THE PROGRAM OF THE UMPRUM VISITING ARTIST STUDIO IN THE 2025/2026 FALL SEMESTER

The UMPRUM Visiting Artist for the 2025/2026 fall semester are Dani D'Emilia

Program Title and Syllabus:

Artistic Practices for Times of Transition

This program invites students into an embodied, arts-based inquiry on what it means to create from a place of metabolic intimacy and responsible relationality. Drawing from somatic practices, performative experiments, and transfeminist as well as decolonial thought, we will explore how artistic processes can help us sense, navigate, and enact necessary transitions at personal, collective, and systemic levels. Through a combination of one-on-one mentorship and collective experimentation, students will be encouraged to investigate what artistic, emotional, and conceptual “sheddings” are needed to make space for new forms of coexistence, creativity, and resilience amid social and ecological uncertainty.

 

Artists' Bio:

Dani d’Emilia (they/them) is an artist, educator, curator, and researcher working at the intersections of performance, visual arts, somatic practices, radical pedagogy, and social-ecological justice. Their art-life practice is moved by a yearning for metabolic intimacy: a sense of responsible attunement with the web of inseparability that connects all relations, human and beyond. Guided by the force of Radical Tenderness and grounded in transfeminist and decolonial sensibilities, Dani is especially interested in political practices of healing that intertwine artistic, somatic, affective, ecological, and spiritual spheres. They have co-authored, with Vanessa Andreotti, the text Co-sensing with Radical Tenderness (2020) and, with Daniel Coleman, the Radical Tenderness Manifesto (2015). Dani has been part of the collective Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (CA/BR) since 2017 and is a co-founder of the immersive theatre company Living Structures (UK) and the art space Roundabout.lx (PT). They were previously a member of the collectives La Pocha Nostra (US/MX, 2011–16) and Proyecto Inmiscuir (ES/MX, 2015–17), and a collaborator with AND Lab – Centre for Research in Art-Thinking & Politics of Coexistence (PT/BR, 2018–21). Dani is currently developing a research project entitled Abscission, which explores queer deviations from anthropocentric notions of fixity, individuality, and superiority. Framing transitions as inevitable cycles of release and renewal shared by all bodies—human and more-than-human—it investigates what we might intimately and systemically need to shed to make space for other forms of (co)existence and metabolic reciprocity to inhabit us. Dani also facilitates the course Facing Human Wrongs hosted by the University of Victoria (CA), teaches across multiple programs, and coordinates residencies focusing on the role of the arts in nurturing cognitive, affective, and relational resilience as we face ever-widening social and ecological collapses. www.danidemilia.com

 

The structure of the program:

The visiting artist will give a theoretical and practical course.

The program is structured in several intense in-person sessions with the visiting artist and several online meetings with her and her guests. Regular meetings of the group will be held in person weekly throughout the term.

Applications: 
The program is part of the Fine Arts Department of UMPRUM and is primarily reserved to its students but offers limited numbers of places to the students of other departments of UMPRUM. Students of the bachelor, master and PhD programs can apply.

All students apart from the students of the first year of Bachelor Program and the students currently graduating from Bachelor and Master Program are encouraged to enroll. The Visiting Artist Program is open to students of Fine Arts Department and all other UMPRUM departments in limited numbers.

To apply, students must have completed their previous semester and enrolled in the next semester. For applications please contact the UMPRUM Study department.

For more information please contact the program’s Czech pedagogue Sláva Sobotovičová, ssobot@umprum.cz, 737 620 381

Deadline for applications: Jan 31st, 2025

 

In the past UMPRUM has hosted courses of the following visiting artists:

spring 2024/25 Basim Magdy: Playing Musical Chairs in a Locked Room.  A multi-disciplinary approach to creating art

fall 2024/25 Anna Witt: The Survival of The Softest. Dynamics of non-competitiveness.

spring 2023/24 Setareh Shahbazi: Eyes, Come Back! Solidarity in Art. 

fall 2023/2024 Jana Ndiaye Berankova and guests: East-South. Transnational Exchanges Between Eastern Europe and Global South.

spring 2022/2023 Özlem Altin: Draw a map to get lost. Listening in.

fall 2022/2023 Marwa Arsanios: Building a structure. Strategies of self-organizing. 

spring 2021/2022 Viktor Timofeev: Process Soup. Artist’s Derailing and Return Points. 

fall 2021/2022 Matt Mullican: Details from an Imaginary Universe

spring 2020/2021 Maja Smrekar: Dialogues with Different Kinds of Interlocutors

fall 2020/2021 Sam Lewitt: Scales

spring 2019/2020 Tyler Coburn: Counterfactuals

fall 2019/2020 Justin Fitzpatrick: Critical Aspects of Painting

spring 2018/2019 Nina Beier: Cultural Meanings of Material and Objects

fall 2018/2019 David Maljković: Crossovers of Installation

spring 2017/2018 Marie de Brugerolle: The Legacy of Performance