Ulrike Gerhardt is the artistic (co-)director of D’EST since its founding in 2016, nowadays leading the platform together with Suza Husse. As a visual culture studies scholar and curator, she has been researching cultural memory concerning the reverberations of the post-socialist transformation. For her PhD at Leuphana University Lueneburg, she analyzed the ways in which video works by queer-feminist artists and collectives of the “generation transformation” visually deal with the experiences of Perestroika, migration, ecosystems of damage, and indexical landscapes after 1989 / 1991. After holding positions at District*School Without Center, the FHNW Academy for Art and Design in Basel and at Potsdam University, she now works as a research associate and project coordinator for the Succow Foundation in Greifswald, Germany. Here, she is responsible for Sensing Peat, an international project interconnecting ecological art, climate activism, and peatland conservation, supported by the Andrea von Braun Foundation. It continues the work of The Venice Agreement (2022–), an assembly and commitment to protect and restore our planet’s peatlands at a local level.