What began as a vision by AOS co-founder Besjana Shehu, to slow down, observe, and listen, became a five-day journey through ecology, science, and art. This residency is the result of a decade of AOS’s work to protect Albania’s wetlands, years of research, monitoring, and legal efforts to preserve the life that thrives within them. After all this experience in the field and in/with institutions, we felt the need to open another space, one where art speaks in ways that words and protests cannot. Because perhaps art can preserve the memory of our landscapes before they change forever.
More than 130 participants from 19 countries worked side by side to study, create, and reflect on the fragile balance between people and nature, and on how art can help protect it. 22 residents participated in rotation-based bird ringing sessions led by Erald Xeka, Klajdi Duro, and our Hungarian partners. 5 days of bird ringing and 2 days of birdwatching with Taulant Bino documented the autumn migration across the Divjaka wetlands. Sessions were held on habitats and plants (Marjol Meço), bats (Ervis Loçe), insect songs (Boudewij), archaeology (Ols Lafe), and anthropology (Niko Ferro). Over 100 birds were captured, measured, and studied for plumage, migration, and biometrics. Dozens of sketches, poems, field recordings, and short films were created on-site.
A collaborative and immersive program for artists and researchers, the camp was grounded in hands-on field experience, sensitive listening to environments, and research on oral culture, folklore, and traditional knowledge. Within the vast landscapes of Divjakë-Karavasta, each dawn was devoted to mist-netting and ringing migratory birds (following EURING standards), while afternoons opened space for cross-disciplinary exploration through drawing, photography, sound, and natural materials gathered in the field.
United Kingdom/Tunisia/France
Lillie Aissa-Jeanrenaud has been working at the intersection of climate and creativity for five years. She has worked across writing intertwined with other disciplines to reunite nature and culture for diverse global audiences. Themes of her multimedia storytelling include environmental justice, abolition ecology, ethnobotany, earth architecture, and more. Lillie works on rewilding the collective consciousness, through decolonising and bringing about conversations of repair and community care. She does this through facilitation, co-creation, and weaving together interdisciplinary threads.
Her artistic interests currently include beekeeping, building with earth, migration of animals and humans, ecocide, and extinction of experience facing inner-city people (such as herself). She is interested in exploring them using film, writing, and co-creation. She learned about collective storytelling through Radical Film School, which connected her to her current worldview.
Mexico/Norway
Luis Fernando Amaya is a composer and percussionist from Aguascalientes, México, now based in Oslo. His work often explores collective memory and the relationship between humans and non-humans, engaging with plants, animals, and environmental contexts. He studied composition and music theory at the Centro de Investigación y Estudios Musicales (CIEM) and holds a Ph.D. in composition and music technology from Northwestern University.
His music has been performed across the Americas and Europe by ensembles such as CEPROMUSIC, London Sinfonietta, Lucerne Festival Contemporary Orchestra, Ensemble Dal Niente, Fonema Consort, Yarn/Wire, and the Oslo Domkor. Amaya has received several recognitions, including the Residency PRIX CIME (2023), a Presidential Fellowship from Northwestern University, and he represented México at the 61st International Rostrum of Composers of UNESCO in Helsinki.
His scores are published by BabelScores. His first monographic album, Cortahojas, was released in 2023 by Protomaterial Records, with his second album forthcoming from Aurora Records in 2025.
USA/Japan/Portugal
Haruka Aoki (she/they) is a queer Japanese-American poet-illustrator and hope bender. Her narrative artwork, which has been featured in publications including The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The Washington Post, aims to inspire individuals with both wit and sincerity as her hand-drawn characters engage the world around them. Growing up often unsure of where “home” would be next, Haruka befriended the abundant imagination found in nature and community, a constant starting point in her work. By foraging inspiration from ancestral and metaphysical realms to nurture her artistic practice, she hopes to grow and provide an accessible space for collective healing. She often feels deeply grateful to be an earthling.
Hungary/Albania
Ildikó Benussi is a teacher and has been part of AOS activities before, such as bird counts and bird ringing in Tirana.
She practices daily nature journalling using drawings and writing to cultivate close observation of nature, and often uses these skills to share her passion for birdwatching with children and young adults through group activities.
France/China/Togo
Félicia Dotsé is an interdisciplinary artist, choreographer, and movement coach based in Paris whose work weaves together dance, somatic research, neuroscience, psychology, and ritual. After beginning her career in chemical engineering, she transitioned fully into the arts, cultivating a practice rooted in embodiment and sensory perception. Her work explores the dialogue between inner landscapes and the more-than-human world, often through immersive experiences that invite participants into movement, presence, and collective exploration.
She is the founder of ODYSEA, an elemental and participatory performance journey, and Self Sanctuary, a platform dedicated to holistic movement, emotional release, and well-being. Her artistic language spans choreography, video, sound experimentation, and watercolor painting, often shaped by ecological encounters and intuitive processes.
In 2026, she will join the La Wayaka Current residencies, continuing her research on the relationships between the body, ecology, and forms of intuitive knowledge emerging from direct contact with natural environments.
Wales
Georgia Ferguson is a researcher and fibre artist working in textile repair, exploring the use of natural materials including wool and plant fibres in heritage textiles. She grew up in the mountains of rural mid-Wales and is now based in London.
She completed an MA with Forensic Architecture where she investigated the ongoing exploitation of looted cultural objects by platform capitalism. She has since been pursuing her fibre arts practice full-time through sewing, mending, and repairing textiles in a studio in East London.
France/USA
Charlotte Force is a Paris-based writer and artist. With a research background in history and literature, she develops literary, academic, and visual narrative projects that often draw on fairy and folk traditions, wonder, and cultural spaces. She writes and illustrates original short stories. For her, storytelling is inseparable from how people engage with each other and the more-than-human world: an act of attention, interpretation, and care.
She is co-founder of Speculative Creatures, a collective investigating imaginary beings in/through art and how they speak to politics, ecology, and society. As a master's candidate at the École normale supérieure, her research focuses on fairy tales, intellectual history, and practices of literary adaptation. She has a B.A. in medieval history from Columbia University. Born in New York City, she grew up between urban and rural landscapes, spending long periods in the French Basque Country.
Poland
Edka Jarząb is a sound artist practicing deep listening as a starting point for sound activism, exploring the biopolitics of voice and its role as a bridge between private and public. Using radio waves, extended voice techniques, field recording, and electronics, she creates audiospheres for her personal and collaborative performance works and installations. Passionate about the sonic environment, she organizes workshops and sound walks rooted in different schools of acoustic ecologies, also as part of public programs at some of the major music festivals in Poland (Unsound SummerLab, Sanatorium of Sound).
She is co-founder of Radio Kapitał, a Warsaw-based community radio station, where she produces poetic radio plays and interventions. She leans towards the physical experience of sound and reflections on perception as a relational experience. Her texts can be found in publications on sound ecology or biopolitics of voice and public space, such as Going Out. Walking. Listening. Sound Making edited by Elena Biserna or Empowering Aesthetics by Denisa Tomkova (Bloomsbury, 2025). Recently she showed a live performative audiovisual piece, Alluvia, inspired by river flows as life-giving, fertile grounds of storytelling and poetry, featuring a real gem: found cassettes from 1990s amateur ornithologist, recording Polish birds.
Slovakia/Denmark
Max Juráni, born in Bratislava, Slovakia, is a visual artist based in Denmark where he graduated from the 'Art and Technology' programme at Aalborg University.
Previously he has worked with interactive installations, with a focus on human-computer-human interactions through the use of mixed reality. In 2020, he exhibited a project on 'Cooperative Aesthetics' in collaboration with Kunstuniversität Linz at the Ars Electronica Festival.
After completing his studies, he has increasingly grown closer to art-making as a personal practice, by engaging in small-scale projects and simply through the lived experience of seeing and noticing in the immediate world around him. He is interested in creatures, critters, environments, patterns, symbols, and signs; and their collections.
Albania
Arnilda Kyçyku (born December 21, 1997, Elbasan, Albania) is a contemporary artist based in Tirana, specializing in oil painting. Her practice focuses on human connections, everyday life, and cultural heritage, weaving together personal experience with broader social reflections.
In 2023, she held her first solo exhibition at the Tirana Art Gallery. In 2024, she became a resident at the same institution and presented her second solo exhibition, “Tirana 1+1,” which later traveled to the Shkodra Art Gallery under the title “Tirana n’Shkodër.” In 2025, she completed a three-month residency at Vila31 ArtExplora, culminating in the exhibition “Tirana Preserves Culture and Tradition.” She has also participated in group exhibitions organized by SatelitZone, Prag Space, and other initiatives.
In 2022, Kyçyku received the Best Contemporary Artist Award at the Tirana International Contemporary Art Festival. She is currently expanding her practice by exploring new media, including photography, video art, and installation.
China
Liu Jing is a Beijing-based sound practitioner working across archiving,editing, and experimental composition. With a background in sociology and anthropology (MA), she explores sonic storytelling. A fully-funded participant in the Ens Lumiere Sound Documentary Program, she creates immersive works that bridge ethnographic fieldwork, artistic experimentation, and narrative audio.
Scotland
Cat MacLeod is a poet, environmental facilitator, and library worker based in Scotland. She loves and researches bugs and birds, through surveying, poetry, photography, advocacy and kinship. Cat holds a MA (Hons) in English and Creative Writing, a PGCert in Applied Arts and Social Practice and was awarded a scholarship for their MRes in Eco-literature at UHI and was a Clydebuilt 16 Poet. Cat has performed poetry, given talks and presented papers, and is currently developing environmental education and interdisciplinary projects to increase access to citizen science and wildlife conservation. Her work can be read in publications by Discount Guillotine, Selkie and Generator Projects.
Albania
Ledia Kostandini is a visual artist based in Tirana, Albania whose practice explores social transformations, memory, and inherited or disappearing cultural landscapes. Her work draws inspiration from the layering of time, everyday experiences, and the subtle traces people leave behind in public and private spaces. With a particular interest in architectural forms and overlooked urban details, she investigates how social behavior becomes embedded in the built environment.
Working across photography, installation, public interventions, drawing, painting, and illustration, Kostandini often treats art as a tool for moving back and forth through time. Memories and lived experiences become pathways for reflection, reactivation, and reimagining. Her material approach is fluid and exploratory, combining ready-made objects with traditional handcraft practices, and embracing reuse as a way of generating new narratives from what remains. Through this process, her work questions how meaning is formed, preserved, and transformed within everyday life.
Albania
Born in 1988 in Tirana, Matilda Odobashi lives and works in Tirana. She mainly works with drawing, installation, painting, digital drawing, and writing. She graduated from the University of Arts of Tirana in 2010, at the department of Graphic Arts. Since 2012, she has been involved with the Groupe du champ freudien en Albanie and since 2018 she has been pursuing her formation in psychoanalysis with the support of Fondation du champ freudien, Paris. She is the co-founder of M/NUS art space in Tirana, Albania.
United Kingdom
Jemima Pike (Bristol, UK) is a sculptor, dancer, and sound artist. Drawing from sources personal and collective such as dreams and archives, fragments of conversation or domestic debris, Pike observes the meaning of mundanity, giving value and voice to processes, and unwitnessed moments.
Pike thinks of movement in terms of shifting pattern, repetition, murmuration. The body in space is a vessel to tell choreographed histories - her work communicates the complex intergenerational emotions of longing and otherness. Pike’s work fills space with almost understandability, a performance between audience and artist as one of evasion, with a beckoning finger.
Albania
Anxhela Pipero (b. 1995, Tirana, Albania) is a visual artist whose practice is rooted in close observation of the everyday. Often intersecting with anthropology, she works across drawing and painting, exploring traces of human presence, emotion, and movement, often capturing subtle shifts in life's tempo and atmosphere. Her work engages with the ephemeral and the quiet gestures that define the relationship between humans and the world around them.
She holds a degree from the University of Arts, Faculty of Fine Arts in Tirana. In 2023, she held her first solo exhibition at Minus Art Space, Tirana. She lives and works in Tirana.
Italy/Indonesia
Eko Saputra is an interdisciplinary artist and heritage historian based in Venice, Italy, where he runs Studio Angge. He holds a PhD in Cultural Heritage and Territory, working at the intersection of art and technology. His practice also explores how history, memory, and spirituality can be reinterpreted through contemporary artistic and digital practices, exploring new ways to engage with cultural stories in the present.
Argentina/Germany
Joaquín Salas is an Argentinian biologist and interdisciplinary artist whose work explores the connections between art and nature. With a background in environmental conservation and ecological activism, he has worked in native forest restoration, protected area management and biodiversity monitoring with a focus on native flora and ecosystems.
As an artist, he integrates music production, video, poetry, and drawing, creating experimental pieces rooted in close observation of the natural world. His process relies on attentive listening and improvisation, shaping soundscapes and visual works that reflect ecological textures and dynamics.
He approaches both science and art through curiosity and wonder, grounded in the understanding that humans are part of nature rather than separate from it. He believes that awareness begins with knowing and appreciating the living world. Through his practice, he seeks to connect ecological understanding with cultural imagination, encouraging more conscious and sensitive ways of engaging with our surroundings
Serbia
Uroš Stojiljković (Velika Plana, Serbia) is a poet and visual artist based in Belgrade. He works as a Communications Officer at the Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia. He is also the editor-in-chief of Detlić, a science communication magazine for wild bird enthusiasts in Serbia.
Through his artistic practice, he explores the relationship between humans and the immediate material world, especially nature, documenting sensory perception and the ways in which the physical world shapes a person’s inner life. His poetry has been published in prominent literary journals in Serbia and the region.
Romania
Vlad Țînțaș, 26, is originally from Seini, Romania, where the intercarpathian region meets the Someș Plateau in Maramureș County. They studied Video Art and Photography at the National University of Arts in Bucharest, where they developed an interest in artistic research and its influence on artistic practices.
Their artistic interests mostly lie within and engage with archives, family, state, and those that are lost and fragmented, including video, photographs, or maps. While happenings, performance, land art and practices involving the intersections of science and art are areas they currently explore and play in.
In recent years, they have become passionate about mining issues and extractive industries, focusing on the state of their county’s overall natural wellbeing. Soil sciences have brought them closer to art and the belief that moving forward in times of climate crisis depends on finding space for science in art and vice versa.
United Kingdom
Ottilie Winfield Wilenski (Cambridge, UK) is a printmaker, photographer, bookmaker and installation based artist and curator. Questioning what we notice, scan, map and look closer at in natural environments, Winfield Wilenski’s practice asks the viewer to take on a constructive gaze; piecing together impressions and memories. Data, photographs and prints are combined to inhabit the slippery overlap between the scientific and the imagined, playing with the actions of scanning and mapping. The work pays attention to tiny details, the ends of branches and sediment underfoot, as well as the vast lines of horizons and shores. Recently, snow and water covered landscapes have been of particular interest in their ability to visually fragment land.
Austria/Italy
Franziska Zauner is a visual artist working in collaborations with dancers in the field of performance, education and artistic research. Drawing from natural and cultural phenomena, her recent interest in archaeology expands her reflections on time, ecology, and how we collectively and individually inhabit the world—past and present—under late-stage capitalism.
In 2025 she collaborated with SIGNA on ‘Das Letzte Jahr’ and in 2024 worked with Liquid Loft as set designer for ‘in medeas res’ and published ‘UNCLEAR DEFINITIONS’ on Research Catalogue. The last is an ongoing dialogue with the emerging performance scene in Vienna under the direction of Backpulver Think and Practice Tank for Contemporary Dance. In 2023 she published the research of the performance installation ‘Archipelago of Time’ in Rapso Bologna.
Her practice bridges theory and embodiment, with a strong focus on nature as a site of regulation and resilience. Training in art, pedagogy, and restorative justice supports her work across diverse contexts, from youth-at-risk programs in Belfast to experimental platforms in Europe.