Activist council

Aldessa is a Roma decolonial feminist activist. She moves between community building, transnational knowledge production, policy-making, advocacy, grant-making and culture, always chasing spaces where the personal and political intersect. She’s inspired by Roma women who share their lived experience and knowledge, without them, the Romnja Feminist Library, which she co-founded and directs, wouldn’t exist. Through the library, she builds transnational spaces for Roma feminist knowledge, archiving, collective memory, and belonging. She works across Roma, racialised, queer, and migrant justice networks in Europe. She is motivated by dismantling systemic oppression while creating spaces where collective care, shared learning, and joyful resistance are possible. Optimistic and persistent, she celebrates small victories, every ray of sun, and every act of resistance that challenges injustice in the world.

Binta Jammeh wears many hats – educator, facilitator, organizer, social entrepreneur, and mental health advocate – in support of community-led initiatives focused on reducing social and environmental inequalities. She has 10+ years experience working internationally on issues related to digital literacy, educational, social, and economic inclusion of marginalized communities, capacity and community building, and intercultural communication. Her current work focuses on helping organizations build citizen-led movements for social change, training youth leaders and activists in campaigning, community building and mobilization, and building networks of peer learning, support, and empowerment for marginalized communities.

She’s currently based in Paris, and when she’s not working, she can be found trying to perfect her recipe for the world’s best chocolate chunk cookie, listening to podcasts, and volunteering with grassroots anti-racist and feminist organizations.

Carnelian (they/them) is a Black trans organiser, educator, facilitator, agitator, astrologer and Salsa enjoyer currently based in the UK. The spectrum of their work has been very broad over the last 10 years; from trans healthcare organising, decolonial & anti-racist education, to local food sovereignty work. Though currently in the UK, they have been mostly nomadic for the last 5 years, teaching internationally and building community in Portugal, Spain and Ireland too. At the core of their many roles, is a commitment to anti-colonial and anti-imperialist politics that are rooted in many anarchistic practices, all with the aim of building dual power for communities. Right now, their work primarily focuses on building autonomous structures for queer/trans/disabled/BIPOC communities. This spans from teaching herbalism, urban permaculture practices, DIY trans healthcare and various tricks-of-the-trade in community building. They can often be found reading birth charts, foraging, making kombucha and eating with comrades.

Jovan Džoli Ulićević is an activist, thinker and doer from Montenegro. He was born in 1991 in the capital, Podgorica, where he also studied and specialised in ecology, becoming passionate about eco-systemic perceptions & visions of the world. He is soon to graduate in Diplomacy and International Relations at the University of Donja Gorica in Podgorica. Through this, he’s contributing to building integrative perspectives which transcend the traditional oppressive geopolitical approach in the field, politicising on the ground issues at regional and global scales, as well as linking the struggles faced by marginalised communities – especially women, trans and queer people – with wider social justice frameworks in national and international spaces. The topics he’s active in are anti-fascism, queer activism and feminism, drawing from peace-building and decolonial approaches. He is the founder of several queer feminist organisations such as Spektra, Trans Mreža Balkan and LGBTIQ Association of Queer Montenegro. He also works as an executive director in Spektra and Trans Mreža Balkan.

Joris is a writer and editor originally from the Netherlands, but based in Istanbul, Turkey for nearly a decade. From 2013 until the magazine’s recent closure, Joris was Managing Editor at ROAR Magazine, a journal of the radical imagination covering grassroots struggles for real democracy across the globe. Joris is a dedicated bookwurm, avid cyclist and somewhat of a history buff. Migration issues and border violence are part and parcel of life on the outskirts of Fortress Europe, so it is no surprise that these topics appear on top of his political agenda, alongside Indigenous rights, anti-colonial resistance and grassroots democratic alternatives. As we confront the juggernaut of global capitalism, the redistribution of means and resources is one small but crucial step towards a leveling of the playing field which increases our odds in the fight for our collective survival.

Melike grew up in Izmir, Turkey, and is currently based in Budapest, Hungary. She is a former human rights journalist and alternative media researcher. Her activist journey began during the Gezi Resistance in Turkey where she was particularly active in the feminist and LGBTIQ+ movements. Melike is now working with the Artivist Network as a creative facilitator, artivist and digital activist. She also works as a freelancer to support grassroots groups and campaigns such as Debt For Climate by providing social media and communications support. She believes in the power of digital activism to decolonise the dominant narratives and discourses for social and climate justice. As an artivist, she also works on guerrilla theatre, particularly the theatre of the oppressed as a tool for interventionism. She is highly passionate about underground literature as well as Turkish and Eastern European cinema, which brings her to review many books and films. Melike is obsessed with Balkan music and dance and follows contagiously the groovement whenever she has the chance.

Maria Zreiq is an organizer, educator and multidisciplinary artist, born and raised in Palestine. As an organizer and educator, Maria’s practice is rooted in liberatory pedagogy, decolonial cultural production and the cultivation of queer imagination. As an artist, her practice moves through photography, poetry, and documentary cinema, exploring notions of home, body, memory, and longing through a decolonial and queer lens. In all that she practices she draws inspiration from abolitionist, Marxist, and black feminist thought. She loves live music, cooking in community, countercultural literature, mountain climbing, and swimming in rivers and seas.

Merve is an antimilitarist activist, campaigner, and organizer from Turkey. For her, the spark began with the “national security” classes she took in high school; this experience led her to reflect on nationalism and militarism and to fight against the deep links between the two. She is one of the coordinators of the Conscientious Objection Watch and a member of international antimilitarist networks such as War Resisters’ International. She believes that resistance against compulsory military service is a powerful form of civil disobedience so she focuses on strengthening this form of disobedience, organizing solidarity with those resisting compulsory military service, connecting local struggles with global anti-war movements.

As a mother facing the anxieties of raising a child in times of crisis, she never forgets that the personal is political, a reminder that gives her strength to live and to keep resisting. She genuinely enjoys watching cloudy skies, swimming, and cooking.

Mohammed is an activist living in the UK who aspires to live up to the expectations of the Black Radical tradition. He is the founding director of the Decolonial Centre, a political education platform that spreads the ideas of anti-colonialism. His biggest intellectual inspiration is C.L.R James, and he sees himself as part of the socialist, anti-colonial tradition. He made the horrible mistake of trying to write a PhD thesis on the relationship between capitalism, colonialism and patriarchy. He still hasn’t finished writing it. Mohammed used to skate, but he was very bad at it. He doesn’t have the patience to finish video games anymore either, although he is passionate about them. Mohammed is also a big fan of dystopian sci-fi, even if he’s trying to stop it from becoming a reality. He likes Snowpiercer, Battlestar Galactica, and The Expanse. He also likes anime. Despite all of this, don’t call him a member of the nerd-left, he doesn’t appreciate it 😉 

Nat Skoczylas (they/them, Poland 1987) is an artist, activist, anarchist and researcher living in Berlin. They work and live collectively, exercising some of the utopian ideas drawn from anarchy, feminism, ecologies, speculative fiction and their own experience growing up in a post-socialist, poor, and way too religious part of Poland. Their practices span community building, organising, writing, game design, performance, as well as fermentation and food as a tool for storytelling and social transformation. Nat is currently busy thinking of acid communism as a basis for new politics and relating and fighting landlords in Berlin.

Sergio is an organizer, facilitator, social butterfly as well as an ever curious and pathologically eclectic generalist. His current focus is in supporting the development of Porost, an activism training hub focused on bringing activists from the CEECCNA region together to learn from each other. His enthusiasm fuels his involvement in other rad initiatives: co-steering the development of an open-source platform on protest culture in Romania called “another story”; organising as a migrant worker for the anarcho-syndicalist Free Workers Union in Germany and co-conspiring with other activist nerds about complexity theory and its applications in social change. 

Despite enjoying reading theory, Sergio rarely manages to fully finish a book. He draws most of his inspiration from the activists he meets at gatherings and trainings, and his politics are in constant feedback with his spiritual practice. In his pockets of free time he can either be found relaxing with friends, testing the boundaries of uselessness or climbing trees, dancing or writing fiction. When he has a free afternoon alone, he ends up spending it writing transformative strategy ideas in his wikipedia-like note-taking system and reading iyashikei mangas. In a past life he was a filmmaker and obsessed with cinema.

Sidorela (she/her) is an activist based in Tirana, Albania, working in gender and urban justice. In the last six years her activism has spanned over different areas within the wider anti-privatisation movement, namely around fighting for the betterment of the healthcare and education systems and the race for free and accessible public spaces, all work that she’s been doing in and next to student organisations, trade unions, and eviction & gentrification activist groups.

Right now she’s developing the first anti-femicide platform in Albania, collecting data & making public the dire findings around gender-based violence in the country. What keeps her going everyday to fight for systems change is the trust she has in her team and in this work, after the conviction that no one can be free until everyone is free. She is also working towards democratising public spaces in her city through neighbourhood councils – a non formal structure that allows citizens to collectively sense-make & self-organise around the injustices they sense and experience.

Her go-to approach for dodging pointless political debates is to drop a casual ‘I would prefer not to’, which is her way of saying ‘Let’s not get stuck in discourse but be in practice of what new, radical and fresh ideas have to show us for social justice’.

Živilė is a community organiser and a facilitator, driven by localised problems – periodically, frustration – and being helpful whenever or wherever needed. Her early activism was instigated by learning about climate justice, discovering tools on Beautiful Trouble, and meeting amazing activists throughout the journey. These were the most effective sources of her motivation. Gradually, her focus evolved to being more based on intersectionality and finding common points of solidarity within activist circles, who work on different issues. This has led to network Y?! coming about – starting as a cross-issue festival, Y?! is an activist participatory fund based in the Baltic countries. Currently staying in Lithuania and running a local energy poverty project, facilitating events for LGBTQ+ youth, and working on a campaign for human-friendly planning of the city, which is threatened to be taken over by large corporations. Živilė loves board games, camping, exploring outside, swimming and binge-watching when there is time.

Mother of two beautiful boys, journalist, translator and cultural producer. Since 2005, I dedicate myself to issues related to African and Afro-descendant communities in Portugal and Germany. In 2015, I founded Afrolis – Cultural Association, an organization aimed at promoting cultural expression and building new identity narratives of African descendants through identification, research and knowledge sharing. I am also a curator, researcher and consultant for several initiatives in the academic, media and social movements fields. I love the sun, flowers and the sea.

Ilaj is a member of the Ulex Project‘s core team and is part of the Council in their collective identity as a limb of the Ulex Project. Ilaj is an experienced trainer, facilitator and networker investing most of their skills, gifts and time into supporting social movements in Europe, mostly through holding (educational) spaces on topics such as group dynamics, the practice of solidarity and empowerment, psycho-social resilience, working with trauma and repression. They are passionate about working with the body as a radical means of deconstructing systems of oppression. They are a pole dancer and dream of becoming a roller skater but the latter is difficult as there is no asphalt where they live. They are mainly connected to LGBTQI+, queer and feminist movements in Eastern and Southern Europe.

Maria Francesca De Tullio is researcher in Constitutional Law (Federico II University of Naples). She also worked at University of Antwerp, within the project Cultural and Creative Spaces and Cities, and fulfilled a research residency at Université Paris 2. She authored a book on *Substantial Equality and New Dimensions of Political Participation.* Other main areas of research are: counter-terrorism and states of emergency, competition law on the Internet, the collective dimension of privacy in the age of big data.

She is an activist in l’Asilo as well as in Italian and European commons movements, with special reference to creative use of law and negotiations with administrations. She is also a part of the Council of audit on public debt of the city of Naples. She likes sports, nature, and explorations.

Kevin Buckland (he/him) is an artivist who has spent the past 14 years working with the international climate justice movement to lift up the role of art, creativity and artists in creating change. He engages in a wide diversity of creative tactics – from papermaché canoes to direct-action performances, from cardboard circuses to giant inflatables – to harness the power of culture and creativity to open space for new ideas and politics. He is the co-founder of the Gastivists Collective and the Artivist Network, and is currently organising to create La Casa dels Futurs: a permanent climate justice center in Barcelona, where he is based. He is a painter, novelist, performer, puppet-maker, and child-herder who thinks how we do things can be as important as what we do. 

Selçuk Balamir is a designer by trade, educator by profession and activist by inclination, working in postcapitalist politics, commoning practices and ecological transition. He has been active in the European climate justice movement since 2009. He co-founded grassroots disobedient action collectives (codeROOD, Fossil Free Culture, Queers4Climate) and co-developed creative-strategic frameworks of Climate Games and Shell Must Fall campaigns. He co-initiated the social housing cooperatives NieuwLand and de Nieuwe Meent. His PhD in Cultural Analysis from University of Amsterdam is on postcapitalist design. He currently teaches New Earth (eco-social design) at Willem de Kooning Academy in Rotterdam and is the Artist in Residence at the Amsterdam Academy of Architecture. He identifies himself as originally-from-Turkey, French-speaking, queer-migrant and cat-person. People say he’s usually good at starting things but quite bad at finishi— — —