EP 250: Honrar la Voz - Lineage, the Body, and Creating Without Pain with Carolina Mama

Kimberly speaks with Carolina Mama: Argentine composer, singer-songwriter, filmmaker and photographer, calling in from Barcelona. They met in Santa Fe and worked together on the photographs for the Erotic Seasons era of Kimberly's work, and this conversation sits at the intersection of artistry, spirituality, liberation and social justice. Carolina traces her ear through the folkloric rhythms that lived in her body before she had names for them, to a full scholarship at the New School in New York and the research through Morocco that led to her debut album, Amina. They talk about making peace with being loved and hated at once, why the audience is a co-author rather than a jury, and the night at Lincoln Center when she understood that a version of herself had just died on stage. The second half provides a peek into the contemporary music industry: where artists are asked to arrive tour ready, audience ready, content ready and team ready with no infrastructure behind them. She speaks about arriving in the U.S. and discovering she was not white here, about gratitude alongside the loss of safety on a working visa, and about the Latina archetype the market keeps handing her, which she refuses. They close on synesthesia and the weave between film and music, on psychology as curiosity rather than analysis, on the trauma frame and what it costs art, on the surname she chose in order to honor her grandfather, and a long exchange about collaboration, elders, and what it means to be in service.   BIO Carolina Mama is an Argentine singer, composer, musician and filmmaker. Her debut solo album, Amina, was released in September 2025, co-produced and recorded in Los Angeles with Lau Noah and Emily Elbert, rooting the folkloric traditions of Latin America and North Africa in the improvisational spirit of jazz and a cinematic sense of narrative. The record takes its name from Amina El Filali, a sixteen year old girl in Larache, Morocco, whose story Carolina encountered while researching folkloric music composed and performed by women; that story, together with her involvement in the Ni Una Menos movement in Argentina, shaped the album into a testimony for silenced lives and a call for gender based violence prevention. She studied film at the Universidad Nacional del Arte in Buenos Aires and was working in the industry by seventeen, before a full scholarship brought her to the New School for Jazz and Contemporary Music in New York, where she chose the Argentine pianist and composer Guillermo Klein as her mentor. A former member of the collective projects Nacarola and Levana, she has sung alongside Juan Carlos Baglietto, Lito Vitale, Julia Zenko and León Gieco, and has performed at Lincoln Center, the Joyce Theater, Pregones Theater and Zinc Bar. She has toured and traveled through Mexico, Europe, South America and Morocco, and splits her time between Brooklyn and Santa Fe. She spoke for this episode from Barcelona. WHAT SHE SHARES How a teenage bedroom in Argentina, one CD at a time, built the ear she still writes with The move to New York, the full scholarship, and the feeling of having touched the ceiling at home Making peace with being loved and hated, and the person who always finds you after the show The audience as co-author: how a room changes the music while it is being played The night at Lincoln Center when the fear did not come, and what she understood from that What intimacy means to her, and why desire and life force come before any song Silence as the condition for the muse, outside the body and inside the head The state of the music industry: smaller rooms, rarer live music, artists asked to arrive fully built Why she stopped subscribing to constant output, and what her body had to do to make that decision What actually supports an artist, and why she will not consume AI music Arriving in the U.S. and discovering she was not white here Gratitude for what the country gave her, alongside the loss of safety on a working visa <li dir="ltr"