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Cultural Icons - Conversations with iconic people who have shaped New Zealand’s arts & culture scene.

The Cultural Icons project is a series of recorded interviews and programmes with some of our most significant visual artists, architects, publishers, entrepreneurs, writers, musicians, arts commentators and philanthropists.

The conversations are conducted by the interviewee’s friends or contemporaries and form a fascinating cultural genealogy. Warm, informed and often intimate, the dialogues are a rare insight into these iconic people’s creative journeys, their youthful ambitions, their hurdles, successes and their contributions to New Zealand’s arts and culture scene.

The launch of The Depot’ Cultural Icons website marks two years of the project’s life, from conception and funding to recording and building the multi-media site.  And this is just the beginning.

“We believe the Cultural Icons project will have a profound effect on New Zealand society, providing an opportunity for New Zealanders to find themselves more readily at home in this landscape; as part of a country with its own distinctive cultural vernacular,” says  Linda Blincko, initiator of the Cultural Icons project and Depot Coordinator.

“The project started as a series of interviews with iconic New Zealanders whose work has formed an extensive but largely uncharted cultural landscape. We stumbled upon its fecundity through Jam Radio interviews, initially undertaken by Graeme Lay with local writers, and realised the need to bring this distinctive environment to view.  Where previously we had seen shafts of light cast on particular elements and aspects of the landscape we now sensed the emergence of a whole; meaningful and distinctly identifiable as Aotearoa, New Zealand.” Linda Blincko

The audio interviews are accessible online and provided free of charge.

Thirteen interviews have been made available on the website launch date of 2 February 2011.  A new interview will be released each week.

 “It’s all mystery…you’re in it, you have to discover it, you have to discover yourself in it, give it reason and if you don’t give it reason, there’s no reason for you to be here.  Life needs consciousness”  Alan Pearson from his Cultural Icons interview

“What is ‘New Zealand identity’?  How do we express ourselves through these particular cultural activities which are after all, universal?”  David Eggleton from his Cultural Icons interview

“While I was at TVNZ we would go around the country and interview a lot of old people about their stories and I always thought about my Grandfather and thought ‘man, someone’s got to write his story’”.  Bradford Haami from his Cultural Icons intervie

“My ambition was to be a gangster and I was working on it quite assiduously and in a very disciplined way”. Denys Trussell from his Cultural Icons interview
 

 “Art’s always stepping forward then going back, it does these manoeuvres.  Otherwise we’d be sitting here in a black room with a white square behind us”.   Nigel Brown from his Cultural Icons interview

Website designed by Strategy Auckland.