Josephine Baan (also goes by the names Joseph, Jo, or any variation thereof) engages in art, education and collaboration as ways to forge creative resurgence. They’re interested in the complexities of collectivity and in the possibility of establishing a solidarity that does not homogenise, but affirms difference. Their current research investigates the political currency of incoherence and illegibility within performance practice, asking what aspects of performance might angle towards liberation or abolishing the constraints that one is born into.

Josephine performs with their body and voice and makes installations, props, scripts and choreographies that explore the spaces and relationships between the flesh and the word, change and preservation, and roles and readings of power and control in relation to affection and gestures of care. They use speculative fiction and performance as tools to invade existing narratives that naturalize normative states of sex, gender, race, ecology, and the hierarchies between them.

Their practice is closely linked to their work as an educator, which is influenced by radical pedagogy and non-hierarchical collaborative methods. They are a founding member of Rotterdam based educational collective sohere, and between 2019 and 2022 they co-ran Zurich based School of Commons; a grassroots initiative dedicated to the study and development of decentered knowledge, with a focus on practices of self-organised learning and commoning. They are currently engaged in developing a performance-based pedagogy in the frame of a speculative, itinerate ‘school’ titled The School for Collective Embodied Inquiry. They are especially dedicated to creating safer, more inclusive, and more accessible environments for learning, working, and living together.

They are a recipient of the Werkbeitrag Fachstelle Kultur prize of the province of Zürich 2021. Recent exhibitions and performances include; Bl0Wn at Tanzhaus, Zürich and Drifts Festival, Helsinki (2023); Queer Trust at Shedhalle, Zürich (2022); Burner at LIFE, Rotterdam (2022); Weathering at Titanik Galleria, Turku (2021); Werkschau at Haus Konstruktiv, Zürich (2021); Weathering at SIC, Helsinki (2021); The Opposite of a Cynic [Tongue] at Nieuw & Meer, Amsterdam (2020); inter:archive at OnCurating, Zürich (2020); Here Not Here at Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Turin (2019).