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by RNZ
Perlina Lau hosts a weekly show about creativity and culture in Aotearoa.
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- 5 days ago14 min
Pip Steel on boro: the high value Japanese textile art born from poverty
Boro is the Japanese tradition of mending and patching fabric over generations, born in rural farming and fishing communities where nothing could be wasted. The repairs were always done on the back of the cloth, never meant to be seen, and pieces were sometimes built up across seven or eight layers of fabric over decades. Pip Steel stumbled across it while sourcing recycled indigo cotton online, and has since built a collection spanning pieces from the 1860s to the 1950s, acquired entirely without visiting Japan.
- 5 days ago4 min
Central Library hosts The Most Wuthering Heights Day Ever Pōneke
The global Kate Bush phenomenon where participants dress in her iconic red outfit and perform the choreography from the Wuthering Heights video is taking place at its wet weather venue in Wellington's Central Library. Culture 101 crosses to organiser Emma Harrison to find out whether library goers are likely to Shhh the dancers.
- 5 days ago14 min
The 14 hands behind every Crown Lynn cup
Anna Thomas heads to Te Toi Uku Crown Lynn and Clay Museum in West Auckland, where curator and director Louise Stevenson has just reopened the site's 100-year-old kiln, the last surviving structure from the brickmaking era in Auckland. The museum tells the story of four decades of Crown Lynn ceramics including 2,700 patterns, 15 million items a year at peak production, exported around the world, and what Louise describes as 14 pairs of hands involved in making every single cup. Anna also visits the newly restored kiln, now home to an installation by ceramic artist John Parker.
- 5 days ago16 min
Dan Slevin previews the NZ International Film Festival
Dan Slevin joins Culture 101 with a preview of this year's NZ International Film Festival. Films include ARCO, a family animated film co-produced by Natalie Portman about a boy who steals his sister's time travel suit hoping to see dinosaurs but lands in the near future instead; The Ice Tower, in which Marion Cotillard plays a tyrannical 1960s film star who befriends a teenage orphan girl on the set of a Snow Queen adaptation; The Tale of Slilyan, a Macedonian documentary about a farmer whose family has gone to Germany and who finds an unlikely companion in a wounded stork; and Rose, with Sandra Hüller as a disfigured 17th-century woman who survives by disguising herself as a male war veteran.
- 5 days ago7 min
Brett Austin wrote his first novel in retirement, starting with a Google search
Brett Austin decided, after retiring in his late 60s, to try writing a novel. His first step was typing "how do you write a novel" into Google. His debut, Flood Zone, is a Coromandel-set crime thriller built around climate change, a suspicious subdivision on flood-prone land, and the kinds of wealth and power that make things disappear. He joins Culture 101 with advice for anyone thinking about having a go: don't wait.
- 5 days ago16 min
Anton Thomas' maps that are three years in the making
Nelson-born, Melbourne-based artist and cartographer Anton Thomas spent three years on his Wild World map, drawing every one of its 1,642 species on a single original sheet of paper, in pencil, without any sort of digital backup. He describes imagining every disaster scenario including a roof leak, a magpie through the open door, while knowing years of work sat on one piece of paper in his studio. He joins Culture 101 to talk about the process of drawing the world without borders or cities, and why he listens to music from wherever he's drawing to get the sense of place right.
- 5 days ago13 min
Stefan Roesch, head of Film Dunedin on their award winning marketing campaign
Stefan Roesch has spent years studying the relationship between screen tourism and location. His PhD began with a simple question: why would anyone fly to New Zealand just to look at a grassy hill where Hobbiton used to be? Film Dunedin's latest marketing campaign, a short film shot as an actor's casting tape, with James Mustapic playing someone who very much doesn't get the part, has just won a global tourism marketing award. He joins Culture 101 to talk about what screen productions do for destinations after the cameras stop rolling.
- 1 weeks ago18 min
Hutch Wilco, curator of Forever Tomorrow, Auckland Art Gallery's contemporary Chinese art exhibition
Forever Tomorrow: Chinese Art Now at Auckland Art Gallery is the largest survey of contemporary Chinese art ever staged in Aotearoa, spanning 67 works and 42 artists across more than four decades of practice since China's 1978 reforms. Curator Hutch Wilco spent nearly a decade living and working in China, ending up there almost by accident. The exhibition includes Ai Weiwei's famous sequence of photographs dropping a Han dynasty urn, and a huge sculpture that came through the goods lift with less than one centimetre of clearance.
About Culture 101
Perlina Lau hosts a weekly show about creativity and culture in Aotearoa.
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