The removal of cultural treasures from formerly colonized countries has become a major issue in the media, yet voices and perspectives from the countries most affected continue to be rarely heard.  This episode considers cultural heritage from the perspective of a country that has suffered profound cultural losses throughout the 20th century: Rwanda. Juvenal Nsengimana, a Rwandan lawyer and expert on cultural heritage, brings insight, honesty, and hope to the question of how his country, faced with the dual onslaughts of colonialsim and genocide, has made a priority of reconstructing its cultural past, hoping to lay the lasting foundation for a peaceful and prosperous future. 

Nearly a century after its removal, a totem pole that was stolen from the Nisga'a Nation of Canada's Pacific coast and sold to Scotland's National Museum was welcomed back to northern British Columbia in a moving homecoming ceremony last Fall. Far more than a cultural "object", the pole is described by the Nisga'a as "a chapter of the Peoples' cultural sovereignty" and "a living constitutional and visual record."  Noxs Ts'aawit (Dr. Amy Parent), a member of the nation and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Education and Governance at Simon Fraser University, comments that the pole has "a living spirit in it" and is "a relative. And so it's like bringing a family member home after being gone for almost 100 years." There is a growing awareness around the world that the appropriation of cultural artifacts was an integral part of the process of colonial domination. Is it time to recognize this profound experience of cultural loss as a form of trauma that needs to be healed? I explore this question with the help of Myrna McCallum, a Métis lawyer from the Canadian West who specializes in trauma-informed lawyering. Myrna also hosts her own podcast, The Trauma-Informed Lawyer.

Photo credit:  Quinn Bender/Reuters

Pianist Glenn Gould is one of the most celebrated classical musicians of all time. A pioneering interpreter of the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, he was also a brilliantly rebellious thinker, exploring philosophy and media, and contending that technology would ultimately make concerts obsolete by offering a more satisfying listening experience to audiences through recordings. He was prepared to put his revolutionary theories into practice, abandoning his own concert career at the age of 32 to focus on recording, and proving to the world that he truly was a musical artist like no other. Now, more than 40 years after his death, Glenn Gould has become an iconic figure, at least as well known for his good looks and personal eccentricities as his visionary musicianship. This episode focuses on the development of an artificial intelligence project that claims to be able to mimic Glenn Gould's piano playing, applying his pianistic "style" even to music that the pianist never performed or recorded during his lifetime. What are the creative, artistic, and ethical implications of such an innovation? ...Can artificial intelligence truly be creative? I explore these themes with Dr. Akira Maezawa of Yamaha, who helped to design the fascinating and fearsome technology that Yamaha calls "Dear Glenn." 

Special music credits:

This episode features brief excerpts from Glenn Gould's 1981 recording of the Goldberg Variations by J.S. Bach, made on a Yamaha piano in the last year of the pianist's life. 

This episode features an interview with Gro Nesjar, art historian and daughter of Norwegian artist Carl Nesjar, who pioneered "betograve," an innovative method of sculpting with concrete, and became Pablo Picasso's closest collaborator. Picasso and the much-younger Nesjar created more than 30 works together, in different locations around the world, over a period of 17 years.  In this episode, Gro talks about her experiences growing up with her father and Picasso, the relationship between these two unique artists, and her struggle to preserve the integrity of the murals created by her father and Picasso in Oslo after 2011's terrorist attack in the city. She also discusses her brilliant artistic mother and the difficult relationship between art, artists, and gender in Western culture – a situation that is slowly but surely changing.