Following an inspiring program of lectures, workshops, practical sessions, and a weekend retreat to the Austrian Alps, we completed the final selection for the Raise Your Voice 2025 fellowship program. This year, Baltan worked with 13 young talents in the creative sector, developing their practices while exploring ideas of alchemy in the 21st century, a red thread running through most of their current projects.
We are excited to now begin 3-month fellowships for 3 RYV participants who will co-curate a public program on the trajectory’s themes in Baltan’s BlaBlaLab community (maker)space. The selected fellows are: Yi Zhang & Eshwari Ramsali; Mikolaj Stojanowicz; and Valerio Arsenio.
About the Fellowship
Raise Your Voice is a talent development program aimed at helping recent graduates in creative professions position themselves in both the content of their work and the practical aspects of their profession. This year, for the 3rd edition of the program, we offered not only a focus on talent development but also space for the development of the titular 21st-century alchemist. The alchemist here is a metaphor. It represents a way of working: experimenting with what’s possible, combining knowledge across fields, and embracing imagination as a tool for discovery. Whether your practice is in design, art, technology, craft, performance, or another discipline, this theme invites you to reflect on your relationship with technology and the systems shaping our world.
We see the fellowship as an extension of the learning trajectory into a phase of maturation for our emerging art and tech practitioners. It puts them in the position not only to concretely develop as artists and designers but also as cultural producer, by creating a public program in which they will learn how to curate and organize events around their project.
Raise Your Voice is organised in collaboration with the alumni department of Design Academy Eindhoven, DutchCulture and kindly supported by Impulsgelden Kunstloc Brabant and Stimuleringsfonds Creatieve Industrie.
About the Fellows and their projects
--> Yi Zhang and Eshwari Ramsali
Eshwari (they/she) is an Amsterdam-based speculative artist, researcher, bartender, web-tender and pot-stirrer. As a first-generation migrant, they are interested in mapping the cosmology of the Other(s) and the ways in which hospitality, generosity, reciprocity and vulnerability are negotiated in the margins. They combine their developing practice of installation, place-making, storytelling, performance, mixology and herbalism to bring together notions of healing justice, land stewardship, mutual aid, grief tending, more-than-human kinship and queer & trans rituals of care. They recently graduated from the Masters program Planetary Poetics at Sandberg Institute.
Yi (she/they) is an interdisciplinary artist-researcher based in Eindhoven, working across video, installation, drawing, cooking, fermentation and performance. Their research explores the entangled influences of human trade on urban ecosystems, the migration experiences of human and non-human beings, and their displacement under capitalist systems. Through speculative fabulation, Yi reimagines ecological relationships and material afterlives, questioning structures of separation and extraction in modernity. They engage with low-cost, low-tech, and self-organized methods to sustain alternative economies and experiment with community-based, distributed knowledge.
Their project is grounded in a shared commitment to understanding how displaced and re:placed communities navigate belonging within the Netherlands. As two practitioners interested in migration ecologies, land stewardship and situated knowledge, they come together for this fellowship and ask: What does it mean to be “native” in a world defined by movement and environmental transformation? The project aims to articulate possibilities for coexistence and place-making that resist dominant frameworks of fear, dominance, and categorisation and recenter frameworks of kinship, place-making and healing justice.
Yi and Eshwari will produce a digital handbook, conceived as a publicly accessible and mutual-aid-oriented resource. This publication will document both practical tools and conceptual frameworks developed as a collective archive of lived experience, cultural memory, and ecological engagement. Further, they will host two events: one exploring herbal healing practices using plants often labeled as invasive and the other as an immersive participatory experience using teas and tinctures to transform intention into practice.
--> Mikolaj Stojanowicz
Mikolaj is a visual artist and researcher whose work is an exploration of inner/outer transformation through alchemical processes and embodied practice. Working across media and disciplines, he develops methods of “ cartography of the unconscious”, using materials like charcoal, paint and code to map landscapes underneath the surface. His work is grounded in magickal thought, depth psychology, and a commitment to process as the core artistic gesture.
Stojanowicz graduated with a Master of Visual Arts and Post-Contemporary Practice from the Institute of Visual Cultures in Den Bosch, participated in the Raise Your Voice programme at Baltan Laboratories and is currently part of the Apprentice/Master Program at Kunstpodium T. Among others, his work has been exhibited at Het Nieuwe Instituut, IMPAKT Festival, and in a myriad of group exhibitions. Mikolaj will further develop his Grimoire project, a platform that reimagines the artist’s process as a shared and ritualistic practice. Functioning as a living, online manuscript, it archives and communicates artistic methods rooted in alchemical transformation. Starting with his research into techniques such as meditative drawing, collective cut-ups, immersive ritual, and perceptual games. Each “spell” in the grimoire is a documented protocol, a formula for disrupting habitual thought and inviting re-enchantment through making.
The Grimoire is (to be) designed as a non-linear, navigable labyrinth of text, (moving) image, sound, and hyperlink, reflecting the entangled nature of creative inquiry. It serves as a personal research archive and a collaborative space where other artists and practitioners are invited to contribute their own methods. Accompanying the digital platform are physical “Field Labs”, workshops where participants embody these processes, blending theory with tactile, experiential practice.
In the metaphysics of measurability, driven a focus on results, this project asserts the irreducible value of the process. The continuous act of becoming within the transformative correspondence between us and the world. Rather than "finished" artworks, the Grimoire proposes practical tools and methods for reshaping how we see things. An infrastructure for the unspoken layers of experience.
--> Valerio Arsenio
Valerio is a Belgian Italian artist and designer based in the Netherlands whose work explores digital sculpture and object design. His practice investigates systems, iteration and the ways forms emerge when digital manipulation meets the physical world. Through 3D printing and other digital fabrication processes, he tests the limits of material and perception, creating objects that shift between the virtual and the tangible. He approaches surface as an active zone of exchange where body and environment, image and object intersect. Surface becomes both phenomenon and representation, a site where meaning takes shape through contact. His background spans architecture studies in Brussels and industrial design in Milan, and he is currently completing his studies at the Design Academy Eindhoven, grounding his work in a multidisciplinary and research-driven approach to contemporary technologies and identity.
His project Altro Oltre explores images and shapes as carriers of meaning and considers narrative as a structure that does not depend on language. It examines how visual interpretation draws on shared symbolic conventions while remaining open to contextual shift, and how narrative logic can be enacted through sequences of forms, images, and interfaces rather than told through words. The project is informed by the idea that fables are not simply stories but tools for making sense of the world. Across cultures, they condense collective experience into symbolic structures that guide perception, organise behaviour, and articulate relationships between humans, environmental uncertainty. In this sense, the fable functions as an early knowledge technology. Rather than approaching fables as literary objects, the research focuses on how they operate. It looks at how warnings, awareness, and cognitive shortcuts are encoded through structure rather than content. By shifting attention from story to function, the project considers how these mechanisms can remain active within contemporary conditions shaped by fractured digital systems and new forms of vulnerability.
The work takes the form of a series of sculptures created through digital and physical modelling. These objects translate fable logic into physical structures characterised by condensation, ambiguity, signal, and threshold. Parts of the sculptures will become an interface on which are projected sequences of footage, merging digital imagery with physical form and creating an idiomatic storyteller. Each piece brings together structure, object and projection to form a multidimensional fable. Through materiality, image and interface, the works propose narrative logic as a contemporary tool for discussing and navigating our complex technological environments.