members
board:

Katharina Ottmann

Katharina Ottmann is a Strategy Associate supporting the Senior Management Team at the Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA), London – a ‘think tank of tomorrow’ founded in 1947 platforming film, exhibitions, spoken word and performance.
Previously, she had focused her career on launching new initiatives with designers, artists, museums and city governance. She began her career as Marketing Director to the demi-couture label AHNDE working with Creative Director Tanya Steven and subsequently served as Productions & Partnership Director of OUTSET Contemporary Art Fund (UK), a charity supporting new art and funding infrastructure initiatives for the arts. At Outset, she further launched the Outset Professionals Circle, a next-gen patrons circle supporting strategic development projects at British museums.
Katharina holds an MBA from Saïd Business School, The University of Oxford and had previously completed an MLitt in Modern & Contemporary Art at Christie’s Education, London and a BA in Economics & Management at Bocconi University, Milan.
Her involvement with reflects her deep interest in both the visual and performing arts and bridging platforms thereof.
Katharina was born in Munich and lives and works in London.
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ko@maschinn.org

Olivia Schuler-Voith

Olivia is a designer working in both costume and set design with experience in opera, performance and film. She holds a particular interest for historic costumes, especially in mid 19th Century and Central European design. She consistently seeks inspiration from the fine arts which strongly influence her work and overall vision.
Olivia holds a BA in History of Art from the University College London and a Masters Degree of the same subject from the Universität Zürich.
She gradually began experimenting in opera following an early experience in the commercial art world, and since 2013 she has been forging a career as a freelance set and costume designer while learning and assisting in important productions of renown opera directors — among them Robert Carsen, Sven-Eric Bechtholf, Stefan Herheim, Jan Schmidt-Garre and Kasper Holten. She worked at leading institutions such as the Salzburg Festival, Zurich Opera House, Glyndebourne Festival, Lucerne Festival, Leipzig and Helsinki Opera Houses.
Between 2016 and 2017 she directed and produced a documentary portrait on Gesine Völlm, a leading German opera costume designer, which is currently in post production. Her most recent projects include designing costumes for the first-ever virtual reality opera film, 360° Figaro, an innovative project realised in Halle, Germany, by German filmmaker and opera director Jan Schmidt-Garre in 2018.
Later in 2018 she went on to co-found , triggered by the desire to produce, conceive and art direct independently and free from commercial pressure. Bringing together different media as well as creatives lies at the core of her initiative. In the summer 2019 she designed the production for the film Na To Thimase, a production directed by Clemente Ciarrocca.
Some of her future projects include developing a new opera production and independently developing her own clothing line, an attempt to reinterpret and sustainably up-cycle forgotten designs.
Olivia was born  in New York and lives and works between London and Grisons, Switzerland.
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osv@maschinn.org

Clemente Ciarrocca

Clemente Ciarrocca is a filmmaker and artist working through visual and conceptual media on reality and ideation, on conception, on perception, on the particular and on the perfection of the organic.
He completed a BA Philosophy and Economics at University College London in 2016 and immediately began working with experimental opera director Graham Vick first as a trainee and then as an assistant, following him on a number of productions between Europe and the UK.
Growing more attracted to the elements opera shares with visual and conceptual arts, in 2018 he co-founded as an ‘ubiquitous space’ to conceive, support and realise a wide variety of vision-driven artworks, coagulating ideas and talent through independent transdisciplinary projects and publications outside of a strict time regularity.
For the last three years he’s been specialising in moving image, directing, producing, editing and writing works for the screen, with a particular interest in focusing on the physical quality of film.
He directed, co-produced and edited his first short film, Na To Thimase, produced by and supported by OUTSET Contemporary Art Fund (Greece), shot with HAOS Film in Athens, Greece in July 2019.
Finite Eyes, also produced and to be published by , is his second short film, inspired by and shot within the Alps during lockdown period.
Clemente was born in Rome and currently lives and works between London, Luxembourg and Rome.
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cc@maschinn.org
further members:

Olukoye Akinkugbe

Olukoye is an architectural designer and researcher. At present, he works as a researcher at Forensic Architecture, based at Goldsmiths University in London.
Olukoye holds a Diploma from the Architectural Association in London (2019), where he studied 2 years under John Palmesino and Ann-Sofi Rönnskog of Territorial Agency.
His practice is mostly concerned with recreating real-world environments to virtually simulate and inhabit them; a composite of 3D artistry and the pragmatism of spatial design, representation and analysis.
He is a keen amateur photographer and is interested in the concept of ‘Aesthetics’ in any of its permutations across the various creative fields.
Olukoye was born in Lagos and lives in London. He joined  in 2020.
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Margherita Arco

Margherita is an independent writer and filmmaker. She holds a BA in Anthropology from Columbia University (2006) and an MFA from Tisch School of the Arts in New York (2016), where she focused on screenwriting and directing.
Writing both comedy and drama, she likes to explore grief, family dynamics (often generational clashes) and shifting traditional communities in contemporary and historical contexts. As one of six sisters, she is also drawn to stories about women and family. Her latest short stories have been published by the ‘Chattahoochee Review’ Spring 2020 and ‘Your Impossible Voice‘ in March 2020.
Feature screenwriting work includes a contemporary family drama, The Salt of the Earth, which was selected for the IFP Emerging Storytelling Lab, the German Drehbuchwerkstatt, the Hollywood Blacklist, and the NYU Purple List in 2016. Helene, a Victorian love story, is in development with a London-based production company and selected for the MFI Screenwriting Lab and the London Finance Market in 2018. Television work includes writing in a writer’s room on a 1960’s spy thriller produced by Gaumont for Amazon in 2019 and a TV comedy series for an independent producer.
Her extensive experience in planning and realising film works resulted in producing the feature film ‘Fits and Starts’ (dir. Laura Terruso, premiered at SXSW 2017, sold to The Orchard) and directing various short narrative films, exploring and blending genres along the way: documentary, comedy, surrealism and drama.
Margherita’s avid interest in lays in the multi-layered, cross-media expression the platform and its members bring forth, as well as a nourishing role of support and collaboration both play within her creative practice.
Margherita was born in Munich but grew up in the United States. She currently lives and works in London.
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Giangiacomo Gallo

Giangiacomo Gallo is a sound designer, music producer and musical performer working on the concept of intermedia. He strives to engage with diverging artistic methodologies and blending expressivities in his work, focusing with particular interest on awakening the performative character of music.
Following his studies in Electronic Music Composition at “Conservatorio di Musica Santa Cecilia” in Rome, he begins ideating the musical project ‘Diacronie’ in tight collaboration with fellow music producer Edoardo Maria Bellucci. In early 2020 the sound laboratory and studio ‘Diacronie Lab’ is born in Rome as a result. He continues to experiment in his compositions with ‘modelling’ sound, borrowing the concept of sound object from the French musique concrète.
In 2019 he curates as Diacronie the sound design and editing for the award winning documentary Koi. Throughout 2020 he curates the sound design and the overall sound post-production of ’s experimental short Na To Thimase.
Collaborating with and producing local as well as international talented artists, Giangiacomo currently lives and works in Rome. He joined in 2020.
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