Florentina Manuel Martínez is a textile artist originally from the state of Veracruz, in the municipality of Chicontepec, in the community of Ateno. She is a Náhuatl language speaker. Currently she is living in Tamaletom (the municipality of Tancanhuitz, in the state of San Luis Potosí, México). Florentina is married to a Tének flyer man of Tamaletom. (Tének is an Indigenous group of Mexico and flying refers to the traditional ritual dance of prehispanic origins.) Florentina has lived in Tamaleton for 18 years and has learned much about the Tének culture. 

Michele A. Feder-Nadoff is an artist and anthropologist whose practice and research is concerned with the meaning of making [https://mfedernadoff.academia.edu].

Her longterm ethnography in Santa Clara del Cobre, Michoacán, México began in 1997 initiated by her apprenticeship with a master coppersmith, Maestro Jesús Pérez Ornelas. This led to her founding the non-profit Cuentos Foundation, becoming a Fulbright Scholar and cultural anthropologist, PhD, El Colegio de Michoacán. Her critical aesthetics integrates onto-epistemology, performance, and phenomenology with multimodal and collaborative methods designed to decolonize education, art and anthropology. Her artwork is included in private and public collections worldwide. Recent publications include her edited volume, Performing Craft in Mexico: Artisans, Aesthetics and the Power of Translation, 2022, Lexington (Bloomsbury Press), her monograph An Anthropology of Making in Santa Clara del Cobre: Presence of Absence, 2024, Palgrave, and numerous book chapters and articles. She is the assistant editor of the Journal of Embodied Research and an independent scholar, translator, curator, video-producer, lecturer and a multimodal workshop facilitator.  

Claudia Rocha Valverde, PhD in Art History is a professor and investigator at El Colegio de San Luis (COLSAN) in the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Center in Mexico. [https://scholar.google.es/citations?user=aZ-M7XMAAAAJ&hl=es]

Currently, Claudia is the academic liaison of the CASA COLSAN Xilitla Project. Her fieldwork is in the region of Huasteca in the state of San Luis Potosi, where she has carried out research on contemporary traditions of pre-Hispanic origins. In particular, she has specialized in how the knowledge of Indigenous Nahua and Tének women is manifested in the history and symbolism of their clothing, which they wear today in ceremonial contexts related to the concept of Madre Tierra, Mother Earth, which reflects the natural environment in which they live.

For more (and the Spanish version) click here. 

Musicologist Dr Adèle Commins is Head of Department of Creative Arts, Media and Music at Dundalk Institute of Technology. Her PhD from Maynooth University focused on the music of Irish-born composer Sir Charles Villiers Stanford. Her recordings include contributions to an album of Irish piano accordion music released by Comhaltas in 2014 and vocal soloist on an album by Irish composer Sr Marie Dunne in 2015. She also contributes music in two local churches. Her recent research includes critically documenting the music of Co. Louth céilí bands from the mid-twentieth century. Her compositions featured in the seminal publications Tunes from the Women (2023) and some have been recorded by Cork-based Ceolta Sí (2020).

Ethnomusicologist and geographer Dr Daithí Kearney is co-director of the Creative Arts Research Centre at Dundalk Institute of Technology, where he lectures in music, theatre and tourism. His PhD from University College Cork examined the geographies of Irish traditional music. An All-Ireland champion musician, he has toured and recorded as a musician, singer and dancer with a number of groups including Siamsa Tíre, The National Folk Theatre of Ireland, and performed for President Obama in The White House. He recorded the critically acclaimed album Midleton Rare with accordion player John Cronin in 2012 and continues to tour regularly. He wrote and produced the musical To Stay or Leave (2005, 2015) and his compositions have been recorded by groups including Nuada (2004) and Ceolta Sí (2020). As a composer, he has received commissions funded by the Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltachts and Cork County Council.

Both Commins and Kearney have published extensively on music including contributions to the Companion to Irish Traditional Music and the Encyclopaedia of Music in Ireland . In 2017 they released an album A Louth Lilt, featuring their own compositions, and produced the documentary The Road to Speyfest in 2016. International tours including North and South America, France, Scotland, Norway and England. They have composed and arranged a number of pieces for the Oriel Traditional Orchestra, of which they are musical directors. In 2024, they were commissioned by Louth County Council to compose the score for a music theatre production Brigid, Lady of Light for the 1500 celebrations of St Brigid in Co. Louth.

Dr Kayla Rush is an assistant lecturer in music at Dundalk Institute of Technology. An anthropologist of art, music, and performance, her current research examines private, fee-paying rock music schools in global perspective. She previously held a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Individual Fellowship, supporting ethnographic research with Rock Jam, a private music education organisation in Ireland. Her work has appeared in Borderlands, Liminalities, Feminist Anthropology, Journal of Popular Music Education, and IASPM Journal, among others. She is the author of The Cracked Art World: Conflict, Austerity, and Community Arts in Northern Ireland (Berghahn, 2022). She is also a recognized teacher and practitioner of creative ethnography, with a particular interest in ethnographic science fiction.

Alex Ungprateeb Flynn is Assistant Professor and Graduate Vice Chair at the Department of World Arts and Cultures/Dance, University of California, Los Angeles. Working with activists, curators, and artists in Brasil, Alex investigates the prefigurative potential of art in community contexts to theorize the production of knowledge, notions of utopia, and social and aesthetic dimensions of form. Framed by a collaborative methodological approach, Alex fundamentally inquires how human beings express themselves artistically, and in doing so, seek to transform the world.

X/ Insta: alexungprateebf

With her artistic practice, Aline Motta (b. 1974, Niterói, Brazil) seeks to point out and fill in the gaps in her own family history as a result of colonial erasure. Her videos, photographs, installations, and performances are based on speculative studies that mix archival research, field trips, and oral history reports that she uses to access, nourish, and reveal parts of the past that were previously thought to be lost. In 2023, she exhibited in the Sharjah Biennial 15 (UAE), at MoMA Museum of Modern Art and the 35th São Paulo Biennial.

Insta: 1alinemotta (Instagram)

The link to article featuring the full interview: https://terremoto.mx/en/online/escribiendo-historias-manifestando-futuros/ 

Ayala Gazit is a visual artist who specializes in photography and installation. Born in Israel, she is currently living and working in Berlin. Prior to moving to Berlin she lived in New York city, where she completed, with honors, a BFA in Photography in The School of Visual Arts. Ayala has presented works in art venues around the globe, including in Germany, USA, Australia, New Zealand, and Israel. She is the recipient of numerous awards such as The Tierney Fellowship and The Photography NOW Award at Woodstock, amongst others. Her works cover a wide range of themes, including history, memory, loss, family, and creation, all explored through a special focus on the question of how can the photographic image capture the things that are no longer there.

https://www.ayalagazit.com/ 

Rotem Steinbock is a PhD candidate in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, working on the intersection between art, immigration, and identity. Her PhD research follows Jewish Israeli visual artists who immigrated to Berlin, focusing on the ways they negotiate, reflect upon, and visually represent their dynamic senses of alterity and belonging. Before coming to Cambridge Rotem completed a B.A. in psychology and sociology and anthropology and an M.A. in anthropology at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and a B.F.A. at the Department of Fine Arts at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem.

https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/staff/rotem-steinbock-2019

Eliana Otta Vildoso (Lima, 1981) holds a degree in art, an MA in Cultural Studies from the Universidad Católica del Perú, and a PhD in Practice from the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna. She co-founded the artist collective Bisagra in Lima and the ecofeminist collective Mouries in Athens. She coordinated the curatorial team for the permanent exhibition at Lugar de la Memoria, la Tolerancia y la Inclusión Social. She has taught at the Art Faculty of PUCP, Corriente Alterna and Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes. She lives and works between Vienna and Athens. 

Website: eliana-otta.com

https://drivingthehuman.com/prototype/virtual-sanctuary-for-fertilizing-mourning/

Instagram: eliana.otta

Nuno Cassola Marques (Aveiro, 1984) holds a degree in Fine Arts and an MA in Contemporary Art Practice from the University of Porto, Portugal. He co-founded and co-curated the first edition of the Wadi Rum film festival, and co-founded the community kitchen Khora in Athens, which continues to serve 1200 meals a day to people in need. In addition to his activism, he works as a cinematographer and filmmaker. He lives and works in Athens. 

Website: www.nunocassola.com

Frederick Schmidt is currently completing his PhD in Social Anthropology at Cambridge with the title “Un-Contemporary Arts: Norms and Forms in a Greek Art School”. Based on two years of ethnographic fieldwork in Athens (2020-2022), his PhD concerns the imbrication of private and public educational institutes in the landscape of artistic education in Athens, and makes the case for a reappraisal of formalist methodologies in visual anthropological research.

Sera Park is Associate Lecturer in Social Anthropology at the University of St Andrews. Her PhD (University of Cambridge, 2022) examined the collective mourning and activism that emerged in the aftermath of the Sewol Ferry Disaster in South Korea. Her research interests include social movements and activism, the affective and moral dimensions of social life, and death, mourning, and memorialization. 

Elzė Sigutė Mikalonytė  is a Research Associate at the Department of Psychology and a Junior Research Fellow at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge.

Her research interests are in aesthetics, metaphysics, experimental philosophy, and philosophy of cognitive science. She currently works on the project “Higher Values: Aesthetic Experiences, Transcendence, and Prosociality” with Prof. Simone Schnall and Dr Ryan Doran.

Her doctoral work focused on the philosophy of music and the ontology of musical works. As part of her doctoral research, Elzė conducted experimental philosophy studies in musical ontology. She has also investigated other topics in experimental philosophy of aesthetics, such as the folk concept of art, judgments of the identity of artworks, and intuitions on AI-created art.

https://mikalonyte.com/

https://twitter.com/ElzeSigute

Edoardo Chidichimo is a social anthropologist and computational neuroscientist who is interested in all things social. Combining anthropology, AI, mathematics, and philosophy, Edoardo seeks to address sociality in the broadest way, confronting disciplinary niches and pushing toward an integrated study of interpersonal human behaviour and cognition.

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ec750

Profile: https://www.neuroscience.cam.ac.uk/member/ec750

Xasan Daahir Ismaaciil (‘Weedhsame’) is a Somali poet currently based in Hargeysa, Somaliland. Mentored by the beloved late poet Maxamed Xaashi Dhamac ‘Gaarriye’, his work includes hundreds of poems and song lyrics on themes including politics, migration and love. He is widely considered one of the most influential poets of his generation. Trained as a mathematician, Weedhsame currently teaches Somali language and literature at the University of Hargeysa and works as a statistician for the Ministry of Education. Some of his work has been translated by the Poetry Translation Centre, and is available here: https://www.poetrytranslation.org/poets/xasan-daahir-weedhsame

Christina Woolner is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in the Department of Social Anthropology at Cambridge. Her research broadly explores how forms of popular art and practices of “voicing” are entangled in processes of sociopolitical change, especially in the wake of violence. For the last decade she has been studying the political and affective dynamics of love songs and political poetry in Hargeysa, Somaliland. Her first book, Love Songs in Motion: Voicing Intimacy in Somaliland recently came out with the University of Chicago Press. Information about the book, alongside supplemental audio-visual material, is available on the book’s companion website: www.lovesongs.christinawoolner.com.

Jonas Tinius is a sociocultural anthropologist, and currently scientific coordinator and post-doctoral researcher in cultural anthropology in the ERC project Minor Universality: Narrative World Productions after Western Universalism based at Saarland University. He completed a PhD in the Department of Social Anthropology at the University of Cambridge, before joining the Centre for Anthropological Research on Museums and Heritage (CARMAH) at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin. He co-founded the Anthropology & the Arts Network of Anthropologists (EASA) with Roger Sansi. His publications include Across Anthropology: Troubling Colonial Legacies, Museums, and the Curatorial (with Margareta von Oswald, Leuven 2020). 

www.jonastinius.com

State of the Arts book: https://www.cambridge.org/it/universitypress/subjects/arts-theatre-culture/drama-and-theatre-general-interest/state-arts-ethnography-german-theatre-and-migration?format=HB

Iza Kavedžija is an Assistant Professor of Medical Anthropology at the University of Cambridge. She is specialising in Japan, with primary research interests in art and creativity, the life course and aging, and health and wellbeing. She is currently leading an AHRC-funded project entitled ‘The Work of Art in Contemporary Japan: Inner and outer worlds of creativity’.

https://worldsofcreativity.socanth.cam.ac.uk/

https://www.socanth.cam.ac.uk/directory/dr-iza-kavedzija

Permissions obtained for the use of all samples featured in this episode.

寂空 (JACK) is a shamisen musician and frontman of the band The Shamisenists. His approach to composition is one of continuous movement across boundaries, inspired by his own travel to different parts of the world. As a result, his music often exhibits a diversity that escapes categorization. Jack performed at the Rugby World Cup official reception at the Yokohama Arena in 2019. In 2022, The Shamisenists were the sole Japanese band to perform at the celebrated MOTOCULTOR festival in France. In 2023 Jack performed at Fuji Rock, the biggest music festival in Japan. He is the recipient of multiple awards and honours, including an Indian Foreign Minister’s Award for his arrangement of the Japanese version of Gandhi’s beloved devotional song. 

https://www.instagram.com/shamisenist_jack/

Jack’s words in this episode were translated by Robert Simpkins and narrated by Oscar Wrenn. Oscar is a PhD researcher based at Kobe University in Japan, studying everyday agricultural practice in depopulated rural landscapes.

Robert Simpkins is a social anthropologist and coproducer of the Artery podcasts. His research interests focus upon the intersection of sound, space, creativity, and the production of self.

Permission obtained by Transist Records and the creators of the music for tracks featured in this podcast episode:

LOTUS / The Shamisenists [re:tokyo]

Modernized Flight / The Shamisenists [re:tokyo]

URVIBE_feat. Yokotasax / The Shamisenists [PLAY!]

Permission also granted for use of the impromptu shamisen performance recorded during the interview, and featured at the close of the episode. 

Tamaki Ueda, aka Banetoriko, is a Japanese noise music artist who was born in Nara, moved to Los Angeles, and finally established herself in Osaka. Her music, composed with a self-made metal instrument named Banetek, is inspired by yokai, the supernatural creatures from Japanese folklore to whom she has dedicated a great part of her life. Her last album, Yorioto Hogiokuri, which could be translated as “Celebrating and sending off the summoned sound”, came out in 2022.

https://banetoriko.net/ 

Luca Proietti is a PhD candidate in Japanese Studies at SOAS, University of London. His research interests are related to performing arts, media, and cultural studies, focusing on their relationship with society and culture. He is involved in a research project on Japanese noise music, focusing on its cultural and social engagement and exploring its historical continuity with Japanese traditions.