South America
Album: Shearwater - The Great AwakeningThursday, 09 June 2022
The title The Great Awakening is a metaphor for America’s switch from its previous presidential administration to the current: the arrival of a new era and, with it, a fresh phase of life. Emblematic of this is the xenarthran, a type of armadillo,... Read more... |
Alejandro Zambra: Chilean Poet review - from here to paternityTuesday, 05 April 2022
Time-honoured advice warns actors never to work with children or animals. Perhaps the literary equivalent should tell novelists not to invent other writers in their books. Especially poets. Unless you can command a wholly convincing poetic idiom of... Read more... |
Blu-ray/DVD: The Invisible Life of Eurídice GusmãoSunday, 27 March 2022
Karim Aïnouz’s Cannes Palme d’Or winner and Brazilian Oscar entry is advertised as “a tropical melodrama”, and its Rio seems barely to have left the jungle. We first meet sisters Eurídice (Carol Duarte) and Guida (Julia Stockler, pictured below)... Read more... |
‘Let me be your main course’: composer Jimmy López on why new music needs time and spaceTuesday, 22 February 2022
No, not your aperitif – and certainly not your digestif; your bona fide main dish, the one your audience yearns for, dresses up for, and looks forward to.It’s 2022; time for arts leaders to show the way into the future and to not underestimate the... Read more... |
theartsdesk Radio Show 32: a conversation with Matt Johnson of The TheSaturday, 06 November 2021
Peter Culshaw’s occasional global music radio show returns with a two-hour conversation with one of the most innovative and enduring post-punk artists.TO LISTEN TO THE SHOW CLICK THIS LINKMatt Johnson, under his nom de guerre The The emerged into... Read more... |
Documenting the unimaginable: photographer Sebastião Salgado talks about climate change, dodging caimans and changing perspectivesThursday, 21 October 2021
Sebastião Salgado has carved out his career by documenting the unimaginable. He takes areas of life all too often ignored by wealthy westerners and reveals them in mesmerising, teeming detail.To look at one of his photographs is to experience... Read more... |
Album: Bebel Gilberto - AgoraThursday, 20 August 2020
The title, translated from the Portuguese, is “now” – an immediacy that, on first listen, seems apt for Bebel Gilberto’s lush and loose Agora. Originally scheduled for a May release, the Brazilian singer’s first album in six years sings with a... Read more... |
The Dead and the Others review – dreamlike journey set in indigenous Brazilian communityFriday, 26 June 2020
The Dead and the Others won the Un Certain Regard Jury Prize at Cannes in 2018, perhaps due to the supreme devotion to subject and place that this macabre work exhibits. It is a film of startling visual power and mood, with a drifting storyline that... Read more... |
Chris Packham: 7.7 Billion People and Counting, BBC Two review - is it too late to get population growth under control?Wednesday, 22 January 2020
We hear plenty of debate about climate change and its disastrous potential, but the ballooning growth of the world’s population may be the most critical issue facing humankind. Chris Packham thinks so (“it’s undeniably the elephant in the room,” he... Read more... |
Album: Las Cobras - SelvaTuesday, 14 January 2020
Selva is the sophomore album from Uruguay’s arch tripsters, Las Cobras. More ethereal and even less direct than its predecessor, Temporal, it is a disc of dark and dreamlike psychedelia that brings to mind the possibilities of the Jesus and Mary... Read more... |
CD: Los Lobos - LLegó NavidadMonday, 09 December 2019
In a season awash with limp carols, dodgy glam-rock and schmaltzy jazz, all credit to Los Lobos for coming up with something different. LLegó Navidad (Christmas is Here) contains 12 festive folk songs, mostly hailing from Latin America.... Read more... |
Anna Maria Maiolino: Making Love Revolutionary, Whitechapel Gallery review – a gentle rebellionThursday, 10 October 2019
Now in her mid-seventies, Anna Maria Maiolino has been making work for six decades. Its a long stretch to cover in an exhibition, especially when the artist is not well known. Perhaps inevitably, then, this Whitechapel Gallery retrospective seems... Read more... |
