Jj Fadaka is an artist and programmer based in Edinburgh. Their practice spans writing, socially engaged art, installation, and facilitation, grounded in Black feminist and abolitionist traditions. Jj uses ritual, craft and performance to explore how invisibilised care work sustains our lives.  

Jj programmes events and workshops to support emerging artists facing social and material barriers in their careers. Their art education has been formed in community centres.  

Jj will create a short film of their time in Venice, documenting the experience of building a team to represent Scotland’s creative sector on the world stage. They will share the art, voices and spaces that have impacted them most in Venice, using collage, poetry and short diary entries. This film builds on their debut film, My Blood Runs Purple, made with Ria Andrews for EAF25.  

Calum Rennie is an Edinburgh-based designer, artist and art worker operating between practice, project work and engagement. His interests circle expanded notions of place, environment and atmosphere as complex fields of queer interrelations amid bodies and materials; where slippages in hierarchies reveal (dis)connections and generate new, specific perceptions. Rennie is a founding co-director of Civic Soup, an interdisciplinary collective whose work invites an expanded sense of the public realm through co-operative thought and action.

"I’m very grateful to be granted this development opportunity to work, learn and live within a completely new context for this extended period–especially one as rich and particular as Venice during the Biennale. During my time on site, I hope to develop responses that fold out from the work of this year’s representation into the city through field walks and recordings that further explore the parade." - Calum Rennie

Lily Lavorato is a Glasgow based artist who's practice traces sickness through bodies, portals and landscapes often related to the southern Italian peninsula of Calabria, where their paternal family are rooted. Following memories that echo from bewildering experiences of illness and cultural belonging, they create sculptures that act as hybrids of flesh and environment, person and place.

"During my time in Venice, I’ll focus on research, writing and drawing related to my current project ‘Songs of a Bad Life’ to explore manifestations of hypermasculinity and the influence of honour and shame in Italian culture. I am particularly interested in exploring queer readings of Italian classical art through seeing some in person and I’ll take all of this learning forward into sculptural forms when I am back in Glasgow." - Lily Lavorato