CHRIS DERCON

CHRIS DERCON

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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


Mia Funk is an artist, interviewer and founder of The Creative Process. 

(Highlights) IAN BURUMA

(Highlights) IAN BURUMA

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Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. 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).

IAN BURUMA

IAN BURUMA

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Ian Buruma is the author of many books, including A Tokyo Romance, The Churchill Complex,Their Promised Land, Year Zero, The China Lover, Murder in Amsterdam, Occidentalism and God’s Dust. He teaches at Bard College and is a columnist for Project Syndicate and contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times, and other publications. He was awarded the 2008 Erasmus Prize for making "an especially important contribution to European culture" and was voted one of the Top 100 Public Intellectuals
by the Foreign Policy magazine.

This interview was conducted by Mia Funk & Lexi Kayser with the participation of collaborating universities and students. 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).

(Highlights) RICHARD D. WOLFF

(Highlights) RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.

RICHARD D. WOLFF

RICHARD D. WOLFF

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Founder of Democracy at Work · Host of Economic Update
Author of The Sickness is the System: When Capitalism Fails to Save Us from Pandemics or Itself

You can criticize many things in the United States, but there are taboos and the number one taboo is that you cannot criticize Capitalism. That is equated with disloyalty…This story about Capitalism being wonderful. This story is fading. You can’t do that anymore. The Right Wing cannot rally its troops around Capitalism. That’s why it doesn’t do it anymore. It rallies the troops around being hateful towards immigrants. It rallies the troops around “fake elections”, around the right to buy a gun, around White Supremacists. Those issues can get some support, but “Let’s get together for Capitalism!” That is bad. They can’t do anything with that. They have to sneak the Capitalism in behind those other issues because otherwise, they have no mass political support.

(Highlights) BRIAN WILCOX

(Highlights) BRIAN WILCOX

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Chief Engineer & Co-founder of Marine BioEnergy
Grows Kelp in the Ocean to Provide Carbon-neutral Fuels

The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for thousands and millions of people, phenomenal sacrifices that people make. When you see what some people do and the risks they take. I have basically found my job for the remaining years that I have on the earth to try to make the world a better place.

BRIAN WILCOX

BRIAN WILCOX

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Chief Engineer & Co-founder of Marine BioEnergy
Grows Kelp in the Ocean to Provide Carbon-neutral Fuels

The kelp plant itself can grow to 30 meters easily, and sometimes 40 meters, so it’s a huge plant…When people look around the world today, seeing the news, making the world a better place is getting increasingly important. People have to pay attention to what they can do as individuals to make the world a better place. The world is not going to become a good place on its own. If there weren’t for thousands and millions of people, phenomenal sacrifices that people make. When you see what some people do and the risks they take. I have basically found my job for the remaining years that I have on the earth to try to make the world a better place.

(Highlights) GAIA VINCE

(Highlights) GAIA VINCE

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Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time · Adventures in the Anthropocene

The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.

GAIA VINCE

GAIA VINCE

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Science Writer, Broadcaster & Author
Transcendence: How Humans Evolved Through Fire, Language, Beauty & Time · Adventures in the Anthropocene

The good thing about our species is that we create our own environment. What we’ve been doing so far is creating an environment where we’re much more successful. We live a lot longer, we’re much healthier than we have been in the past. There are many, many more of us, so we’re very successful as a species and that’s been at the expense of other ecosystems, but what’s happened is we are now dominating the planet to a dangerous degree, but we are also self-aware. We’re capable of understanding that.

(Highlights) MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
MARY EDNA FRASER & ORRIN H. PILKEY
(Highlights) JANE MADGWICK

(Highlights) JANE MADGWICK

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Ecologist & CEO of Wetlands International
Co-author of Water Lands: A vision for the world’s wetlands and their people
Wetlands naturally absorb twice the amount of carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
I think everybody at school learns about the water cycle. That rings a bell with everybody. Maybe this is a good hook to show the place of wetlands in capturing and purifying and the story of water. And then in turn how this links to what we’re seeing every year: droughts, floods, fires, heat waves which are devastating and life-threatening. I think this may be one of the easiest routes in educating people, connecting wetlands with water and the direct impact of that.

JANE MADGWICK

JANE MADGWICK

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Ecologist & CEO of Wetlands International
Co-author of Water Lands: A vision for the world’s wetlands and their people
Wetlands naturally absorb twice the amount of carbon than all the world’s forests combined.
I think everybody at school learns about the water cycle. That rings a bell with everybody. Maybe this is a good hook to show the place of wetlands in capturing and purifying and the story of water. And then in turn how this links to what we’re seeing every year: droughts, floods, fires, heat waves which are devastating and life-threatening. I think this may be one of the easiest routes in educating people, connecting wetlands with water and the direct impact of that.

(Highlights) OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

(Highlights) OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

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Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

OSPREY ORIELLE LAKE

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Founder & Executive Director of the Women's Earth & Climate Action Network International

Author of Uprisings for the Earth: Reconnecting Culture with Nature & Artist

There’s a wide range of reasons that we really need to understand the root causes of a lot of our social ills and environmental ills. I think we need to continue to come back to this question of how we heal this imposed divide between the natural world and human social constructs. And that healing is key to how we’re going to really unwind the perilous moment that we face right now. How do we reconnect with the natural world? Not just intellectually, but in a very embodied way.

(Highlights) JACQUES FRANCK

(Highlights) JACQUES FRANCK

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Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA
Interview Highlights

Well, I have always considered Leonardo as the perfect artist, and more or less like a father. The real master is a kind of a father figure. So, to help me understand better, improve myself, know more, make the proper efforts and listen to someone who is so knowledgeable that in listening to what he says you will make real progress. I was listening to Maria Callas some time ago, because when she came to Paris in 1968 she was in the Opéra Paris, and she was in a concert. Music was in her psychology. In Leonardo, art was in his psychology, as an expression of the mystery of life in him. The same in Callas. I'm always observing artists performing because it's very interesting to observe. She was living in another dimension. As if she were connected to an invisible source, and that invisible source suddenly gave her genius. On top of all she'd been learning technically, so she had the art, the architectural setting of the technique. So she couldn't fail, because of course what she was singing was very difficult, but also, suddenly, life came into it.

JACQUES FRANCK

JACQUES FRANCK

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Painter and Art Historian for Louvre Museum & Armand Hammer Center for Leonardo Studies at UCLA

Da Vinci certainly must have been very well organized because you can't make so much work without a base in the organization of your life which is very strict. You can't go and penetrate such high intellectual spheres unless you're a man of good. Do you understand what I mean? To have some ideal of perfection, beauty, and humanity inside yourself…Art is art, and that's all. To me, art is the expression of beauty, and beauty is something like the sun, shall we say. An absolute.

MASTER SHI HENG YI

MASTER SHI HENG YI

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35th Generation of Shaolin Masters
Headmaster of the Shaolin Temple Europe

Just getting to know what is Buddhism, which is the foundation of every monastery. The Shaolin Temple is in the core, first of all, it’s a Buddhist monastery and when you are starting to read about Buddhism, one of the key sentences, in the beginning, is: With your thoughts, you are creating the world…So it’s very rarely clearly stated that it is the thoughts that are creating the world. Nevertheless, if you are now looking at the practices that the Shaolin Temple offers, that is quite physical. There is a lot of physicality in there, so you might think but why are you saying with thoughts you create the world, but you have so many different physical activities. It is because if you want to have mental freedom. If you want to approach freedom, you cannot just approach freedom by doing things or trying to chase freedom. The freedom that we are looking for is the type of freedom that is derived and that is very closely related to its counterpart, which is very hard restriction or very hard structure. So if you want to experience what freedom is, look at the restrictions of your life.

(Highlights) PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

(Highlights) PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

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Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

PROF. BAYYINAH BELLO

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Founder of Fondasyon Felicitee
Afrodescendant Ourstorian, Educator, Writer & Humanitarian

It’s true. In Haiti, to a large degree more women were involved in the Revolution, in the war, in the fighting for the nation for the very simple reason that women had more opportunities. After a certain time, we became invisible. Once you’re in your 60’s, you are missing a few front teeth, in fact, some of the women used to take a stone and break up their front teeth so that they wouldn’t be noticed anymore. “That’s just an old lady with no front teeth. Okay, she goes about her business, nobody looks at her. She can do nothing.” And those were the fighters–the greatest fighters of our revolution.