E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

E.J. KOH - Award-Winning Memoirist & Poet - “The Magical Language of Others”, “A Lesser Love”

/

Award-winning Memoirist & Poet
The Magical Language of Others · A Lesser Love

I had delayed speech, and I had quite a bit of trouble with speaking. I think I must have been five before I was uttering some of my first words and trying to articulate. Simple communication was very difficult for me and my family, especially in a family where we were speaking several languages. They hoped to instill English. It’s the language of survival. There was a lot of frustration and fear in my relationship to language, and the relationship these languages had to each other, that was something I felt very sensitive to since I was young. Since before I could speak.

Highlights - JILL JOHNSON - Dancer - Choreographer & Ballet Stager - Fmr. Dance Director, Harvard

Highlights - JILL JOHNSON - Dancer - Choreographer & Ballet Stager - Fmr. Dance Director, Harvard

/

Dancer · Choreographer and Ballet Stager · Fmr. Director Harvard Dance

Keeping people interested in dance is exposing folks, no matter how big or small an audience, to the different ways of seeing. How can you place a value on solace, joy, or tenderness and vulnerability?

JILL JOHNSON - Dancer - Choreographer & Ballet Stager - Fmr. Dance Director, Harvard

JILL JOHNSON - Dancer - Choreographer & Ballet Stager - Fmr. Dance Director, Harvard

/

Dancer · Choreographer and Ballet Stager · Fmr. Director Harvard Dance

Keeping people interested in dance is exposing folks, no matter how big or small an audience, to the different ways of seeing. How can you place a value on solace, joy, or tenderness and vulnerability?

(Highlights) GEORGE ELLIS

(Highlights) GEORGE ELLIS

/

Cosmologist, Theoretical physicist & Star of South Africa Medal Recipient

Artistic creativity and it’s crucial to artistic creativity amongst many other things. In artistic creativity, from my viewpoint, is that you start off with an idea and you’re shaping and you’re totally in control and it doesn’t matter if it's music or sculpture or painting or a novel, eventually the thing sparks its own life, becomes itself, and at that point, the role of the artist is to stand back and let it become what its got to become. And that’s where you get the great art.

GEORGE ELLIS

GEORGE ELLIS

/

Cosmologist, Theoretical physicist & Star of South Africa Medal Recipient

Artistic creativity and it’s crucial to artistic creativity amongst many other things. In artistic creativity, from my viewpoint, is that you start off with an idea and you’re shaping and you’re totally in control and it doesn’t matter if it's music or sculpture or painting or a novel, eventually the thing sparks its own life, becomes itself, and at that point, the role of the artist is to stand back and let it become what its got to become. And that’s where you get the great art.

(Highlights) KYLE HARPER

(Highlights) KYLE HARPER

/

Author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History
G.T. & Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma

Human well-being is both a question of social development in a very holistic sense that people have jobs that provide adequate food and clean water as well as the elimination of dangerous microbes, and so the question is how do societies continue to develop in a way that's globally equitable and sustainable and that's really one of wicked hardest problems on the planet is how do we continue to experience growth without having carbon emissions that make growth and impossible, that continue to hold societies in poverty, and that continue to imperil human health.

KYLE HARPER

KYLE HARPER

/

Author of Plagues upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History
G.T. & Libby Blankenship Chair in the History of Liberty, Professor of Classics & Letters, University of Oklahoma

Human well-being is both a question of social development in a very holistic sense that people have jobs that provide adequate food and clean water as well as the elimination of dangerous microbes, and so the question is how do societies continue to develop in a way that's globally equitable and sustainable and that's really one of wicked hardest problems on the planet is how do we continue to experience growth without having carbon emissions that make growth and impossible, that continue to hold societies in poverty, and that continue to imperil human health.

(Highlights) BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

(Highlights) BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

/

NYT Bestselling Author of A New Way to Wealth · Doing More with Teams
Founder of AHC Group

Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the ship and all we had a chance to do was look at each other. I’ve come to believe is that not only is the future near you can design your own life.

BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

BRUCE PIASECKI, PhD

/

NYT Bestselling Author of A New Way to Wealth · Doing More with Teams
Founder of AHC Group

Each day you wake up you make decisions that shape your own fate, your ascent, position, your own creativity. I like to think of it as fate is a personal construct. When I was at Cornell they had me teach an Emerson essay called “Freedom and Fate” where he said that fate was so overwhelming in some traditions that it’s as though we were each involved in a shipwreck and we were each thrown off the ship and all we had a chance to do was look at each other. I’ve come to believe is that not only is the future near you can design your own life.

(Highlights) RENEÉ JAWORSKI · MATT KENT · EMILY KENT

(Highlights) RENEÉ JAWORSKI · MATT KENT · EMILY KENT

/

Pilobolus Dance Company
Highlights

I guess the part that's our thing is the method or process that Renée Jaworski was describing. The constraint, the framework that we try to put on what we're doing includes that, for this time, let's not map everything out first and try and realize the vision that one person has but to put people together, as Renée was saying, and have something else emerge that's a product of everybody that's involved. Penn Jillette, who we were honored to work with, the way he put it is, "You're not a collective, you're not looking the same, talking the same, you don't use the same terms for movement. All the dancers look different, and they think differently as well. –MATT KENT

RENEÉ JAWORSKI · MATT KENT · EMILY KENT

RENEÉ JAWORSKI · MATT KENT · EMILY KENT

/

Pilobolus Dance Company

I guess the part that's our thing is the method or process that Renée Jaworski was describing. The constraint, the framework that we try to put on what we're doing includes that, for this time, let's not map everything out first and try and realize the vision that one person has but to put people together, as Renée was saying, and have something else emerge that's a product of everybody that's involved. Penn Jillette, who we were honored to work with, the way he put it is, "You're not a collective, you're not looking the same, talking the same, you don't use the same terms for movement. All the dancers look different, and they think differently as well. –MATT KENT

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

(Highlights) SIRI HUSTVEDT

/

Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

SIRI HUSTVEDT

SIRI HUSTVEDT

/

Novelist and Essayist

The reason I think you should read in these other disciplines is because it will help you in your own work. Now I really mean that. I think what has happened with the fragmentation of disciplines is that when problems arise. ...the people working in the discipline are unable to see avenues out of the problem that they would easily see if they had worked through problems in other disciplines.

(Highlights) SEBASTIEN GOKALP

(Highlights) SEBASTIEN GOKALP

/

Sébastien Gokalp · Director of France’s National Museum of Immigration
Curator of Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris & Louis Vuitton Foundation

We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

SEBASTIEN GOKALP

/

Sébastien Gokalp · Director of France’s National Museum of Immigration
Curator of Exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Musée d’art Moderne de la Ville de Paris & Louis Vuitton Foundation

We have a motto that says that ‘we want to change the gaze on immigration or to open the eyes on immigration’. We’re not here to make action in society, but we want people who come here to have elements of reflection, perception about the question of immigration. To change a mind, because immigration is about the stories of people who come from another country–they are someone else, basically–by assisting them we want to show how someone else can be great for us and not a stranger, foreigner, nor an enemy, but a friend. Someone who will bring us many things about culture, about work, about a way of meaning, of thinking. We have a historical point of view. We want to show that from the French Revolution until now, so two centuries of stories.

(Highlights) ROB NIXON

(Highlights) ROB NIXON

/

Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor
Professor Environmental Humanities at Princeton

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

ROB NIXON

ROB NIXON

/

Rob Nixon is a nonfiction writer and the Barron Family Professor in Environmental Humanities at Princeton University. He is the author of four books, most recently Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Nixon is currently writing a book on environmental martyrs and the defense of the great tropical forests. He writes frequently for the New York Times. His writing has also appeared in The New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, The Guardian, The Nation, London Review of Books, The Village Voice, Aeon and elsewhere. Much of his writing engages environmental justice struggles in the global South. He has a particular interest in understanding the roles that artists can play in effecting change at the interface with social movements.

Rob Nixon · Author of Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor & Professor Environmental
Climate Change & Environmental Solutions · Creative Process Original Series

ROB NIXON

There are some recurrent threads in indigenous cultures across the world. One of those is–We don’t own the land. The land owns us. It’s not seen as property first. It’s seen as inalienable in that sense because you don’t own it in the first place. What we’re seeing now is a kind of movement where more and more indigenous people are living kind of amphibious lives. On the one hand, they have their indigenous cosmologies. And the other hand, in order to increase the likelihood that they can keep out big corporations, mining, logging, and so forth, their presence on the land needs to be bureaucratically recognized is to have recognition that “this is your property.” So in one sense many of these communities I find are both inside and outside private property regimes.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Phil Kehoe with the participation of collaborating universities and students. Associate Interviews Producer on this podcast was Phil Kehoe. Digital Media Coordinator is Phoebe Brous.

Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process & One Planet Podcast (Conversations about Climate Change & Environmental Solutions).

DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS

DIMITRIOS PANDERMALIS

/

President of the Acropolis Museum

I think that contact with ancient civilizations is very important because we get to have in our life a third dimension. If we live only in the present, we don't understand what happened many thousand years ago. We don't realize what the development of humanity really is.

(Highlights) CHRIS DERCON

(Highlights) CHRIS DERCON

/

Museum director, curator, and cultural producer at large, Chris Dercon is the President of the Réunion des musées nationaux – Grand Palais, an umbrella group of national museums in France. His career in major cultural institutions across Europe spans several decades. From 2011 to 2016, he was director of London's Tate Modern. He has been program director of MoMA PS1 in New York, and has served as director of the Witte de With Center of Contemporary Art in Rotterdam, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam, the Haus der Kunst in Munich, and Berlin's Volksbühne theater. He is also a presenter, writer and maker of cultural documentaries.
www.grandpalais.fr

Chris Dercon · President of Grand Palais RMN · Curator & Cultural Producer (Highlights)
The Creative Process Podcast


(Highlights) KATE MUETH

(Highlights) KATE MUETH

/

Actress, Choreographer, Artistic Director - Neo-Political Cowgirls

I care very deeply about the arts, theater arts. So I had a choice to make, either leave entirely or be the change, as they say. So I started Neo-Political Cowgirls to embrace women in their story, in our story.