Talking Culture is a platform for thought-provoking discussions about the future of Europe, the UK, and the world. Through fascinating interviews with thinkers and doers in the arts and culture sector, this show investigates how creative fields are emerging from the tumultuous present into the future. What role will culture play in a post-Brexit, post-COVID-19, post-colonial world? And how can it contribute to a future that prioritises sustainability, collaboration, diversity, and inclusion? From the Goethe-Institut London, this is a podcast about the critical role and value that arts and culture have in our societies.
Talking Culture #19: Synthetic Life: A future of 'Natural History'?
Janek Zamoyski, Leo Darwin Vogel & M. Scott Brauer
The Synthetic Sacred is a new action-research initiative curated by Lucy Rose Sollitt that explores pathways for ecological restoration amidst hybridity. The notion of the Synthetic Sacred is both a provocation and an attempt to forge sustainable narratives and practices. Weaving together posthuman and Indigenous knowledge systems, it explores the sacred as a means to transform fractured relations with nature and resist capitalist-colonialist extraction and alienation. It proposes the sacred as a framework to guide and detoxify our synthetic creations, ensuring all ecologies flourish.
For this episode, we explore what becomes of nature when life is synthetic and ask what role biotech can play in ecological restoration. What becomes of nature when life is synthetic? Who or what controls life when nature is bionic? And can biotech ever be part of ecological restoration?
Agnieszka Kurant (Łódź, Poland, 1978) is a conceptual artist investigating collective and nonhuman intelligences and the exploitations present in digital surveillance capitalism.
Kurant is the recipient of the 2020 LACMA A+T Award, the 2019 Frontier Art Prize, and the 2021 Google AMI Award. She has had numerous solo exhibitions, including Crowd Crystal at Castello di Rivoli (2021-22), Uncomputables at Hannover Kunstverein (2023), Exformation at Sculpture Center (2013) and Errorism at Kunsthal Gent and Muzeum Sztuki in Lodz (2021). In 2015 she realized a commission for the façade of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, and in 2021-22 a permanent commission for the MIT List Visual Arts Center, Cambridge, MA. In 2010 she co-represented Poland in the Polish Pavilion at the 12th Venice Biennale of Architecture (with A. Wasilkowska). Kurant’s works were also exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Pompidou Center and Palais de Tokyo, Paris; Istanbul Biennial; the SFMOMA, Kunsthalle Wien, Witte de With; Whitechapel Art Gallery, the Kitchen, the De Young Museum, Gamec, Bergamo, CAPC Bordeaux, Moderna Museet; Louisiana Museum, Denmark; Villa Medici, Rome; Milano Triennale; Bonner Kunstverein; Kunstverein in Hamburg; Mumok, Vienna, Mamco, Geneva;Museum of Modern Art in Warsaw; Frieze Projects, Performa Biennial and FRONT Triennial, Cleveland, among other institutions. Kurant was an artist in residence at the Berggruen Institute (2019-2021), a visiting artist at MIT CAST (2017-2020), and held a fellowship at the Smithsonian Institute (2018).
Her work will be featured in the upcoming Sydney Biennial (March 2024). Kurant’s upcoming solo exhibitions and projects include a solo show at Mudam Luxemburg (June 2024), as well as commissions for the Pompidou Center (June 2024), and for Bourse de Commerce - Pinault Collection in Paris (October 2024). Kurant’s monograph Collective Intelligence, co-edited by Stefanie Hessler and Jenny Jaskey will be published by Sternberg Press/ MIT Press in March 2024.
After receiving his PhD in genetics from the University of Cambridge, Johannes Vogel worked at the Natural History Museum in London and took up his appointments in Berlin in 2012. Since then, he has been working as the Director General of the Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz Institute for Evolution and Biodiversity Research Berlin, and Professor of Biodiversity and Science Dialogue at the Humboldt University Berlin since 2012. He is also President of the European Citizen Science Association and advises the European Commission (Chair & member Open Science Policy Platform) and German Government (e.g. Bioeconomy Council, High-tech Forum, Chair of German Science year 2022 ‘Ask your Question’).
With a natural history collection of over 30 million objects and some 200 scientific staff, the museum is one of the largest research museums in the world. The Museums vision is to promote scientific and social dialogue to foster action for nature and democracy. It sees itself as a ‘political museum’ attracting up to one million visitors annually, 60% of which are young adults.
Michael Levin is the Vannevar Bush Distinguished Professor of Biology at Tufts University, an associate faculty at Harvard’s Wyss Institute, and the director of the Allen Discovery Center at Tufts. He has published over 400 peer-reviewed publications across developmental biology, computer science, and philosophy of mind. His group works to understand information processing and problem-solving across scales, in a range of naturally evolved, synthetically engineered, and hybrid living systems. Dr. Levin’s work spans from fundamental conceptual frameworks to applications in birth defects, regeneration, and cancer.
Talking Culture #18: The Healing Power of Cultural Practice
Odelia Toder
The Goethe-Institut provides funding to enable professional as well as newcomer and amateur artists, whether in groups or individually, to carry out projects in Germany or abroad. For this episode, we speak to multidisciplinary artist Gugulethu Duma aka Dumama about her involvement with the Goethe-Institut over the years and across continents, which includes film festivals, music performances, a podcast project and workshops. We discuss the complex poetics of curating in a space that is scarred by colonialism and apartheid. Gugulethu will welcome us into her multidisciplinary world to vindicate the healing power of artistic practices and the challenges encountered along the way.
Gugulethu Duma (aka Dumama) is a musician, composer, sonic poet and creative producer from the Eastern Cape Province of South Africa. Her practice plays with the deconstruction and critique of archaic modes of representation in Southern African/African sonic and performance culture, while also composing music for herself and others. As a storyteller and lyricist, she weaves together childhood songs, stories and personal memories with electronic hues and gestures, experimenting with the divide between traditional oral culture and futuristic, globally oriented poetics in her embodiment of an African technological consciousness.
As an emerging curator and cultural organiser, Gugulethu intentionally works to bring artists together in workshops and performances centred around Embodied Social Justice, while unfolding and activating the voice(s) through unique narrative-making processes.
She has been an artist in residence with the Solo Magic Radical Black Femme Project, curated by Base Arts (2021) Seattle, One Beat Music, Goethe Talents, Nirox and Red Bull Music.
Talking Culture #17: (Re-)Collecting Europe with Marta Bausells
Marta Bausells
(Re-)Collecting Europe is a residency programme devised by the Goethe-Institut London, which gave two journalists the opportunity to travel through the UK for four weeks. It aimed to reach emerging journalistic voices, encouraging critical thinking and creative debate. Against the backdrop of the UK’s departure from the EU the journalists-in-residence examined the social and cultural impact Brexit had on the civil society in the UK.
For this episode, we speak to Marta Bausells about her residency written piece: Cold Tea, what it means to be European three years after Brexit and creative writing endeavours.
Marta Bausells is a writer, editor, translator and artist. Her work has received support in the form of fellowships, residencies, grants and awards by Headlands Center for the Arts, Vermont Studio Center, SPACE on Ryder Farm, Carraig-na-gCat (the Albers Foundation), Arts Council England, Tin House Summer Workshop, the London Writers Awards, Can Serrat, Ventspils House, Faber Residency, and the International Journalists’ Programmes in Berlin.
Her work has been published in The New York Times Magazine, The Guardian (where she was a staff journalist for four years), VICE, ELLE magazine, The Paris Review, and others outlets.
She's currently at work on her debut novel and on a creative non-fiction manuscript titled "Not My Story to Tell," on intergenerational trauma around the Spanish Civil War.
Talking Culture #16: The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction
Georgia Metaxas and Esther Leslie
For this episode, Esther Leslie and Louis Porter join us to unpick the mind of one of the 20th century's greatest thinkers Walter Benjamin. In 1935, he wrote an essay called 'The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction', which set out his ideas on the media and culture in general whilst retaining an edge that has managed to get under the skin of almost everyone who has read it. During the episode, we reflect on some of the core ideas from the text and apply them to modern-day cultural phenomenons, from machine translation to grand-scale digital art exhibitions.
Esther Leslie is Professor of Political Aesthetics at Birkbeck, University of London. Her interests lie in the poetics of science and the politics of technologies. Current work focuses on turbid media and the aesthetics of turbulence.
Her books include various studies and translations of Walter Benjamin, as well as Hollywood Flatlands: Animation, Critical Theory and the Avant Garde (2002); Synthetic Worlds: Nature, Art and the Chemical Industry (2005); Derelicts: Thought Worms from the Wreckage (2014) and Liquid Crystals: The Science and Art of a Fluid Form (2016). Recent work on the biopolitical economy of dairy, with Melanie Jackson, includes the publications Deeper in the Pyramid (with Melanie Jackson) (2018/2023) and The Inextinguishable for the Limerick Biennale, 2020. A book on anti-fascist radio pioneer Ernst Schoen (written with Sam Dolbear) is out in July with Goldsmiths Press, and a study of ICI and its impact in Teesside is soon to be published in Palgrave Pivots series.
Louis Porter is a London based artist, photographer, researcher and educator in photographic processes. His work focusses on the circulation and recirculation of images, texts, ideas and the technologies of reproduction that enable this. Publishing and printed matter are an important part of his practice, via his own imprint Twenty Shelves, independent publishers and as a member of The Artists’ Books Cooperative.
His books and multiples are held in numerous artists’ books collections including those of Tate Modern, MoMa, the New York Centre for Book Arts, The Victoria and Albert Museum and the Reina Sofia Museum. He has undertaken residencies at the Zentrum Für Kunst und Urbanistik (Germany), Awagami paper Factory (Japan), Australian Archaeological Institute of Athens (Greece) and The Red Gate Gallery (China)
Talking Culture #15: Lives of Objects: Gala Porras-Kim and James Webb
Pieter Hugo and Eber Lee
We are currently thinking of Practising Freedom as Phase 1 of an even bigger project, which we have launched called Lives of Objects. Working with cultural practitioners, researchers, museum professionals, and existing collaborative initiatives, we have envisioned Lives of Objects to consist of workshops, residencies, panel discussions, lectures, podcasts, artistic interventions and exhibitions.
This is the first podcast episode of the Lives of Objects series. For it, we invited eminent artists Gala Porras-Kim and James Webb to discuss the ways in which we think about the lives of objects through an artistic lens. The two have been breaking boundaries within their own disciplines to rethink how we present museological objects and artefacts, particularly those with historical, socio-political and spiritual importance.
The Lives of Objects and Practicing Freedom projects were realised in collaboration with the British Council.
Gala Porras-Kim has been working and living in Los Angeles (USA) since 1996. She holds an MFA from the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) and an MFA in Latin American Studies from the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA). Her work has been part of the Biennials in Gwangju, Korea (2021); São Paulo, Brazil (2021) and Whitney, New York (2019). Last year she had two major solo exhibitions at Gasworks in London and Amant in New York.
In 2023, in addition to CAAC, she is exhibiting her work at the Museo Universitario Arte Contemporáneo de México (MUAC). Gala Porras-Kim was a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University (2019) and an artist-in-residence at the Getty Research Institute (2020-2022).
James Webb is an artist known for site-specific interventions and installations. His practice often involves sound, found objects, and text, invoking references to literature, cinema, and the minimalist traditions. By shifting objects, techniques, and forms beyond their original contexts and introducing them to different environments, Webb creates new spaces of tension. These spaces bind Webb’s academic background in religion, theatre, and advertising, offering poetic inquiries into the economies of belief and dynamics of communication in our contemporary world.
Webb has had solo exhibitions at, amongst others, the Art Institute of Chicago, USA, 2018; SPACES, Cleveland, USA, 2018; Norrtälje Konsthall, Norrtälje, Sweden, 2018; Galerie Imane Farès, Paris, France, 2016 and 2019; Yorkshire Sculpture Park, Wakefield, United Kingdom, 2016; Hordaland Kunstsenter, Bergen, Norway, 2015; blank projects, Cape Town, South Africa, 2014, 2016, and 2020; CentroCentro, Madrid, Spain, 2013; Johannesburg Art Gallery, Johannesburg, South Africa, 2012; and mac, Birmingham, United Kingdom, 2010.
Major group exhibitions include the 9th and 16th Biennale d’Art Contemporain de Lyon (2007, 2022), 13th Biennial of Dakar (2018), 4th Prospect Triennial of New Orleans (2017), Documenta 14 (2017), 13th Biennial of Sharjah (2017), 12th Bienal de la Habana (2015), 55th Biennale di Venezia (2013), and the 3rd Marrakech Biennale (2009). Other notable group shows include those at spaces such as MONA FOMA, Australia; Wanås Konst and Historiska, Sweden; MAXXI Roma, Italy; Darat al Funun, Jordan; Théâtre Graslin, France; and the Tate Modern, London.
Talking Culture #14: Beyond Hearing
Matthew Herbert
To celebrate 60 years of the Goethe-Institut London, we held three Goethe Annual Lectures in 2022. For our third GAL, we invited Dr Matthew Herbert for his talk "Beyond Hearing". Through a series of extraordinary sound recordings, he pushed us to hear further than we might have thought possible, and asked the question: “How can systemic listening lead to meaningful action?” The talk was moderated by Ella Finer, whose work in sound and performance spans writing, composing, and curating with a particular interest in how women’s voices take up space; how bodies acoustically disrupt, challenge, or change occupations of space.
Matthew Herbert is a musician, artist, producer and writer whose range of innovative works extends from numerous albums (including the much-celebrated Bodily Functions) to Ivor Novello nominated film scores (Life in a Day) as well as music for the theatre, Broadway, TV, games and radio. He has performed solo, as a DJ and with various musicians including his own 18 piece big band all round the world from the Sydney opera house, to the Hollywood Bowl and created installations, plays and operas. He has remixed iconic artists including Quincy Jones, Serge Gainsbourg, and Ennio Morricone and worked closely over a number of years with musical acts as diverse as Bjork and Dizzee Rascal.
He has been sampled by J Dilla for Slum Village and another of his pieces (Café de Flore) inspired a movie by Jean-Marc Vallee (Dallas Buyers Club). He has produced other artists such as Roisin Murphy, The Invisible, Micachu and Merz and released some of these works alongside others on his own label – Accidental Records. He also set up NX records with Goldsmiths University to support the release of music from alumni and others. Notable collaborators have included chef Heston Blumenthal, playwrights Caryl Churchill and Duncan Macmillan, theatre director Lyndsey Turner, musician Arto Lindsay and writer Will Self.
But he is most known for working with sound, turning ordinary or so-called found sound into electronic music. His most celebrated work ONE PIG followed the life of a pig from birth to plate and beyond. He is relaunching an online Museum of Sound and is the creative director of the new Radiophonic Workshop for the BBC. His debut play The Hush was performed at the National Theatre, his debut opera The Crackle at the Royal Opera House and he continues to work on projects for the screen as well as the stage. His debut book called The Music was published in 2018.
Talking Culture #13: The Culture of Artificial Intelligence
King's College London
To celebrate 60 years of the Goethe-Institut London, we held three Goethe Annual Lectures in 2022. For our second GAL, we invited Professor Mercedes Bunz to discuss “The Culture of Artificial Intelligence”. In her talk, she explores the particular power of AI systems using work from contemporary artists to reveal the human misunderstanding regarding AI. The talk was moderated by Eva Jäger, curator of Arts Technologies at the Serpentine.
Mercedes Bunz is a professor in Digital Culture and Society at the Department of Digital Humanities, King's College London. She studied Philosophy, Art History, and Media Studies at the FU Berlin and the Bauhaus University Weimar, and wrote her thesis on ‘The history of the internet-driven by a deep curiosity about digital technology'. Until today, she has not been disappointed by the transforming field that is digital technology, which provides her reliably with new aspects to think constantly about. At the moment, that is Artificial Intelligence and ‘machine learning’. Delving into the topics of AI and ‘machine learning’, Bunz co-leads the Creative AI Lab, a collaboration with the Serpentine Gallery, London.
TALKING CULTURE #12: POLITICS - WHAT'S LOVE GOT TO DO WITH IT?
Regentaucher
As German writer Mithu Sanyal confirms, it's a preconceived idea that love and politics don't go together. They are in fact polar opposites. Moreover, love has become a dirty word in politics. We can talk on social media about sex till the cows come home, but love, it's too cute, too lovey-dovey, and too unpolitical.
But this has not always been the case. Most movements for social justice had a love of ethics. Gandhi placed love at the centre of his campaign to free India. Martin Luther King preached and practiced love. And James Baldwin called for a Love of Politics. What has happened to marginalise love in the political discourse and what can politics informed by love look like?
In light of recent events, a discussion about the role of love in our world seems more relevant than ever before. But this isn’t the romantic notion of love we are more commonly familiar with, it’s the love that cultural scientist and journalist Mithu Sanyal claims is sorely lacking in our world. A political love. It's the absence of this love that she believes is responsible for so much social injustice and inequality.
Mithu Sanyal is a novelist, academic, literary critic, columnist and broadcaster. Her work has been published by international newspapers including The European and The Guardian, DIE ZEIT, Süddeutsche Zeitung, NZZ, Frankfurter Rundschau etc. Her books include a cultural history of the Vulva (Wagenbach) and Rape – from Lucrezia to #metoo (Verso Books). Her debut novel Identitti (2021) was shortlisted for the German Book Award and is published in English by Astra House and V&Q Books. Her new book about Emily Brontë has just come out with KiWi.
Talking Culture #11: How can art help us understand quantum computing?
What exactly is a quantum computer? Have you ever wondered what all the media hype is about or how quantum computing may impact our everyday lives? In this episode, we talk to quantum expert Emily Haworth, curator Lucy Rose Sollitt and Professor Eduardo Miranda to learn about quantum technologies and the arts. Over the coming weeks, the Goethe-Institut will explore these questions and more under the umbrella of a new project and international events series called ‘Living in a Quantum State’. For more information and all event listings, see Goethe.de/quantum or follow @livinginaquantumstate on Instagram.
A philosopher by training, Lucy’s research-led practice maps the contours of emerging art and how it intersects with technologies, economies and ecologies. Lucy works across scales, exploring systemic phenomena and co-/subjective embodied experience. She is motivated by a belief in art as felt knowledge, wonder and the pursuit of fairer and more meaningful forms of coexistence.
Lucy’s work includes writing, curation, strategy and policy development - for organisations ranging from FACT, Serpentine Galleries and Rhizome to the Goethe Institut, DACS, Tate, Arts Council England and UK government. Lucy regularly teaches and participates in panel discussions, for example, at V&A, QUAD, Christie’s and the RCA.
Lucy’s approach is artist centred. She enjoys working as an artist mentor for SPACE Studios alongside her other projects.
Emily Haworth is a Quantum Science & Technology MSc student at the Technical University of Munich. She is originally from Lancashire, England and did her Physics BSc at University of St Andrews. Alongside her studies, she created ‘PushQuantum: Climate’ which aims to support quantum technology to be an overall carbon negative endeavour. As part of this, the group recently curated an interactive exhibition at Munich’s Deutsches Museum exploring the role of technology in the environment and society.
Eduardo Reck Miranda’s distinctive music is informed by his unique background as an Artificial Intelligence (AI) scientist and classically trained composer. He is internationally known for his research in neurotechnology for music and is championing investigation into quantum computing for musical creativity. Eduardo was a research scientist in the evolution of language group at Sony CSL Paris. Currently, he is a professor at the University of Plymouth, UK, where he leads the Interdisciplinary Centre for Computer Music Research (ICCMR). His opera ‘Lampedusa’, composed with sonification of subatomic particle collisions and live-electronics was premiered by BBC Singers.
Imagine life beyond crises. A world beyond catastrophe, wars and climate crisis. How would you like to live? And now think ahead to 2050. Looking back on your present self, how would you have wanted to have lived? In this episode we talk to curator and project developer Isabel Raabe of Talking Objects Lab and curator and dance dramaturg Thomas Schaupp, one half of the curatorial team behind Goethe Morph* Iceland: How we always wanted to have lived.
Isabel Raabe is a curator and project developer from Berlin. She studied Contemporary Dance and later cultural management and curated numerous interdisciplinary international art and cultural projects. She is interested in curatorial and artistic strategies that deconstruct Western perspectives and traditions of thought. She recently initiated RomArchive - Digital Archive of the Roma. Isabel Raabe initiated the project Talking Objects consisting of the Talking Objects Lab, which she runs with Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, and the Talking Objects Archive, a digital archive for decolonial knowledge production to be launched in 2024.
Isabel Raabe is part of the curatorial team of Talking Objects Lab together with Mahret Ifeoma Kupka, Malick Ndiay (Musée Théodore Monod, Senegal), Njoki Ngumi (The Nest Collective, Kenya) and Chao Tayiana Maina (African Digital Heritage, Kenya).
Thomas Schaupp is a dance dramaturg and curator. Initially trained as a medical laboratory technician, he later embarked on new paths and completed a bachelor's degree in theater studies and art history in Berlin. While still a student, Thomas started working as a dramaturg in the dance scenes of Berlin and Bucharest, soon after devoting himself fully to freelance work. Since then he has worked internationally with choreographers and performing arts institutions across Europe and beyond.
Author and curator Dan Hicks, best known for his book The Brutish Museums (2020), takes stock of the debate around the enduring legacies of empire in our museums, universities and society at large. In this episode, he talks about recent events in Europe and North America, from removing statues and un-naming buildings to returning artefacts from colonial museums. As a society how can we make amends for the past? And what are the next steps for upholding antiracism in the future?
Dan Hicks FSA is Professor of Contemporary Archaeology at the University of Oxford, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, and a Fellow of St Cross College, Oxford. His most recent book is The Brutish Museums: the Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (Pluto Books, 2020).
Talking Culture #8: Clubbing and culture in times of Covid
The Goethe-Institut London and the Somerset House Studios are collaborating to establish a new, international artist residency programme to support a Germany-based artist working at the intersection of music, art and technology. For the inaugural edition from October 2021 onwards, we invited Berlin-based but Texas-born DJ, writer and performer Juliana Huxtable. It's time to discuss her artistic influences, visions and opinions on clubbing in a global pandemic.
Using the structures of music as mediums in her multimedia universe, Juliana Huxtable is a DJ and musician singular in her approach. Where her visual art and poetry navigate the complexification of desire in a life increasingly mediated by technology, her music utilizes the sounds of technology itself to construct parallel realities to be inhabited and embodied in rhythm and harmonic tableaux.
Her sets skillfully deploy the notion of sampling, and re-blogging as DJ strategies, ecstatically mixing an array of influences that frolic at the boundary of genre intuition and experimentation. At once an assertion of freedom and an ode to the evolutionary structure of electronic music subcultures, she aspires to the sublime in what can often only be described as a witchcraft seance behind the decks on stage.
Talking Culture #7: "A greener infrastructure for a sustainable metropolis"
Artist Natalie Taylor, architecture and design collective Urban Radicals and landscape architect Adam Harris talk about their SouthKenGreenTrail installations: "Foodbank for Pollinators" in Prince's Gardens and "Windflower" on Exhibition Road were both envisioned to bring greener infrastructure and more sustainability to London. Get an exclusive insight into their creative and sustainable ideas, the productive thinking behind them and the process of conception and realisation of the two installations.
Talking Culture #6: "Notes from a Grown Up Country"
In the summer of 2020, British author and broadcaster John Kampfner released a new book with a provocative title Why the Germans Do it Better: Notes from a Grown-Up Country. In this episode, we share his 2019 Brady Lecture with the same title: Why the Germans Do it Better. And yes, the title made us a bit uncomfortable too. But don’t worry, this isn’t an episode about one nation being superior to any others. It's about what democratic countries in the West can learn from a unified Germany that they helped to create.
John Kampfner is an award winning author, broadcaster, commentator and force in the UK creative sector. He was Chief Political Correspondent at the Financial Times, political commentator for the BBC's Today programme, and editor of the New Statesman, regularly contributing to British and international media. He established the Creative Industries Federation in 2014 and was its CEO for five years. John Kampfner was also the founder Chair of Turner Contemporary, one of the UK's most successful art galleries.
His previous five books include the best-selling Blair’s Wars (2003) and Freedom For Sale (2009), which was short-listed for the Orwell Prize. Kampfner is a Senior Associate Fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) and adviser to the Frankfurt Book Fair. He presents the podcast series Pale, Male and Stale with the comedian Shazia Mirza which looks at politics and identity.
His forthcoming book is provocatively titled Why the Germans Do It Better. Lessons from a Grown Up Country (to be published in July 2020). When the Berlin Wall came down in 1989, John Kampfner was working as the East Berlin correspondent of the Telegraph. Thirty years later, he finds a country transformed. Germany, for sure, faces problems: the social effects of the refugee influx, the rise of the AfD, a slowing economy, an ageing population, worsening infrastructure and a continued timidity in foreign affairs. Yet Kampfner juxtaposes contemporary Germany with the mayhem of 'Brexit Britain' and Trump's America and argues that its political maturity enables it to confront the challenges of the contemporary world better than others.
Talking Culture #5: "What Does it Mean to Be European?“
With Brexit in the rearview, the decades-long discussion and debate about the role and purpose of the European Union has taken on a new urgency. In this episode, we ask two young intellectuals–one from the UK and one from Germany–to reflect on what Europe means to them. Alice Boyd is a composer, theatre-maker and environmental campaigner from the UK. Simon Strauß is a German historian, writer and journalist. Both were born into the European Union and have used their work to think critically about what it means now and what it can mean.
Alice Boyd is a London and Bristol based composer, sound designer, theatre maker and environmental campaigner. Her work uses the voice, everyday sounds and electronic textures to tell stories about the world around us. She has been selected as one of Sound and Music’s New Voices composers for 2020, supported by Arts Council England, the Garfield Weston Foundation and the PRS Foundation.
Simon Strauß ist a German author, theater critic and historian.
He studied antiquity and history at the university of Basel, the university of Poitiers and the university of Cambridge.
In 2017 he published his first book "Seven Nights" and in summer 2019 hist second one "Romain Days". 2020 he was responsible for the publication of the theater piece collection "Spielplan-Änderung".
He is a founding member and board director of the association "Arbeit an Europa e.V." and is also a full member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in the section Performing Arts.
Talking Culture #4: "Leading the Art World Towards Sustainability"
Photo: Christa Holka
Art has the power to change the world by highlighting critical issues, but what responsibility does the art world have to make their own changes and take inventory of internal practices that are unsustainable or inequitable, to address the environmental cost of putting on exhibitions? In this episode, Iwona Blazwick, Director of the renowned Whitechapel Gallery in East London, grapples with these questions on the future of museums and galleries.
Iwona Blazwick has been Director of the Whitechapel Gallery, London since 2001 and is a curator, critic and lecturer; formerly at Tate Modern and London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) as well as being an independent curator in Europe and Japan.
Recent curatorial projects include William Kentridge: Thick Time (2016), Thomas Ruff Photographs 1979-2017 (2017), Mark Dion: Theatre of the Natural World (2018) and Michael Rakowitz (2019) at the Whitechapel Gallery and Carlos Bunga: The Architecture of Life at MAAT, Lisbon (2019), The Palace at 4am, a group show at the Archaeological Museum Mykonos (2019) and Sight, a solo show with Antony Gormley and the Neon Foundation on the Island of Delos (2019).
Iwona Blazwick has written monographs and articles on many contemporary artists, published extensively on themes and movements in modern and contemporary art, exhibition histories and art institutions and is series editor of the Whitechapel Gallery/MIT Documents of Contemporary Art.
Talking Culture #3: "'Some Kind of Tomorrow': Honoring the Visions of Black Feminist Creative Authors "
The creative writing of Black feminist authors has revolutionary potential. It challenges dominant assumptions and expands the horizons of the current literary audience. In this episode, activist and author Sharon Dodua Otoo honours her literary ancestors and mentors, condemns the racist structures that deprived them of deserved praise during their lifetimes, and explores how Black feminist creative writing can move our society forward.
Sharon Dodua Otoo (*1972 in London) is an author and a political activist. She writes prose and essays and is editor of the English-language book series “Witnessed” (edition assemblage). In 2017 her first novellas “the things i am thinking while smiling politely“ and “Synchronicity” were published in German translation by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo won the Ingeborg Bachmann Prize in 2016 with the text “Herr Gröttrup setzt sich hin”. In 2020 her inaugural speech at the Festival of German Language Literature “Dürfen Schwarze Blumen Malen?” was published by Verlag Heyn. Her first novel in German “Adas Raum” was published in February 2021 by S. Fischer Verlag. Otoo is politically active with the Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland e. V. and Phoenix e. V. She lives with her family in Berlin.
Talking Culture #2: "Why Artists are Working with Blockchain to Reinvent the Arts"
Now, as the world is facing a new economic crisis, how could the arts and civil society benefit from blockchain technologies? Hear from artists, curators, technologists and researchers who are using blockchain to revolutionise their way of working. This episode features Ruth Catlow, artistic director of Furtherfield, Ben Vickers, CTO at the Serpentine Galleries, and artist collectives from Berlin to Moscow who are part of the DAOWO Global Initiative.
Ben Vickers is a curator, writer, publisher, technologist and luddite. He is CTO at the Serpentine Galleries in London, co-founder of Ignota Books and an initiator of the open-source monastic order unMonastery.
Ruth Ctalow is an artist, curator and researcher of emancipatory network cultures, practices and poetics. Artistic director of Furtherfield, a not-for-profit international community hub for arts, technology and social change founded with Marc Garrett in London, in 1996. Co-editor of Artists Re:Thinking the Blockchain (2017); curator of the touring exhibition New World Order (2017-18); runs the award winning DAOWO arts and blockchain lab series with Ben Vickers, in collaboration with the Goethe-Institut; principal investigator for the blockchain research lab at Serpentine Galleries. Director of DECAL Decentralised Arts Lab, a Furtherfield initiative which exists to mobilise research and development by leading artists, using blockchain and web 3.0 technologies for fairer, more dynamic and connected cultural ecologies and economies.
Dzina Zhuk is an artist and tech-politics researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. She is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. She co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk. Her alter-ego bitchcoin works with voice, audio, future beats and sci-fi synth. Her major interests include jeopardized interfaces; emotional effects of algorithms; non-anthropocentric view towards machine intelligence; and imaginary scenarios of the present day.
Nicolay Spesivtsev is an artist and researcher based in Moscow and Minsk. With a technical background as a computer scientist, Spesivtsev combines a critical approach to computer science that is interwoven with computational economies and queer futurism. He works with imaginations born from overlapping technological, economical, and political landscapes in present day culture. His interests include solidarity born from affective labor, critical approaches to emancipation of joy from assemblages of bodies of living subjects (human and non-human), and systems based on computation, digital decolonialism in Eastern Europe, among many others. He is part of the group eeefff and Flying Cooperation. He co-organizes the annual event WORK HARD! PLAY HARD! in Minsk.
Calum Bowden creates stories, worlds, and platforms that reimagine relations between organisms and algorithms, humans and nonhumans, the Earth and the cosmos. He co-founded Trust and Black Swan. Calum took part in the post-graduate program at the Strelka Institute, Moscow. He has an MA in Design Interactions from the Royal College of Art and a BSc in Anthropology from University College London.
Laura Lotti is a researcher investigating the relations between technological, economic and cultural systems. She is a research partner at Other Internet, where she collaboratively explores headless dynamics in networked cultures. She co-founded Black Swan and is a member of Trust.
Kris Nelson is Artistic Director and CEO of LIFT, the London International Festival of Theatre. He was Festival Director of Dublin Fringe Festival from 2013 until 2017.
Home in Canada, Kris Nelson founded the performing arts agency Antonym where he represented Theatre Replacement, Public Recordings and 2boys.tv. He was a producer and Encounters Curator for Magnetic North Festival and initiated and co-curated a variety of platforms devoted to artist touring such as PushOFF.
