ARANTXA ARAUJO is a Mexican multidisciplinary artist with a background in neuroscience based in NYC, interested in art as a vehicle to create awareness and social change using video, mapping, LEDs and performance. Her work has been shown in the Brooklyn Museum, University Settlement, Glasshouse Gallery, Queens Museum, Panoply Lab, Art in Odd Places in NYC; El Monumento a la Revolución, and El Vicio, in Mexico; RAW during Miami Art Week; The Semel and Huret&Spector Gallery in Boston; and SPACE Gallery and Bunker Projects in Pittsburgh; Nuit Blanche Festival in Saskatoon, Canada. Araujo was part of EMERGENYC (2017), ITP Camp (2018) and was awarded a full scholarship from Mexican Government Institution CONACYT. She holds an MA in Motor Learning and Control from Teachers College, Columbia University.

JELILI ATIKU is a Nigerian multimedia artist with political concerns for human rights and justice. Through drawing, installation sculpture, photography, video and live art performance; he strive to help viewers understand the world and expanding their understanding and experiences, so that they can activate and renew their lives and environments.

Since 2008, he has been involved in an ongoing performance project, In the Red, which uses red as a symbol of life, suffering, danger and violence. In 2008/2009, his performance video, Victim of Political Assassination was showcased in Video Library section of Rencontres Internationales in Paris, Berlin and Madrid. He also featured in the Geisai #12 Contemporary Art Fair, Tokyo, Japan (2009), 16th Festival International D’Art Video de Casablanca, Morocco (2009), Old News #6, Malmo, Lagos and Copenhagen (2009/2010) and Freedom to Create Prize, Singapore (2009).

He was among participating artists in the International Video Art Festival in Yorkshire, UK: VAF 1: From Africa (2011). Similarly, his videos, Red Bug were among the videos that were screened in: Woodland at the Kurt Schwitters Summer School, Merzbarn Estate, Lake District, UK (23rd July, 2011); Hail Thy Name screened in an exhibition, titled WƆbƆle kutu wƆkpe: Cultures in confluence held at Goethe Institut, Accra, Ghana (11-29, 0ctober, 2011), etc. He also participated in Cinemarche Video Art Festival, Scarborough Indoor Market, Scarborough, North Yorkshire, UK (22nd October), and 2011 Protest Art International Festival held in Harare, Zimbabwe – where he enacted performance, titled Red Flag in collaboration with Fisani Nkomo(28th October, 2011); 1st Arts and Culture Congress where he enacted RED uctio AD AB surdum, Lome, Togo (18th November, 2011); and the SICA Festival where he also enacted Red Carpet at Cotonou, Benin Republic (26th November, 2011).

ALAN TOD

I look for the vibrations of reality and of perspective. My work is about optic.

I am first and foremost an artist of the forest, and my sole ambition is to spread the song of the trees across the earth and make the forest a piece of art. From a theoretical point of view, I am a painter of the classical questions in art, and as such I serve nature, its beauty, and its love for humanity.

"Planting forests, awaiting the eagles’ return" is the sound of the new economy and a new spirituality. A forest is a family, a new state of mind for human kind. The vibration between life and death, darkness and light, water and sun, soil and sky is making the green melody of a landscape painting.

FOREST is, in and of itself, a living, vibrationist artwork. It was proposed tangentially to the pictorial research into polyphony, and its aim is to propagate the growth of natural forest, with the help of humanity. As such, the project produces forests, stories, photographs, films, paintings, installations and performances.

Adhering to the collaborative tradition of painting and related to the movement of Bio arte, the FOREST questions accepted truths, and brings the spectator into this debate. As the heir of total art, this living piece can be seen as the ultimate work of love between nature and humanity.

From a purely pictorial point of view, FOREST is akin to Claude Monet’s undertakings in Giverny, where he planted his garden before painting it.As an objet d’art, FOREST is a work of ‘inspired botany’; the continued transformation of the Sintra forest and the Park of Pena in Portugal, a botanical forest planted in the 19th Century by King Ferdinand II of Portugal, who was nicknamed the Artist King.Today Sintra forest is renowned for its positive environmental impact. FOREST is a continuation of this same spirit.

Using sincerity as a key for humility, I try to use constraint as a freedom or a chance.

There is nothing to invent, only to discover.