Future Prospects: A Panel on Personal Utopias
Saturday 7th December
FREE| 1-2pm
Led by critic, writer and WORD Christchurch Programme Director Kiran Dass, hear our panelists talk about creating the utopias they wish to live in. Like Derek Jarman’s Prospect Cottage, each of our panelists have created beauty and innovation in unlikely places. In the shadow of an abandoned nuclear power plant, Jarman turned Prospect Cottage into a place of refuge and creativity. Our panelists – artist and writer Sam Duckor-Jones, writer and community activator Helen Lehndorf, and playwright, producer and director Hone Kouka – have each seen a barren space and filled it with something gratifying.
RSVP appreciated
Writer and critic Kiran Dass is Programme Director for WORD Christchurch and has written about books, music and culture for a variety of publications including NZ Herald, NZ Listener, Guardian, The Wire, North & South, Metro, The Spinoff, RNZ, Sunday magazine, Sunday Star-Times and Vice. In 2020 she was awarded a Michael King Writers Centre Residency, and in 2023 was the Verb Wellington Writer in Residence at Katherine Mansfield House & Garden. Dass was a judge for the 2024 Jann Medlicott Acorn Prize for Fiction at the Ockham New Zealand Book Awards and was convening judge for the same prize in 2021. She reviews books regularly on RNZ's Nine to Noon.
Sam Duckor-Jones is an artist and writer from Te Whanganui-a-Tara. He is represented by Bowen Galleries and has published two collections of poetry with Te Herenga Waka Press. These days he is based in Maawhera where he lives inside his public sculpture work in progress, Gloria of Greymouth.
Writer, teacher and community activator, Helen Lehndorf’s latest book ‘A Forager’s Life’ is a creative nonfiction nature memoir. In 2023 it made the top ten list for NZ nonfiction.
She is also the author of the poetry collection ‘The Comforter’, which made The Listener’s ‘Best Books of 2011’ list, and ‘Write to the Centre’, a book about the life-enhancing practice of keeping a journal.
She is passionate about community food resilience and lives to serve a kaupapa of radical reciprocity…with people and the earth.
Hone Kouka (Ngāti Porou, Ngāti Raukawa, Ngāti Kahungunu) is a father, a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit, an acclaimed Māori writer, producer and director, the youngest winner of the Bruce Mason Playwriting Award and multi-award winner.
In 2022, Hone was named an Arts Foundation Te Tumu Toi Laureate, receiving the Sir Roger Hall Theatre Award.
He has had plays produced in South Africa, Britain, Hawai’i, Canada, Australia, Japan, New Caledonia, as well as throughout New Zealand, with three plays being translated into French, Japanese and Russian. Hone’s plays include Ngā Tangata Toa, Waiora: Te Ūkaipō, The Prophet and Bless The Child.
In 2004, Hone co-founded the production company, Tawata Productions, focusing on the development and presentation of new theatre by Māori and Pasifika artists. Hone became a member of the New Zealand Order of Merit for his services to Contemporary Māori Theatre in June 2009.
Created in 2015, Hone is the Artistic Director & Chief Executive and co-founder of Kia Mau Festival, a Māori, Pasifika and global Indigenous contemporary arts platform based in Te Ūpoko o te Ika a Māui. Hone’s work also extends to the film industry.