Open Arts

Caroline Baas, born in Berlin in 1997, initially studied theatre, film and media studies in Vienna and, after completing her bachelor’s degree in 2018, went on to study acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar. She graduated with distinction in 2022. 

Since then, she has worked at the Burgtheater (2020–2023) and the Landestheater Niederösterreich (since 2022), as well as in front of the camera, most recently for the series ‘das Vergessen’ (ARD/ORF).

In the Master’s programme in Open Arts, she explores the instinct to play, hybrid theatre-games, and works on interactive formats and objects. Her research focuses on topics including communication, disinformation, deepfakes, and the study of group dynamics.

Pilar James Borower was born in Vienna in 1998. After a brief stint studying philosophy at the University of Vienna, she studied acting at the Max Reinhardt Seminar, graduating with a diploma. She has performed at venues including the Burgtheater in Vienna, the Volkstheater in Vienna and the Volkstheater in Munich. She lives and works in Vienna and Salzburg as a freelance painter and actress. She has already exhibited her works in various Viennese off-spaces, including the Garage Grande and, most recently, the Funkhaus Wien.

Since 2025, she has been studying for a Master’s degree at the institute for Open Arts and works primarily at the intersection of painting, film and performance. She explores voids, omissions and fragmentary pictorial spaces, as well as the border zones between the body and the (surrounding) world, which she continually re-examines. She focuses on the in-between, where meaning can remain open.

As part of her Master’s programme, she is developing and realising a body horror film about physical displacements, combining painterly, performative, documentary and absurd elements

Roberto Carlos Gonzalez Bautista is a graphic designer originally from Mexico who works at the intersection of art, culture and visual communication.

His portfolio encompasses brand identity development, illustration and multimedia design. He is particularly interested in transcultural narratives and community-oriented perspectives. He develops audiovisual systems that honour cultural heritage whilst incorporating contemporary forms of expression, and enjoys collaborating with artists, cultural institutions and organisations that seek authentic solutions together.

His research interests include themes such as memory, change, transformation, hybridisation, identity, technology, dreams, as well as contemporary and archaic mythologies and poetry. He works with a variety of methods and realises his projects in both analogue and virtual spaces.

Sophia’s research practice operates at the intersections of materiality and virtuality, with a particular focus on the processual, relational, and culturally situated conditions of knowledge production. From this perspective, knowledge does not appear as a static entity but as a dynamic assemblage that takes shape through ongoing processes of negotiation between bodies, technologies, and symbolic orders.

A central interest lies in corporeality as an epistemic medium, as well as in the performative disruption of established orders. The body is understood not merely as a carrier of experience, but as an active site of knowledge production where hegemonic structures can be shifted and alternative forms of knowing articulated. In this context, she investigates how targeted irritations and interventions can destabilize normative regimes of knowledge and open up new epistemic potentials.

Her artistic-research practice to date is characterized by experimental, transdisciplinary - at times deliberately undisciplined—performances and photographic works that productively intertwine art and science. These works operate within the tension between theory and practice and create access to new forms of knowledge by placing the body at the center as a space of experience. Knowledge production is thus understood as a situated, embodied, and non-hegemonic process that unfolds beyond disciplinary boundaries and opens up alternative epistemic horizons. Sophia is rooted in Berlin’s media studies and is currently completing her Master’s degree at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Renée Kraemer, born 1997 in Hamburg, is an interdisciplinary artist who originates in the field of theatre, where she worked as a costume and set designer. After completing her studies at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts, Hannover, she gained over two years of professional experience in costume and set design at the Schauspielhaus Zürich.

Driven by a strong interest in artistic design processes as well as research and development, she is continuing her studies at the Institute for Open Arts to expand her expertise in interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary fields.

In her artistic research and work, she links various aspects of everyday life whilst taking into account the capitalist system, which encompasses all aspects of living space. By combining specific urban spaces with images of popculture many can relate to, and by drawing comparisons with utopian and dystopian aspects of real and fictional worlds, she is currently focusing on a critique of capitalism using the medium of comic.

Iván-Manuel is a Chilean composer and multimedia artist with a degree in music and a master’s degree in composition. His artistic work has already reached various parts of the world, including Korea, Switzerland, Spain, Italy, Austria, Germany, the United States, Argentina, Peru and Chile.

Iván-Manuel Tapia Bruno’s work spans a wide range of genres, including chamber music, symphonic and choral music, and electroacoustic music, as well as performance and installation. His work draws on diverse influences, particularly spectral music of the late 20th and early 21st centuries, recent approaches to sound sculpture, and philosophical perspectives of posthumanism. He is currently exploring the possibilities of multimedia as a student on the Postgraduate Certificate in Composition and the Open Arts Master’s programme at the Mozarteum in Salzburg.

Ivan-Manuél Tapia Bruno’s Master’s project, Glitched Archive, focuses on exploring the archive as a creative tool and the glitch as an aesthetic and poetic device. The latter is understood as a disruptive force that challenges systematic hierarchies by disrupting the aesthetic dimension and legitimising the ‘error’. Archival materials are interwoven with fictional elements to shift the boundaries of representation and problematise the distinction between reality and fiction.

As the central outcome of this research, Tapia Bruno is creating a musical theatre and multimedia work (approx. 60 minutes, approx. 20 musicians) with a libretto by Felipe Pizarro, whose plot revolves around a fictional Institute of Semiotics at an equally fictional Chilean university, which is currently in residence in Salzburg and conducting research into the figure of Walter Rauf.

This research team is compiling an archive of Chilean, German and Austrian documents to serve as the basis for examining the various layers of the character: SS-Obersturmbannführer, illegal migrant, advisor to the DINA (Chilean secret police) and small-scale entrepreneur. The aim is to uncover what lies beneath the different representations that have shaped this figure.

Through multimedia installations, performances, musical numbers and various materialisations of the libretto, the work positions itself in an intermediate space between drama and theatricality, drawing on the expressive possibilities of both artistic devices and historical documents.