Emine Bostancı (TR) is a performer, composer, improviser and academician originally from Istanbul. Currently, she is an external PhD researcher in Cultural Musicology Department at the University of Amsterdam. She was awarded the First Prize at the Young Instrumentalists Competition held in memory of Tanburi Cemil Bey and has performed at many prestigious international festivals and venues. Her discography includes countless international albums within and outside of Europe.

Hye Young Sin (KR), a Berlin-based artist from Seoul, explores the dynamics between humanity’s instrumentalisation of nature and cooperative engagement with it. Her approach is rooted in the concept and practice of cultivation, not merely as an ecological process but also as a cultural, political, and technological act. Sin’s work has been featured in exhibitions and festivals, including the Deutsches Museum (Germany), Sound/Image 19 in London (UK), the Seoul International ALT Cinema & Media Festival (South Korea), and INSONORA in Madrid (Spain).

Pepe Dayaw (PH)  is a plurilingual movement artist, indie author and fashion maker. Since moving to Europe in 2010, siya* has been cooking performative situations and materialities that depart from a unique synthesis of a Filipino migrant fiction: queer, karaoke loving and a spiritual jack of many arts. Through the school of love/life, Pepe has drawn from themes sourced from their singular auto-ethnography: hunger, nostalgia, irony, translation, transits, borders, polyglottic memory, empathy, the unexpected, the invisible, the romantic and the ongoing quest for belonging. Armed with the lens of a dancer and theatre maker, they research the realm of taste and tactility as ‘queered’ and non-linear sciences that occupy the liminal spaces between life and art; between the mundane and the fantastic; between the you and the me.

Koen Gijsman (NL) researches, collects, improvises, composes, teaches, and practises music and sound. With a background in critical theory, enactivism, and performance studies, he finds resonance between decolonial aesthesis and improvised music. His artistic research (Codarts Research Prize 2023) developed methods to employ this knowledge in contemporary jazz practices. Gijsman is the bandleader of Epoxy Quartet, a Rotterdam-based instrumental improvisational ensemble that released its debut album Recollection in February 2025 on Challenge Records. In addition to this, he performs in a piano duo with Italian pianist Esmeralda Sella. His studies with exceptional artists such as Kris Davis and Dave Holland, combined with his experience as a scholar, have made him into an artist who listens carefully and carries responsibility towards both new sounds and echoes from the past.

Devon Gates (UK) is a bassist, vocalist, and composer. After studying both anthropology and jazz performance at Harvard University, Berklee College of Music, and the Royal Academy of Music (London) she has emerged in the jazz scene, working with esteemed artists and leads her own projects as a bandleader, collaborator, and composer, exporting her unique blend of jazz, chamber, and soul influences to the world.  Her lauded composition Don't Wait was published in the Berklee Press New Standards collection of 101 lead sheets by female jazz composers.