather what contribution it can make to changing neo-conservative and neo-liberal approaches to life, community and work, that currently reign over the world. The question is what other spaces, bodies and policies can be engendered in order to bring about true change, and not the mere simple improvement of the situation as regards difference, solidarity and equality.

Session One Audio Recordings: OGG/  MP3
Session Two Audio Recordings OGG/  MP3

Diana McCarty (USA / Germany): media artist and software developer; co-founder of

Bootlab, a Berlin-based IT network production, presentation and distribution group, as well as the Faces and Nettime mailing lists.

Maja Bajević (Bosnia-Herzegovina / France): artist; a graphic design graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Sarajevo, with post-graduate study of multimedia arts at ENSBA (École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts) in Paris.

Anita Ponton (UK): live-art performance artist; graduate of Central St. Martins College of Art and Design in London, currently working on her doctorate in fine arts at Goldsmiths College.

Silke Mansholt (Germany / UK): performer and dancer; has studied graphic design, fine arts, performance and dance - as well as healing practices - in Germany and the UK.

Katrien Jacobs (Belgium / Hong Kong): sholar, writer and activist in the field of digital art and culture, who has lectured and published widely on netporn, sex art and censorship. Currently she is assistant professor at City University of Hong Kong.

Marijs Boulogne (Belgium): performance artist, writer and theatre director; studied at the RITS film-school in Brussels. Under the auspices of Cie Buelens Paulina, young artists improvise with theatre, performance, contemporary music, video and embroidery.

Shelbatra Jashari (Kosovo / Belgium): studied experimental film, and is currently finishing her masters degree in audiovisual arts at the Hogeschool Sint Lukas Brussels.

Christen Clifford (USA): actress, writer and performance artist whose work has appeared in major US periodicals as well as in film and on television; visiting scholar at New York University.

Waltraud Grausgruber, Birgitt Wagner (Austria): representatives of the association Culture2Culture, which organises cultural, scientific and interdisciplinary events focusing on women, film & video, as well as Tricky Women, the only female animation film festival in Europe.

Rosa Reitsamer (Austria): sociologist, writer and DJ, researching women's representation in visual arts, popular culture, and music; editor of the queer-feminist magazine Female Sequences.

Ivana Sajko (Croatia): playwright, dramaturg and director, graduate of the Zagreb Academy of Drama Arts; co-founder of the BAD co theatre group and member of the editorial board of Frakcija, an international magazine for performing arts.

Alenka Spacal (Slovenia): artist, theoretician, fine arts critic and curator; involved in the feminist fine arts and theory; she has a masters in aesthetics from Ljubljana University where she continues her doctorate studies.

Lana Zdravković (Slovenia): graduate of the Philological Faculty of Belgrade University (world literature and theory of literature); in addition to being an active member of the kitch artistic group, she works as a publicist, philosopher, journalist and activist, as well as performance and multimedia arts.

Marina Gržinić (Slovenia) is doctor of philosophy and works as researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at the ZRC SAZU in Ljubljana. She is a freelance media theorist and curator, and has been involved in video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Šmid she has produced more than 30 video art projects, a short film, numerous video and media installations, Internet websites and an interactive CD-ROM (ZKM, Karlsruhe, Germany). Gržinić has published hundreds of articles and 5 books; her last book is Fiction Reconstructed: Eastern Europe, Post-Socialism and the Retro-Avant-Garde (Vienna: Edition Selene in collaboration with Springerin, Vienna, 2000).