This Beautiful Shot is Not an Accident: Recent Episodes
Laura J. Lukitsch, Filmmaker and Story Consultant
This Beautiful Shot is Not an Accident is a podcast that examines design thinking, storytelling and social change. Designed for change making executive directors, development professionals and purpose-driven entrepreneurs who are looking to use story and video to increase their reach and make a bigger impact in the world. In the podcast you’ll meet creative directors, filmmakers, advocates, policy advisors and more, in conversation with Laura J. Lukitsch, online video strategist and filmmaker. Learn more about the series at thisbeautifulshot.com. Produced by Global Performance Media, globalperformancemedia.com.
“This is what I am, do you read me?” Cleopatra Kambugu is a biologist, activist and transgender film personality. Her wish to understand her gender expression led her to study genetics and molecular biology in university and later undergo surgery to help others decode what she felt she already was. In today’s episode we talk about Cleopatra’s resilience, her experience in Uganda during the threats that came in 2013 with the Anti-Homosexual Act, her participation in the award-winning documentary, Pearl of Africa, and her ideas about change, that change is a marathon, we are planting seeds take time to grow. And while they grow we must remember it is important to enjoy the life we have.
Can books from one culture bring empathy to people from very different backgrounds and experiences? Post-doctoral research Tom Kellner is researching the translatability of Israeli literature being published in Germany. In this episode we speak about the process of understanding what books sell, why they sell, and the possible reasons for which works readers read. What readers understand and if empathy increased from reading the stories from another culture is more difficult to determine. Kellner shares a different definition of empathy, one from philosopher Emmanuel Levinus, that empathy is accepting that people are different and we do not understand them. And yet we care. Join us as we explore these ideas.
Biases in search engines are not only an issue of algorithms, our bias is built into the beliefs we have about the world. And our beliefs are influenced by the stories we absorb through our culture and more and more the information we find online. Today I’m speaking with Michelle M. Wright, distinguished professor or literature and Emery College. She has been researching how blackness is constructed through the stories that are told in the public sphere. Today we talk about new stories coming into the culture and ways we can strive to be more inclusive when telling our own stories, looking at the questions we ask others and holding space for ambiguity.
This season I’m in conversation with academics, artists and changemakers about empathy, storytelling and bridging divides. We will be talking about storytelling as it relates to economics, design, literature and beyond. We are all in the process of re-imaging our world. Can empathy help us be more inclusive, kind, compassionate and effective storytellers for change?
Inclusion and equity don’t just happen because it is part of your mission statement. Creating a space where all members feel a sense of belonging is a process. And today I am in conversation with Dori Tunstall who has been working in the area of diversity, equity, inclusion and decolonization. Dori Tunstall is Dean of Design at Ontario College of Art and Design University in Toronto, Canada. Our conversation stretches from language of inclusion to the insights that mushrooms and design thinking bring to our understanding of our fundamental interconnectedness.
What is needed to create an economic system that supports human and planetary flourishing? Renegade Economist Della Duncan speaks about what is needed, deeper connection with our values. Della is founder and co-host of the Upstream Podcast where she invites listeners to imagine what a sustainable, just and democratic economy might look like. In our conversation Della shares the journey she took to reimagining economics, and shares ways we can move from consumption to connection.
Today I’m talking to filmmaker, installation artist and photographer Mischa Leinkauf whose work explores the borders, borders of buildings, bridges, public space, laws, and nation states. This season I’ve been talking to artists about their first solo show. Many of his works are performative interventions and the definition of a show is somewhat nebulous. Who sees the work, when they see the work, do they even know it is a work?
The ecology of emotions is a concept Wild Anima, musician and sound artist Alex Alexopolous has been developing. It is a practice of mending the broken parts through our inner process of photosynthesis. Her sound work and artistic practice center around the heart and healing through nature, meditation and love. Our conversation explores these connections, moving beyond the inner voice and acute shyness, and the importance of keeping a creative process.
Time and a sense of new possibilities are essential for the creative process. Today’s episode was recorded during the fourth week of my artist residency. I speak with the co-creators of KuBa Kulturabahnhof where I’ve been in residence for a month about the artistic process and the gifts of the residency sharing space with the villages of Klien Warnow and beyond. I also speak with the artistic team of Hyenaz, Kathryn Fischer and Adrienne Teicher about their week of research on the topic of extraction, capitalism and the arts.
This week painter Jamila Barakat and video/audio artist Laura J. Lukitsch speak about how their work has developed during the three weeks at the artist residency at KuBa Kulturbahnhof. Jamila shares how she was able to break through her previous painting style to find a new dialect to her painting language and Laura found a way to incorporate augmented audio into her installation. The conversation documents their lessons learned both in terms of their work and their way of thinking about the inner critic. And they share reminders of methods they use to reconnect to their creative flow and inner voice.
The creative process is not a straight line. This week painter Jamila Barakat and video/audio artist Laura J. Lukitsch share reflections on their creative process during their artist residency at KuBa Kulturbahnhof. The conversation covers feeling like a fraud, thoughts on beauty and disgust and a discussion on finding balance between pleasant and controversial material.
Have you been curious about what happens at an artist residency? Painter Jamila Barakat and video/audio artist Laura J. Lukitsch share their reflections on their first artist residency. They talk about the creative process, embracing happiness and failure, self-esteem, past projects and what they want to accomplish during their weeks at the Kuba Kulturbahnhof, 2.5 hours outside of Berlin, Germany
Katze is a Chinese artist and curator living in Berlin. In today’s conversation, we travel from a buried treasure in a school ground in China to marching down the streets of Berlin while remembering the events of 1989 in both countries. Her work is a deep meditation on freedom and the forms it takes across the spectrum of political and personal circumstances. This is a question the continues to be relevant across space and time.
Shasta Ellenbogen is a musician, violist and founder of Classical Sundays, a classical music series bringing new audiences to the classical music genre through an innovative way of curating concerts in Berlin, Germany. In today’s conversation, we talk about the culture of classical music, finding the strength to do one’s own thing, the challenges of leadership across cultures, and Shasta’s hope for the future of Classical Music.
Radio Producer and artist Gabi Schaffner has been creating audio experiences in the realm of field recording music fusions and collaborative garden based radio programs. In our conversation, Gabi shared insights into her artistic trajectory and the links between her work and her view of the worlds of nature and culture.
Artist Maria Thereza Alves has been investigating the histories and circumstances of particular locations to bear witness to stories that have been silenced. Her work makes visible the impacts of an economic practice that fails to view nature as alive: from documenting the intercontinental transportation of seeds to the bringing to life a singular dying mountain in Brazil. In our conversation, we spoke about her placed-based artistic process and how it has evolved after moving to Berlin.
Visual artist and author Jennifer Bennett’s work explores boundaries and otherness, diversity and exclusion. In our conversation, we talked about her book, SAVE, which documents her travels since 2010 from Paris to Mexico and the US. In discussing her first work she also talks about the role of privilege in the ability to become an artist. Our conversation traversed from soil and free speech and a wide range of topics in between.
Sound artist Jens-Uwe Dyffort listens to the architecture of space and along with artist Roswitha von den Driesch, creates spatial audio installations and environmental audio work for galleries and public spaces. The work, through a web of sound that bounces, moves, swells, and circles, brings a new awareness to the places we occupy. In February we met up and spoke about the process of creating spacial audio work.
Cultural worker, artist, curator and author Mikala Hyldig Dal today employs radical optimism combined with realism to engage with complex issues like housing in the time of gentrification. Mikala’s first solo, Who’s Afraid, looked at ISIS videos and political role plays. We talk about her work, influences, and utopian dreams.
Many of us have a voice in our head that keeps us for doing our work. Tone Haldrup Lorenzen, a performance artist, director and co-founder of the feminist theater, had such a voice. This season I am talking to artists about their first solo show. Tone shares about overcoming this destructive voice and pushing forward, performing her first solo and directing her first show and learning from the bumps along the way.
This season I’m in conversations with artists about their first solo show, the risks taken, lessons learned, as well as the curiosity and commitment it takes to continue exploring, creating and communicating. Over the course of 2020, I'll be talking to 10 international artists living in or exhibiting in Berlin, Germany.
This Beautiful Shot is Not an Accident, is a podcast about the creative process, storytelling and social change. Each season I share conversations with international artists, thinkers and changemakers about their work and creative process with the hopes of inspiring you to share your own stories and ideas for making change. This season, I spoke with 10 artists and thinkers about the art of listening. Check out Season 2 and hear from dancers, musicians, a radio host, writer, artists, and more.
Today I’m talking about research-based artistic practice with two members of the bi’bak creative team who co-produced the exhibition, Bitter Things, Narratives and Memories of Transnational Families (along with co-artistic director, Can Sungu). In today’s episode, we speak about the process of finding a story. How a series of conversations can lead to an idea that inspires a team to spend two years crossing Europe and many layers of legal and personal research to learn about a part of the migration story that has had little academic attention but a lot of representation in popular culture.
Today I’m talking to Italian artist, musician, radio host and founder of StreetUniverCity, Giò De Sera, also known as, Don Rispetto. Giò’s radio and StreetUniverCity work focuses on bringing context and history of hip hop to the youth of Kreuzberg. The themes he chooses to highlight reflect the needs of that community and their way of experiencing the world. In today’s episode Gió shares some difficult subjects including the impact of bullying/ or mobbing on the community as well as gentrification and the growth of consumer culture. He also talks about teaching the youth about empowerment and the importance of trusting themselves and the rewards that come from helping the youth to move forward in life.
Today I’m talking to French author and artist Mathilde Ramadier about the power of observation and the importance of listening to nature. Mathilde has written about work, sexism and most recently deep ecology. The foundation of much of her writing is taking time to be aware of what is happening around us. In France, a defining moment for Mathilde as well as hundreds of French people has been the resignation of the Environmental Minister, Nicolas Hulot, in September 2018, over the lack of power of the government to fight lobbyist interests. Our conversation traversed the creative process, Freud’s assessment of the humiliation of man, to the philosophy of permaculture.
Today I’m talking to French musician, improviser and composer, Marion Ruault. While she has studied jazz, classical and many forms of world music and performed in various collaborations around Europe, during her two years living in Berlin, Marion focused on expanding her improvisational practices.
We spoke about the freedom and responsibility that comes with playing improvised music about the need to find a balance between one’s impulses on what’s happening in the group. Listening is an important part of this practice.
We also spoke about her first solo performance and the challenge of making mistakes in public, and how making mistakes can be the best way forward for one’s development as an artist.
In this episode, I talk to French noise artist, Mathieu Sylvestre about listening. As an artist, he plays live experimental works and sometimes composes for film and theater. When composing for others, he speaks about the challenge of translating what is heard and felt by one person to another. He suggests that the act of hearing reveals the personality behind the ear. This episode was recorded outside in Volkspark Friedrichshain in Berlin.
In the spring of 2019 I attended a Tree Sound Walk organized by French artist Karine Bonneval, who works on the topic of human-plant relations. She was as artist-in-residence at the Berlin gallery, Gru_nd with her project, De’jardiner, or De-Gardening. We spoke about her work in finding ways to help humans share empathy with plants. As Karine states, plants don’t have eyes or ears but they can feel and see and listen. They just use other tools. Many of her works involve creating ways to bring out the sounds of plants so we as humans can listen to plant lives.
In this episode I spoke with composer, performer, and media artist Pamela Z, about her process of collecting sounds to create compositions, using samples from the environment, interviews and her own voice. Her practice has shown her that observing is an active role. We spoke about how a work is not truly finished until an audience has heard it.
In winter 2018 I spoke dancer Márcio Kerber Canabarro about listening as a kinetic practice. Beyond dance, he sees listening to the self as a way of understanding others better.
This season I am talking to artists and thinkers about the art of listening. In winter 2018 I spoke to choreographer and performer, Sara Shelton Mann In the winter of 2018, Sara Shelton Mann brought Echo/Listening Through Walls to Dock 11 in Berlin, Germany, in collaboration with Anya Cloud and Jesse Zaritt, and composer Pamela Z. For the podcast, we spoke about listening as a full-body experience. As a dancer, listening with the body is natural but a car accident reduced Sara’s hearing and required her to find other ways of listening. She shares how she listens into space, listens to her life force, to others and to the divine. Sara reflected on listening as one part of the equation of communication, reflecting on how our thoughts impact what we hear and how we interact.
This season I am talking to artists and thinkers about the art of listening. In winter 2018 I spoke dancer and choreographer Yannis Adoniou about his work and how listening influences his practice. He spoke about the importance of making conscious choices of what we listen to and how we give feedback.
Building empathy is a fundamental part of the design thinking process, and that often takes place through direct conversations. IOBY’s has developed an innovative way of pairing a tech-based crowdfunding platform with on the ground organizing to foster social change one small campaign at a time. In this episode, I spoke with Katie Lorah, Director of Communications and Creative Strategy about testing ideas and creating prototypes within a community. Sometimes the simplest ideas, including the use of zip ties or lawnmowers, have the biggest impacts.
When working on social change issues, how do we stay positive? That is a question I asked EMILIA Gutierrez, Director of Online Engagement at Amnesty International USA. Emilia started her journey in social change work on the campaign trail for Obama and has experience working in new media. For all that tech promises, one of her best tests for a good story is if her mother understands the message. Whether she is asking her mother or supporters, having empathy for the audience is key to the success of her storytelling approach. I think you’ll find that Emilia’s energy and enthusiasm are contagious. I hope this episode gives you storytelling ideas as well as some strategies to stay positive on your journey for change.
In this episode, I speak to Stephanie Romig, a designer and social entrepreneur. As a designer, she leverages narrative design to create solutions for public spaces. We speak about the use of questions as a valuable but often overlooked tool for building stories that bridge different stakeholders. In addition to being a designer of places, created Goodmakes, where mothers come to learn fabric design while sharing stories of motherhood. There is magic in asking questions and listening deeply, solidarity in story, and out of this something truly beautiful can be birthed.
In this episode, I speak to bike activist JP Amaral about narratives that change a city. When JP fell in love with biking in 2007, it was said that biking in Sao Paolo was impossible. By 2017, Sao Paolo had over 74 miles of bike lanes and a bike sharing program with over 1,000 bikes. I spoke to JP about this transformation. In 2010 he helped form Bike Anjo, bike angle, helping people new to cycling. JP shares strategies he used for building a pro cycling narrative, including storytelling formulas, the importance of collaborations and how to build momentum across political tenures.
In today’s episode Fay Darmawi, founder of the San Francisco Urban Film Fest, talks about the power storytelling to humanize policy work. Fay had been working in affordable housing finance for twenty years when the program supporting affordable housing financing was suddenly cut without any public outcry. She decided to explore ways of promoting public narratives around specialized topics like urban planning with both her film festival and activist documentary series, Society’s Soul.
As Development Director of a California Montessori school, Chiara Sani is responsible for raising millions of dollars. She decided to use video as part of their fundraising communications strategy. It was her first time working with video and the process involved both unexpected bumps and rewards. In today’s episode, we’ll hear about this journey. We’ll also hear Chiara’s reason for choosing video as a tool.
In today’s episode, we talk about key ingredients for successful design projects. I speak with Matt Silverman, Executive Creative Director and founder of the motion design studio Swordfish, and Kathryn Bodle, Executive Producer. They share that no matter the size of client, successful projects are based on having a powerful story and taking the time to plan. Matt and Kathryn share best practices for both story development and planning.
You may not be able to imagine a time without easy access to cameras, but that was the situation in the US in the 1930s. Roosevelt sent out photographers to document the lives of Americans. Those images inspired congress to understand the impact of the Great Depression and to provide programs to help. In today’s episode, I speak with Darcy Brown, Executive Director at San Francisco Beautiful and Peter Clarke, Communications Manager about using video to share stories of people within their community to bring attention and empathy to different groups who do not have a voice in today’s media.
In today’s episode, I speak with Maya Zuckerman, a regenerative entrepreneur, speaker and culture hacker. We talk about social change organizations and the importance of vision, defining what one stands for as opposed to what one stands against. We discuss the specifics involved in building these stories from understanding your stakeholders, to defining your own vision, to the importance of testing your messages. Maya has been researching movement building and the power of story to impact social change.
In today’s episode, I speak with Ray Wan, creative director of Earthjustice. You may know Earthjustice from their tagline, “Because the Earth needs a good lawyer,” and their work for the environment, wildlife and community health. We met up a few weeks after Trump entered office and spoke about the need for more simplicity in messaging, how decisions are impacted by emotions, and how they leverage video on Facebook. Ray speaks about the importance of coming together, speaking out and fighting hard.