Talking Past Each Other 

Gershwin Bonevacia is a poet, writer and performer. From March 2019 to January 2022, Gershwin was the city poet of Amsterdam and wrote a poem every month in Het Parool. His stormy rise as a poet did not come naturally due to his dyslexia, but his struggle with words made him an inventive word artist.

Daniëlle Zawadi writes prose and performs spoken word. Her stories are often about what it means to be young in the Netherlands as someone of the second generation: born in the Democratic Republic of Congo but raised in the Netherlands. In her work, Zawadi addresses her bi-cultural background. She talks about friendship and how the definition of it changes as she gets older. As someone who is part of GenZ, she sees in her writing the opportunity to capture her world of experience as a photo; one in which others also recognize themselves through word choices that concern not only Dutch, but also French and English.

Jakob Haller trained as a chef and honed his skills in top restaurants, including four years in Copenhagen. In 2015, he returned to South Tyrol and joined his partner’s family farm, Hof des Wandels, in St. Pauls. There, he embraced a new path—growing nutritionally dense food, regenerating the landscape, and making a living from sustainable farming. Hof des Wandels is a diverse polyculture farm that follows regenerative farming practices to produce vegetables, fruits, herbs, and flowers for the local community. In addition to farming, Jakob offers workshops on fermentation and regenerative agriculture. As a chef, he combines farm-grown and locally sourced ingredients with global culinary traditions, creating delicious and nutritious dining experiences. 

Felix began his career as a surveyor but soon found himself traveling the world for a couple of years. During this invaluable time, he discovered the universal language of food—its power to bring people together, regardless of origin, culture, or beliefs. Upon returning to Italy, he attended the renowned culinary institute ALMA and embarked on a professional career in the kitchen. The following years took him back on the road, this time with a clear purpose: to explore the diverse ways of approaching food and cooking, from fine dining to rustic mountain huts. While staying true to his Italian-South Tyrolean roots, he refined his cooking style by incorporating new flavors and techniques—always striving to keep his cuisine simple and honest. Driven by a desire for new adventures and deeper experiences—not just in cooking but also in growing and cultivating food— his passion ultimately led him to join Jakob Haller at “Hof des Wandels”.

The multi-instrumentalist and composer Valentin Gasser received his first saxophone lessons from his father and attended the Bolzano Music School with Hans Tutzer until 2010. From 2010 to 2018, he studied at the Konservatorium Wien Privatuniversität (later the University of Music and Arts), first focusing on jazz saxophone with Prof. Thomas Huber and later on jazz composition and arrangement with Prof. Andy Middleton. In addition to the saxophone, he also plays piano, guitar, flute, clarinet, drums, and trumpet. Since the summer of 2018, Valentin Gasser has been living in Bolzano again, where he teaches (mainly saxophone and piano), performs in various ensembles and as a soloist, and composes and arranges music across jazz, classical, and symphonic wind music.

Elisa Barison is a freelance curator and writer whose work focuses on the intersection of rural and urban spaces and processes. She holds a degree in Art History and Journalism from the University of Vienna, as well as an MBA in Cultural Management from ICART Paris. In addition to her work in the cultural sector, she lives and works on a farm in Bressanone, where they grow wine and slow flowers.

Manuel Oberkalmsteiner is a musician and sound artist from Bolzano who has been engaged in field recordings and the sound aesthetics of places for many years. He is part of the experimental improv duo KNRRZ and co-founder of the music label LAGRINDNOIRE for experimental music. For years, he has been creating sound installations and sound performances and offering workshops on experimental, field recording-based music. With his solo musical project ZOLF & SATURN, he blends electronic music with acoustic instruments and field recordings. He has released three albums so far and regularly performs on stages both nationally and internationally.

Sara Burchia studied stage and costume design at the University of the Arts in Graz and was involved in various theater projects during her studies. Since graduating in 2015, she has worked as a freelance stage and costume designer, primarily in South Tyrol. Her work includes productions such as Punk Rock and The Boy with the Longest Shadow at the Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen. At Stadttheater Bruneck, she designed the eerie stage world for Macbeth. For several years, she has been designing large-scale and playful stage sets for the Freilichtspiele Lana. At Carambolage, she has created a series of striking stage designs, including the visually compelling Name: Sophie Scholl and Die Laborantin (2023). Her recent works also include Die Nacht so groß wie wir (Vereinigte Bühnen Bozen, 2024), Gletscher (Märchenhaftes Theater, 2024), and Der Traam (2024), an electro- electronic musical.

VinKiamo Südtirol is a citizen science project that the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano offers to German and Ladin secondary schools in South Tyrol as part of the PNRR European project iNest (Interconnected North-East Innovation Ecosystem). In this context students actively participate in collecting linguistic data within their local communities by helping different generations of speakers fill in the AlpiLinK questionnaire. AlpiLinK (Alpine Languages in contact), in turn, is a collaborative project between several universities in Northern Italy, including UniBz, and is funded by the Italian Research Ministry in the PRIN framework. Its objectives are the investigation and promotion of the dialects and minority languages spoken in the Italian Alpine regions.

Merve Bektaş is a designer-artist and researcher at the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano, working in Spoke 1 of PNRR-iNEST, Interconnected North-East Innovation Ecosystem. Her research explores alternative futures for local wool in South Tyrol through design, technology, and crafts with a more-than-human approach, that connects urban and rural contexts. Within iNEST, she leads Feral Wool and the WOLB Woll-e-lab project, funded through the Young Researchers program.