Kidnapped for Dinner

Alexis Oliva and Yanira Lopez are the husband-and-wife duo behind textile design business Yerbamala Designs. They took what some may deem a fun hobby or craft and built a full-fledged business, leaving behind their corporate jobs to develop their textile art practice. 

We discuss risk taking, supportive partnership, resourcefulness, approaching a new endeavor with gratitude and as a constant learning opportunity and more in our conversation.

This episode was recorded live in December 2019 as a part of Shop Talk, a special talk series at Mima Market and happy hour with Radiate Kombucha. We discuss process, inspiration and purpose with local, independent artisans and makers.

*Q&A starts at 01:00:42

Laura Marsh is a textile artist with a social practice whose work involves installations, weavings, flags, text and other tactile pieces. We discuss her process, the participatory nature of her work, play and fun as a means of accessibility, creating safe spaces, slow reflection, imagining positive futures for ourselves, generosity, hospitality and more.

This conversation is one of four interviews, recorded with Orchid.fm, profiling Mana Contemporary artists at 777 Mall during Miami Art Week 2019.

Fereshteh Toosi is an artist of Iranian and Azeri ancestry whose work involves embodied experiences, encounter, exchange, and sensory inquiry. We discuss her body of work, including her current project Water Radio: Liquid Intelligence and latest initiative and O, Miami collaboration Reading Camp. Themes that emerge in our discussion include deep listening, the importance of “tuning into” our environments, shared experiences, modes of communication with nature that are beyond the language of words, wonder, imagination and more.

This conversation is one of four interviews, recorded with Orchid.fm, profiling Mana Contemporary artists at 777 Mall during Miami Art Week 2019.

Jenna Balfe is a performance artist, musician and activist whose work promotes healing connections between self, other and environment. We discuss her current work, softening the lines of our experiences, the importance of movement, tenderness & compassion, remembering our connection to nature and each other, play & imagination and more.

This conversation is one of four interviews, recorded with Orchid.fm, profiling Mana Contemporary artists at 777 Mall during Miami Art Week 2019.

Richard Vergez is a Cuban-American visual and sound artist with a background in graphic design and audio/visual collaboration. We discuss his Art Week installation Weeping Willow, hand-made collage work and sonic compositions. A few themes emerge in the conversation: the value of choice over skill in art, absurdity, nostalgia, the influence of Dada and Fluxus on his work, the importance of creating space in the work (and for ourselves), cutting through excess and more. 

This conversation is one of four interviews, recorded with Orchid.fm, profiling Mana Contemporary artists at 777 Mall during Miami Art Week 2019.

Shop Talk is a special talk series hosted by Kidnapped for Dinner at Mima Market and happy hour with Radiate Kombucha. We discuss process, inspiration and purpose with local, independent artisans and makers.

On November 15, we hosted a live conversation with Gabi Serra and Ruth Jeannoel around the idea of “making” and building community. In considering this, Gabi and Ruth implicitly ask: What is your relationship to yourself, to your own community and to other communities you may not be a part of? And what are the socio-economic factors that affect these relationships? 

Ruth is a Full Spectrum birth doula, holistic healer, community organizer, writer and restorative justice trainer & practitioner. She is the founder of non-profit Fanm Saj and a co-founder of Carib Healing Collective.

Gabi is a farmer, herbalist and artist. She is a part of Buenezas and Semillas Cooperative.

'Shop Talk' is a special talk series hosted by Kidnapped for Dinner at Mima Market and happy hour with Radiate Kombucha. We discuss process, inspiration and purpose with local, independent artisans and makers.

We kicked this series off on October 18, 2019 with Mima Market’s Alexandra Cava Palomino, Radiate Kombucha’s Susan Cartiglia and Kidnapped For Dinner host Kristen Soller.

Being an active participant in our lives, experiences over transactions, fostering genuine care & engagement, and cultivating curiosity over fear are among the themes that emerged in our conversation.

What does it mean to be at home? Where and with whom do we get to call home? Who gets to claim space? These questions are extremely charged in the context of urban development, where ‘home’ literally is in flux.

GeoVanna Gonzalez offers an artist and curator’s perspective to these questions as we talk about her art & community space Supplement Projects. We talk about what it means for artists to claim and create within space and the part they may play in shifting urban landscapes. For GeoVanna, the role of the artist & curator is undeniably tied to serving community and perhaps for holding, or hosting rather, space to connect with others, develop relationships, build homes - however you define it.

GeoVanna is a multidisciplinary artist and curator based between Miami and Berlin. She founded Supplement Projects, an alternative art & community space exploring ideas of domesticity within the urban landscape. As an artist, GeoVanna works with ideas of translation and forms of communication in today’s technological and consumer-driven culture. As a curator, she is interested in collective practice, working outside of institutional spaces and providing a platform for people of diverse backgrounds to have face-to-face conversations and interactions. GeoVanna also co-founded the collaborative project Coin In / Coin Out with artist Angel Garcia and the international reading club and performance art collective Read What You Want.

Jayme Gershen shares the making of her first documentary Six Degrees of Immigration. As she discusses her development as a filmmaker, she illustrates how starting a new project or trying a new medium, though daunting, can be an important step in expanding and evolving our own creative language. Her story is an example of how the desire to create and share with others can work in tandem with our doubts.

Jayme is a filmmaker and a photographer based in Miami, FL. Her work uses universal experiences to shed a surprisingly relatable light on issues that at first-glance seem unfamiliar. 

Gershen recently premiered her short documentary, Six Degrees of Immigration, at the 2019 Miami International Film Festival, co-winning the Knight Foundation’s Made in MIA Best Short Film Award and is currently working on her first feature length documentary, Birthright?!, which explores what it means to be a hyphenated American through the eyes of Miami’s favorite Cuban-American electro-funk sweethearts, Afrobeta.

Gershen works around the globe, filming behind-the-scenes action on feature films and commercials, photographing history for publications like Bloomberg, Vanity Fair and The New Yorker and working as a director/cinematographer on a variety of documentaries and doc-style commercial content.

Monica Uszerowicz’s experience as a writer cannot be separated from her challenging inner experience. We talk openly about her self-doubt, critical inner voice and self-image, as well as how she is able to find tenderness for herself through a sense of interconnectedness in the world around her. We also talk about the challenges of permalancing, her writing process (or lack thereof), being an “exposed nerve,” stress eating, Miyazaki soundtracks and more.

Monica is a Miami-based writer and photographer. She has contributed to a number of arts and culture publications including Hyperallergic, Bomb, Vice, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Hazlitt, and Filmmaker Magazine. Monica is also the former Film & Performing Arts Editor for the Miami Rail, an independent extension of the Brooklyn Rail, and currently serves as a web editor for Cultured Magazine.