As the UMPRUM – Academy of Arts Architecture & Design Visiting Artist for the 2025/2026 fall semester, I will be inviting students of the programe to take this theoretical and practical dive with me:

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.

More info here: https://www.umprum.cz/en/web/studios/fine-arts/visiting-artist-studio/the-program-of-the-umprum-visiting-artist-studio-in-the-2025-2026-fall-semester

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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