Creatives

Atelier MELD is composed of producers, artists, scientists and scholars working together to collaborate on issues embedded in climate change and social justice.

Anthropologist, Ethnobotanist

Wade Davis is perhaps the most articulate and influential western advocate for the world's indigenous cultures. A National Geographic Explorer-in-Residence, he has been described as a rare combination of scientist, scholar, poet and passionate defender of all of life’s diversity.͟ Trained in anthropology and botany at Harvard, he travels the globe to live alongside indigenous people, and document their cultural practices in books, photographs, and film. His stunning photographs and evocative stories capture the viewer's imagination. As a speaker, he parlays that sense of wonder into passionate concern over the rate at which cultures and languages are disappearing -- 50 percent of the world's 7,000 languages, he says, are no longer taught to children. He argues, in the most beautiful terms, that language is much more than vocabulary and grammatical rules. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind.

PROJECTS:
• 10+10+10=1 10 Artists + 10 Scholars + 10 Films = 1 Planet
(Janaina Tschape + Wade Davis) in progress

Cellist

Séverine Ballon͚s work focuses on regular performance of key works of the cello repertoire, as well as numerous collaborations with composers; in addition, her researches as an improviser have helped her to extend the sonic and technical resources of her instrument. She studied the cello at the Hochschule für Musik in Berlin and in Lübeck with Joseph Schwab and Troels Svane. In 2004-2005 she was ͚academist͛ at the Ensemble Modern (Internationale Ensemble Modern Akademie). She perfected her contemporary cello technique with cellists Siegfried Palm, Pierre Strauch and Rohan de Saram. In 2005-2006 she was solo cellist of the Toulouse Chamber Orchestra, but subsequently decided to concentrate on contemporary music and on the premiere of new works. Currently she is working on developing extended techniques for her instrument and finding an appropriate notation.

PROJECTS:
• Streaming 2.0 : A soundscape intervention (with Nicolas Fenouillat + Alexander Schellow) in progress

Artist & Musician

Nicolas Fenouillat’s artistic work is multidisciplinary. It combines music, performance art,visual arts, architecture, poetry and video. Visual artist, performer and musician, he translates in a poetic and artistic way his active research in music and sound creation. His additional artistic training at the Fine Arts school of Montpellier, music at the National School of Music in Villeurbanne (ENM) as a pupil of composer, Fred Frith, and the curatorial school Magasin in Grenoble led him to a unique and singular production linking music and art. His artistic work draws its references from different creative fields: architecture, popular culture and counter musical culture. Using metaphors from certain social contexts, the work of Nicolas Fenouillat creates a particular atmosphere, at times vaguely threatening, that offers a full immersion in space in order to transcend it. He conceives works that are characterized by the creative power of sound and the expression of a certain construction, present in the processes of sculpture or through images and allegories.

PROJECTS:
• Streaming 2.0 : A soundscape intervention (with Severine Ballon + Alexander Schellow) in progress

Visual Artist

Shaun Gladwell is a contemporary artist based in Sydney and London. His work spans moving image, painting, photography, installation, performance, and text. Gladwell’s work reflects on human experience through a wide range of subjects, such as contemporary culture, cinema, and ideas throughout art history, such as the sublime and vanitas. His work is held in many museum collections throughout the world, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the National Gallery of Australia.

PROJECTS:
• Ikono TV World Environmental Day (2011)
• Ikono on Air Festival (2013)
• 10+10+10=1|10 Artists +10 Scholars + 10 Films = 1 Planet
A Climate Change Opera (Shaun Gladwell + Cynthia Rosenzweig) in progress
• ProjectShortlisted for The Space | UK and nominated + finalist for the COAL PRIZE | COPArt21

Art Collective

Inside Out is a large-scale participatory art project created by the street artist JR, who is the recipient of the 2011 TED Prize that transforms messages of personal identity into pieces of artistic work. Everyone is challenged to use black and white photographic portraits to discover, reveal and share the untold stories and images of people around the world. These digitally uploaded images will be made into posters and sent back to the project’s co-creators for them to exhibit in their own communities. The project is an affirmation of one of the fundamental goals of documentary photography, which is to make the invisible visible; to document the stories and people who otherwise are not being heard. The project also reminds us that we, photographers and otherwise, need to remain engaged with our communities.

Visual Artist

Milan Rai is a self-taught contemporary artist born in Nepal. In 2013, a butterfly landed in his studio, that moment inspired him to spearhead a project, namely The White Butterfly. He began scattering white butterflies in public spaces, to make art accessible to all. People who found them began connecting and spreading them in ways that brought themselves love, peace, and hope. What started as a simple project became a global project, spreading across 40 countries around the planet. He uses white butterflies in his installations as a symbol of pure transformation and hope. He believes that every individual, like a butterfly, has the power to transform itself and when this transformation happens collectively, we can observe miracles in their truest form.

PROJECTS:
• White Butterflies | Athens, Paris & Stockholm, 2013

Musician, Composer & Soundscape Artist

Ted Regklis was born in Crete in 1986 and raised in Athens, Greece. From the age of 6 he started learning the piano and took his first steps in music composition just a few years later. Before even reaching his 20s, Ted was already producing his own music with computers. He completed his piano studies from the Hellenic Conservatory and the Charalambos Ekmetsoglou Music School, Athens and then he moved on to study music theory at the London College of Music. He is the founder and a band member of several alternative, pop-rock and downtempo music bands, such as Mockbirth, serving as a composer or performing as a singer and a keyboardist. Since 2005 he has been writing music for short films (͞Dead End - the life of Hazara people in Greece ͞| Directed by Apostolos Nikolaidis) and theatrical plays. Later on he stepped into the universe of video games designing the scores for ͞Save the Seas͟ and ͞Pulse Shift͟. Ted is a prolific concert composer and has already released, both in Europe and the U.S., three personal albums (Blank, 2015) and four with his downtempo band, Mockbirth.

PROJECTS:
• Kifissos | Alexander Schellow | Animation Fic-Doc (2017) Soundscape

Climate Change Scientist

Dr. Cynthia Rosenzweig’s primary research involves the development of interdisciplinary methodologies by which to assess the potential impacts of and adaptations to global environmental change. She has joined impact models with global climate models (GCMs) to predict future outcomes of both land-based and urban systems under altered climate conditions. Advances include the development of climate change scenarios for impact analysis, and the application of impact models at relevant spatial and temporal scales for regional and national assessments. Recognizing that the complex interactions engendered by global environmental change can best be understood by coordinated teams of experts, Dr. Rosenzweig has organized and led large-scale interdisciplinary, national, and international studies of climate change impacts and adaptation.

PROJECTS:
• 10+10+10=1 | 10 Artists + 10 Scholars + 10 Films = 1 Planet
A Climate Change Opera
(Shaun Gladwell + Cynthia Rosenzweig) in progress
• Shortlisted for The Space | UK and nominated + finalist for the COAL Prize | COPArt21

Visual Artist

Alexander Schellow deals closely with relations between space, perception and action at the junction between an artistic and scientific research. His work revolves around a possible documentation on questions of orientation, or of the ways attention is scattered and distributed into given spaces.
Since 1999, he has been working on reconstruction processes from memory, based on an ongoing daily drawing practice. This generates different formats which often evolve over a long period of time, partly related to specific contexts. They build series of drawings, animations / films, archives, installations, readings, performances and texts.

Projects:
• Project Nero (2010-ongoing)
• Ikono On Air Festival (2013)

Environmental Interpreter

Interpreter Valya Stergioti’s experience as an educator began in 1990 when, as an adult member of the Greek Guiding Association, she led a group of children aged 7-11. For 5 years, every week, her role was to organize and implement two-hour programs with diverse themes, using hands-on experiential methods that were relatively innovative for Greek education at the time. After completing her Master’s Degree at the Open University (MSc in Environmental Decision Making) with a specialization in environmental interpretation, Valya Stergioti worked with environmental NGOs creating and implementing various children’s programs focused on the environment. In 2007, published her first book (Fsss, Abatou and a nightingale) by Mikri Militos edition.

PROJECTS:
• Neraki, Athens, Greece | 2011
• Neraki, Volos, Greece | 2011
• Message in a Bottle, Lake Karla, Greece | 2014

Visual Artist

New York based Brazilian and German artist, Janaina Tschäpe shares her forename with a Brazilian water goddess, and, not coincidentally, her photographs and performances-to-video feature sumptuously organic, watery, distorted female figures,writes Frieze. Janaina Tschäpe deftly exploits and subverts notions of identity and reality in her work. Since 1997, Janaina Tschäpe has employed the female body as her muse, creating universes of polymorphous landscapes, embryonic forms and ambiguous characters. Tschäpe’s drawings, photographs, films and installations seek to give form to the trance of art making, portraying not a dream world, but the sensation of being in one. Tschäpe creates an environment of dream and fantasy, where the everyday world metamorphoses into a mythical place, populated by fabricated creatures and florescent vegetation.

PROJECTS:
• Ikono TV World Environmental Day (2011)
• Ikono on Air Festival (2013)
• Project10+10+10=1 10 Artists + 10 Scholars + 10 Films = 1 Planet
(Janaina Tschape + Wade Davis) in progress