Biographies

Paolo Freire (1921-1997) was a Brazilian educator and philosoper,  one of the founding figures of critical pedagogy. He has been best known for his classic text pedagogy of oppressed. He has worked for adult literacy programs in impoverishing communities. In 1964 he was imprisoned in Brazil, later lived in exile in Bolivia and Chile. Has worked as a professor at Harvard University and later was invited to Geneva  where he worked as a special educational advisor to the World Congress of Churches. Freire travelled worldwide helping countries to implement popular education and literacy reforms. After 15 years of exile, Freire was allowed to return to Brazil He joined the Workers’ Party in São Paulo and, from 1980 to 1986, supervised its adult literacy project, later was appointed municipal Secretary of Education.

Mareike Wenzel is an actress, director and performance artist. She has received a BA in Acting from “Birmingham School of Acting in 2004. Since 2007 She has been working together with the Danish-Austrian performance collectiveSIGNA since 2007. She has performed at Volksbühne Berlin, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, Schauspiel Köln, Central Theater Leipzig, as well as Salzburger Festspiele and Theatertreffen Berlin. In 2017, Mareike founded the Georgian children theatre company AITSONA DAITSONA.

Zura Tsopurashvili studied at Theological Seminary and Contemporary Art Centre in Tbilisi. His artistic practice is based on study of religion and art, exploring and using links and interactions between them. He established an alternative educational model, a school – Parallel class. He is a member of the group In China. He worked in the residency of Centre for Arts and Urbanistics in Berlin, where he developed a model for a school lesson based on the research about Gelati Academy. Now he is working on 9th grade school textbook – Space organization. 

Alexandra Aroshvili is a publicist, culture and politics researcher. She studied social and political sciences at Tbilisi State University and philosophy at Ilia State University. Her interests are left-wing philosophy, contemporary political economy and critical anthropology. She was an activist and founder of various social movements in Georgia. From 2017 she is an editor of left-wing analytical media platform European.ge.

Jesús Carrillo is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the Universidad Autónoma de Madrid. He was General Director of Programmes and Public Activities of the City of Madrid from July 2015 to March 2016, Head of the Department of Cultural Programmes at the Museo Reina Sofía from 2008 to 2014, and a member of the Editorial Board of L'Internationale from 2013 to 2014. He is also curator of L'Internationale's Glossary of Common Knowledge.

César Vallejo (1892-1938) was a Peruvian poet, writer, playwright, and journalist. He entered the Trujillo University to study literature in 1910, but had to drop out for lack of money. He stopped his college education several times, working in the meantime as a teacher and in a large sugar estate. This experience had important impact on his politics and poetry.  In 1922 he was imprisoned for a false accusation. The poet left jail on behalf of a temporary release. The judicial process was never closed so in 1923, he immigrated to Europe living in dire poverty and remained there until his death in Paris. There he had begun to read Marxist literature and appeared to be an actively committed Communist. He visited USSR three times and a spent couple of years in in exile in Spain. During the Spanish Civil War he supported the Republican side. This war  had big impact on his late poetry.

Alejandra Pizarnik (1936-1972), was born in a Jewish immigrants family, who emigrated from Soviet Union to Argentina.  A year after eentering  the department of Philosophy and Literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires, Pizarnik published her first book of poetry La tierra más ajena. She took courses in literature, journalism, and philosophy at the University of Buenos Ayres, but dropped out in order to pursue painting with Juan Batlle Planas. Pizarnik followed her debut work with two more volumes of poems, La última inocencia and Las aventuras perdidas. Between 1960 and 1964 Pizarnik lived in Paris, where she worked for the magazine Cuadernos and was actively involved in literature scene.  She also studied French religious history and literature at the Sorbonne. There she became friends with Julio Cortazar  and Octavio Paz. She returned to Buenos Aires in 1964, and published her best-known book of poetry: and El infierno musical (1971). Her poetry portrays the life of Latin American women as a bodily destruction by an oppressive and repressive patriarchy. Pizarnik ended her life in 1972.

Simone Weil (1909 – 1943) was a French Philospher mystic and politcal activist. In her late teens, she became involved in the workers' movement. After her graduation from formal education, Weil became a teacher. She taught intermittently throughout the 1930s, to devote herself to political activism and spending more than a year working as a labourer, mostly in auto factories, so she could better understand the working class. In 1932, Weil visited Germany to help Marxist activists. After Hitler rose to power in 1933, Weil spent much of her time trying to help German communists fleeing his regime. During this time Weil published articles about social and economic issues. In 1936, despite her professed pacifism, she travelled to the Spanish civil war on the Republican side. On returning to Paris, Weil continued to write essays on labour, onwar and peace. Taking a path that was unusual among twentieth-century left-leaning intellectuals, she became more religious and inclined towards mysticism.