Movement Matters

A SUMMER SCHOOL CURATED BY : 

Akshar Gajjar (b.1998, India) is an architect and urban designer and is currently a PhD student at EPFL. His research looks at material production and it’s socio-ecological relationships. He studied architecture and urban design at CEPT University, EPFL and ETH Zurich. He is the author of “Living together: More-than-human ecologies for architectural thinking” (Birkhauser, 2025).

Debasish Borah (b. 1987, India) is a visual artist and curator working with performance, photography, and film. His research and practice examine imperial cartography, borders, and embodied aesthetics in the postcolonial. He is interested in articulating the emotional and cognitive relationship of postcolonial bodies with Western Modernity. After finishing his Master’s in History, Theory, and Design from CEPT University, India (2011) and has taught at art, design, and architecture schools in India, Europe, and the USA. He is the co-founder of Farside Collective, art space and book publishers and also the co-founder of Art Book Depot, India’s first independently organised Art book festival. He has published, exhibited, curated and attended residencies in India, Korea, Middle-East and Europe. SInce 2022, Debasish is a Doctoral fellow at the Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, ETH Zurich and a visiting research fellow at the Centre for Post-Colonial Studies, Goldsmiths University of London, UK.

GRAPHIC DESIGN & STUDENT ASSISTANT Simon Nougué & Lauro Nächt (ETHZ)

Prof. Dr. Philip Ursprung (b.1963, USA) is currently the head of the gta Insitute, D-Arch, ETH Zurich. He is an art historian and in 2023 he  together with Karin Sander, he was the curator of the Swiss pavilion at the 18th Architecture Biennale, Venice. He has taught across universities across the world in Europe, Asia and Americas. He studied art history, history and German literature in Geneva, Vienna and Berlin. Since 2011, he is the Professor of the History of Art and Architecture, ETH Zurich. 2017–2019 Dean of the Department of Architecture, ETH Zurich.

Prof. Dr. Florence Graezer Bideau (CH) is a trained anthropologist and sinologist with a PhD in History and Civilization (2005). Before joining EPFL’s Centre for Area and Cultural Studies (CACS) in 2010, she taught cultural theory and fieldwork methodology at the University of Lausanne. Currently Senior Lecturer and Scientist at EPFL's College of Humanities, she teaches area studies, Chinese anthropology, critical heritage, and urban studies. She directed the Minor in Area and Cultural Studies (2012–2016) and serves on the EDAR doctoral committee. Since 2015, she has also been Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Torino. Her expertise includes Chinese anthropology, urban sociology, sociability, and governmentality.

Prof Dr. Florian Dombois, (b. 1966, Berlin, DE)  has focused on wind, time, labilities, and tectonic activity. His artistic practice includes a variety of media and repetitively articulates in happenings and sound installations. Florian Dombois received his Master in Geophysics for his study on «Free Oscillations of Compact Objects» (1992) and defended his PhD in Cultural History on «What is an Earthquake?» (1998), finally working as an artist. Since 1998 Dombois has held various teaching positions at art colleges and universities in Fine Arts, Music, Cultural History on BA, MA and PhD-Level in Europe and the Americas. 2003-2011 he was the founding director of Y (Institute for Transdisciplinarity) at Bern University of the Arts and has been a Professor for Transdisciplinarity at the Zurich University of the Arts, since 2011. His works have been shown internationally. 2010 he received the German Sound Art Prize.

Dr. Alice Hertzog (UK/FR) is a social anthropologist – works on questions of migration, mobility and circulations. Her first focus in the field of urban anthropology, questions the social transformations occurring with post-migrant cityscapes.  The second focus, situated in museum anthropology, investigates the circulation of contested cultural heritage held in ethnographic museums. She is the incoming director of the Ethnographic Museum of University Zurich – where her research has played key role in restitution of the Benin Bronzes.