IAN SEABROOK

IAN SEABROOK

/

Award-Winning Underwater Director of Photography

It’s about leaving the planet in a better condition than it is currently. What you’re witnessing is years of neglect. It’s the humans who have screwed it all up, and the warming of the earth is no different. The oceans are changing. The topography is changing. Mussels are being fried when the tides recede. This is all unnatural. Or maybe it’s natural. I think it’s Mother Nature just being pissed off and saying, “This is what you get.” And so it’s up to everyone to change their ways. Their shopping habits, their eating habits, how much gas they use. All that stuff which people think “that can’t affect anything.” Well, you’re seeing the result of it now.

MICOL HEBRON

MICOL HEBRON

/

Interdisciplinary Artist, Curator & Feminist Activist

Now I think we’re in another culture war. I think we’re in, as we see the realm of cancel culture in social media and this very polarising war between the liberal left and the conservative right. I think that we’re in another culture and a lot of it is centering around gender and race. If you look at what’s happened to black women athletes in the last couples of months, the censuring of their bodies either because of hormones in the case of Caster Semenya or Naomi Osaka, there’s a lot of ways that our society has found to police black bodies for being too exceptional in a lot of ways. For performing in exceptional ways, and the white patriarchy doesn’t like to see that because it starts to diminish their power.


MARK MENNIN

MARK MENNIN

/

Sculptor

I think direct contact with the material should be important to every sculptor because I think once you lose that it becomes a second hand process. It’s one of the reasons the casting process isn’t so interesting to me just because the final product, the final piece has not been touched by the artist. There’s no relationship with the mind that conceived the piece or designed it. I think something is lost when that happens. And it becomes something else.

KIRIAKOS SPIROU

KIRIAKOS SPIROU

/

Editor, Writer, Curator, Content Creator, Pianist & Composer

This particular exhibition definitely had to do with my close relationship to dance. I have collaborated a lot with choreographers for contemporary dance theater, and I was often advising collaborators, so we would create the tasks and the content of the choreography together. We would exchange the tasks. We would create the score and narrative together. Also, because I’m a pianist, which is a very physically demanding instrument, you have this geography of the piano. I think this exhibitions links to my own experience as a performer and composer for dance and the relationship that music has with the body.

MATS HJELM

MATS HJELM

/

Artist, Documentary Filmmaker & Multimedia Installation Creator

Art can be part healing process. There's a lot of research being done. People heal faster a garden rather than a parking lot, for example. The theory is that an opening in the woods with a little bit of water is probably the most healing place. That's the safest because that's what we have built-in as humans as the safe spot. The ocean is not safe, but the little pond. So, what I've done in this particular project with the radiotherapy rooms is that I've taken images from healing wells, partly from Stellenbosch National Park in Capetown, in Rio. I've been filming these water surfaces. I’ve been filming the trees through the water surface basically to create that water pond and the trees around, but from these places that have kind of a healing history.

JANET BURROWAY

JANET BURROWAY

/

Novelist, Playwright & Author of Most Widely Used Creative Writing Text in America

There’s a lot of controversy about that idea at the moment, about whether fiction is truly empathic and how much freedom the imagination should have because, as one of my friends says, the imagination is not free. It comes from all of the places that we come from. So it’s a controversial notion, but I am firmly on the side of literature is empathic. In fact, I think that all the arts are empathic because all the arts basically say, ‘Wait a minute. Look at it this way.’ And they allow us to see from some other vantage point than our extremely self-interested selves.