Martin Zähringer is Artistic Director of “counter!views” and Founder of the
CLIMATE CULTURES network berlin e.V. (↗CCnetwork),
a network at the intersection of climate,
crisis and culture.
He is a feature author and literary critic with a focus on translated
literatures. He has been writing about Ecocriticism and Nature Writing for more than ten years,
and his work has appeared in NZZ, ARD, Deutschlandfunk and elsewhere.
Jane Tversted is Co-director of "counter!views" as well as "Planet Writes Back!" in 2021, Co-founder
of the CLIMATE CULTURES network berlin e.V. (↗CCnetwork)
and responsible for the entire web presence.
She is a feature author and translator and has been working in the field of
climate fiction since 2016.
Together with Martin Zähringer, she has produced several radio broadcasts on climate in
literature, for example, the three-hour program “The Planet Strikes Back”
for “Lange Nacht” (The Long Night) at Deutschlandfunk.
Juliane Schumacher
Juliane Schumacher is a researcher, journalist and author.
She has reported as a journalist from Latin America and North Africa,
and her book “Tahrir and no turning back” about the Egyptian
revolution was published in 2012.
From 2011 to 2014, she was an editor at taz. For many years, she has been
working on climate change and the question of how it is changing people's
relationship to their non-human environment from different perspectives.
In her dissertation, she investigated how the possible inclusion in carbon
markets changed the management of forests in Morocco; the resulting book,
”The Government of the Forest”, was published by Transcript in 2022.
She has been a member of the ”Environment and Justice” working group
at the Leibniz-Zentrum Moderner Orient since 2020. More about Juliane Schumacher
↗www.zmo.de
Fernando Huerta
Fernando Huerta is a trained Engineer. He has been passionate about film for as long
as he can remember, which made him jump into the cinema industry, not as a director or
producer but as a cinema exhibitor and festival organizer. He has run big commercial
cinemas, as well as set up small independent cinemas from scratch.
He studied an MA in Event Management in London, and funded ↗Mobile Kino
in 2013, a company dedicated to setting up open air cinemas, organizing unconventional
screenings and premieres, producing various film festivals and assisting many
companies and institutions in their open air cinema needs,
from the technical to the operational.
Josephin Hanke
Josephin Hanke is a visual artist, filmmaker and project assistant. She studied in
Berlin, Reykjavik and Braunschweig. In her artistic work she examines the
potentiality of the body.
She is Co-founder of ↗Periferi Magazin ,
a platform for utopian and speculative textual work. Currently she is working on a
science fiction series called LEADERS*.
For CLIMATE CULTURES FESTIVAL gegen!blicke/ counter!views she will help as a
program/ project assistant. More about Josephin Hanke ↗www.josephinhanke.com
Simon Probst
Simon Probst is a Berlin-based literary scholar and writer. He holds a master's
degree in Philosophy and German Literature from the University of Heidelberg and
a PhD from the University of Vechta, where he is working as a postdoc researcher
in Environmental Humanities.
His project “Writing and Reading in the Anthropocene.
On the way to a planetary theory of literature” is funded by the Fritz Thyssen
foundation. Currently he is also finishing his first novel “Earthly Bodies”.
At the counter!views festival Simon will curate a panel on Afrofuturistic
perspectives on the climate crisis.
Esther Figueroa
Esther Figueroa PhD, is a Jamaican independent filmmaker, writer, educator and
linguist with over thirty-five years of experience in media production, including
television programming, documentaries, educational videos, multimedia and feature
film. Her activist filmmaking gives voice to those outside of mainstream media and
focuses on the perpetuation of local and indigenous knowledge and cultures, the
natural environment, social injustice and community empowerment.
They include
“Jamaica for Sale”, the award-winning feature documentary about tourism and
unsustainable development. Her most recent feature documentary “Fly Me To The Moon”
(2019) is about modernity and the global aluminum industry.
In 2020, she founded ↗Global Extraction Film Festival
, the first online film festival focused on global extraction. Her environmental
novel “Limbo”, was a finalist in the National Indie Excellence Awards
for Multi-cultural Fiction.
Tobias Gralke
Tobias Gralke is a research fellow at the Film University of Babelsberg where he
pursuing a PhD project on political climate communication and urban futures.
Beyond that, he has been working for more than ten years in the cultural sector
and political education – as a writer, performer, trainer, moderator, and project
manager, with several groups and for numerous organizations. He is also active in
the Berlin tenants' movement and in anti-racist initiatives.
Tobias works for the film section of the festival. More about Tobias Gralke: ↗www.tobiasgralke.de
Imani Tafari-Ama
Dr. Imani Tafari-Ama, a Pan-Africanist and Womanist Scholar,
is currently Research Fellow at the Institute for Gender and Development
Studies at the University of the West Indies.
During 2016-17, she served as
International Fellow and Curator at the Flensburg Maritime Museum, to participate
in the year-long Fellow Me! Mobile Academy and curated the acclaimed
↗Rum, Sweat and Tears exhibition as a
critical response to Danish colonialism in the Virgin Islands.
Tafari-Ama is also the author of “Lead in the Veins” (poetry) and “Up for Air:
This Half has never been Told!”. She publishes a
fortnightly column in The Gleaner, Jamaica’s leading newspaper,
↗Imani in The Gleaner.
For the CLIMATE CULTURES FESTIVAL Imani Tafari-Ama has produced a short film,
“Plastic Pollution and Economic Possibilities”.
Alice Grünfelder
Alice Grünfelder is a writer and teaches young people in Zurich.
As a sinologist, she has always been interested in the margins of Chinese culture
and the corresponding uncomfortable counter-images.
She has published several books on this subject, e.g., on Tibet “Wingbeat of the
Butterfly”, Xinjiang “The Desert Walker” and, most recently, on Taiwan “Clouds over
Taiwan”. When she lived in Taipei for a sabbatical in 2020, she was surprised
by how foreign and yet close this young island republic was to her.
For the festival, she is curating the Taiwan panel with Taiwanese-Canadian author
Jessica Lee, best known for her book about swimming in Berlin's lakes, and
renowned author and environmental activist Wu Ming-Yi.
More about Alice Grünfelder ↗www.literaturfelder.com
