Emily Mathis is a creative nonfiction and fiction writer from the U.S. She is currently revising a collection of lyrical essays focusing on the many lives of the female body and the dual yearnings of intimacy and autonomy against the backdrop of grief. Her essay, “Men Smoking,” was the 2024 nonfiction winner of Sonora Review’s The Erotic contest. Additional pieces have been finalists for contests through the Sewanee Review, Fourth Genre, North American Review, Epiphany, and Tucson Festival of Books. Her nonfiction manuscript was an honorable mention for Miami Book Fair’s 2024 Emerging Writer Fellowship and her flash pieces have been shortlisted for The Bridport Prize. Recent publications include Sonora Review, Hunger Mountain, Epiphany, Los Angeles Review, Another Chicago Magazine, and others. Recent publications can be found on her website at emilymathiswriting.com. She is on Instagram @emily­_a_mathis.

In addition to the essay collection, Emily is also working on a surrealist novel in which women from a small island off the coast of South Carolina turn into alligators at the age forty, but with the advance of the beauty industry and the transformation of South Carolina’s coast into “master-planned communities,” one woman must decide between living her true nature in the swamps or undergoing a lifetime of invasive plastic surgery to remain with her family.

Danny de Vlugt, working under his alias Absent Chronicles, is an audiovisual artist merging sound and visual art. Over the years he’s crafted a signature style blending bass-heavy rhythms, cinematic textures, and classical elements. At the heart of Absent Chronicles’ work is a fascination with the environment. Field recordings from nature and everyday life form the backbone of his sound design.

His work has been exhibited globally, from the Van Gogh Museum to performances at festivals like Amsterdam Dance Event and Art Miami. In recent years, he’s expanded his artistic practice through collaborations across various disciplines, pushing the boundaries of immersive experience and storytelling.

Beyond music releases and performances, his sound design has been featured in campaigns for Apple, Samsung, Netflix, and Nike.

www.absentchronicles.com/portfolio
Instagram: @absentchronicles

My textile sculptures explore what gives us the strength to endure and transform—physically and metaphorically. Each piece reflects on how individuals and communities adapt to shifting environments, identities, and inner landscapes. This work is rooted in personal experience: years of relocation, reinvention, and navigating borders—geographic, cultural, and emotional. Themes of resilience and belonging emerge from my lived tension of not fully fitting in, and the ongoing effort to claim space as a Latine, a mother, an instructor, and an artist.

I use four elemental motifs—campfires, books, cartographies, and salmon—to create a symbolic language of survival. Campfires embody destruction and renewal; books hold memory and fragility; cartographies map both physical and cultural orientation; salmon represent return, movement, and transformation. Through these forms, I weave personal narrative with broader questions of displacement, identity, and cultural memory—inviting reflection on what we carry, rebuild, and hold onto despite the currents of change.

Instagram: @mirzamperezart
Facebook: Mirzam Perez Art

Marina Guiu Almenara is a multidisciplinary artist based in Barcelona. She uses visual art and theatre as political activism for children’s rights and against sexual violence. Through illustration, painting, printmaking, writing, and performing theatre, she seeks to generate tension between the poetic and the political, creating a bridge between the social and the artistic.

The main objective during my residency at NES has been to explore the visual side of my project “La Muda. Un agujero entre el esternón y el ombligo”(*), an artistic documentary narrated in first person about sexual violence, including assault against children. The documentary is structured in three parts: a theatre play, a compilation of testimonies, and an illustrated book.

I’ve explored the similarities between the Icelandic landscape—volcanoes, lava, cracked earth—to the feelings that remain in your body once you have been sexually assaulted—fear, rage, shame, nausea. I’ve been so inspired by the Spákonufell silhouette and the stunning colors of the sunsets and midnight sun during this month in Skagaströnd.

(*) “The Mute. A hole between the sternum and the navel”

marinaguiu.com
guiumarina.com

Cristina Ferrández Box is a visual artist and researcher based in Provence (France) and the North West of Spain. She works in the area of artistic creation as a reflective and critical process by developing visual projects that value the territory, natural immaculate and anthropized damaged landscapes. She analyzes and reveals different layers of landscape perception through its social, geopolitical, symbolical, metaphysical, scientific, and environmental connotations.

From Argentinian Patagonia to Palestine, and the European Atlantic and Mediterranean shores, her work addresses fundamental questions about human society and our capability/or not to be a part of the natural world.
The project that Cristina develops during her stay in Skagaströnd is a search for the spiritual dimension of these vast natural landscapes.

From the visual approach of video art, Cristina tries to establish links or analogies between the constant geomorphic transformation,  the morphogenesis of a landscape, and the evolution and transmutation of matter and human soul in the alchemical process according to the hermetic tradition.

Her latest artistic production is based on different approaches that cover all media, depending on the project concept, enriched with the use of emergent technologies  concerning photography, sound, video art, installation, interactivity, latent personal intervention or/ ephemeral art,  existing in real time, documented by photographs, texts or videos.

cristinaferrandez.art
https://www.instagram.com/cristina_ferrandez/
vimeo.com/user9830945/videos
http://asturiesculturaenrede.es/…/umbrales-de-sucesos.html

I am a photographer, drawing artist, and book maker.


My immediate surroundings, wherever I am, often form the starting point for my work. The mysterious, strange, and invisible in our daily world of quick glances attracts me, I want to look closely, discover the other, the foreign, connect it with my thoughts, and create something new through condensation and transformation that asks questions and makes a change of perspective possible. Maybe even bring back respect for our environment.

I am fascinated by the Icelandic colors and the landscape. On a large scale, but also especially on a small scale. The very unique world of moss and lichen, stones and water.

https://tau-to-rat.de

Besides two-dimensional works on paper—where I use pencil, charcoal and pastels—I most of the time do installations or wall decorations with use of paper. I have a degree in Literature—before I started with studies in Art— and since books and literature have followed me my whole life, I found a way to express my self when I began to use texts, novels, music and poetry from books in the works I create.

I always tear the paper apart. I never cut it. I find that the soft and velvety edges gives the artwork a more sensitive, genuine and tactile appearance. I try to find new ways or technics to develop my understanding of the material and of the interpretations of the text all the time.

Usually artists use words to describe art, I use art to describe words. Art is my language.

The texts I choose to focus on in my work are carefully selected and always related to context—whether that is an exhibition or a show room. I make dresses or costumes of the most featherweight material like silk paper or installations or sculptures of bold and solid handmade cotton paper. Sometimes I prepare it, paint or spray layers of color over it before I tear it into smaller pieces, but most often I like it as it is, in natural shades of white and grey with the text as a contrast next to it.

https://hglattre.wixsite.com/galleriglattre and https://www.instagram.com/hglattrekunst/

Matthew Guenette is the author of four poetry collections: Doom Scroll (2023), Vasectomania (2017), American Busboy (2011), and Sudden Anthem (2008). He plans to use his residency to work on prose poems that explore the surreal comedy of trying to hold it together in a time when it seems so much is falling apart.

https://www.matthewguenette.org/