Episode 5 is an eclectic jaunt with artist Emily Carris-Duncan and host Katleho Kano Shoro. Emily Carris-Duncan is an artist, a budding agriculturalist, and co-founder of the Art Dept in Philadelphia who is now based in Vermont. In this conversation, Emily describes how she transforms rocks into color, how she uses histories of black crafting to transform absence into ancestry, and her plans as a space-maker to someday build a ship out of here. 

ABOUT THE ARTIST
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Emily Carris-Duncan (she/they) is an artist, educator, budding agriculturalist. She/they have a BA in education and photography from Eugene Lang College in New York and  holds a master's degree in photography from UCA in Kent, England. Their work exploring the personal and cultural legacy of slavery and the Black female body has been exhibited both nationally and internationally including at the Cooper Union in, Islington Art Factory in London, The Colored Girls Museum in Philadelphia, as well as EFA Project Space in New York. She/They have been a visiting fellow at The Center For Experimental Ethnography at the University of Pennsylvania. 
She/They uses textiles to unearth and preserve the untold stories of their ancestors by morphing the everyday objects that hold the traces of pain and trauma. Her/Their desire is to heal historical wounds. Carris-Duncan is  are a lover of yellow and the smell of burnt onions makes her immediately happy. A space-maker, she/they is the founder of the residency space, High Pastures, in Vermont as well as the founder of the former non-profit interdisciplinary studio and community creative space, The Art Dept.  ​
ABOUT THE HOST
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Katleho Kano Shoro  is a South African-born Benjamin Franklin Fellow pursuing a PhD in Anthropology. She has worked as a researcher within the museum, education, arts and healthcare sectors. Through her work, she pays attention to epistemology, mainly, the multiplicity of knowledge and how knowledges are made accessible through various mediums. This interest, as well as the fact that she is a practising poet, informs Katleho’s inclinations towards (South) African indigenous knowledge systems, decolonial education, philosophies of (South) African aesthetics, and arts-based research methods. Based on her keen interest in interdisciplinary scholarship, Katleho is an Honorary Research Affiliate of the Archive and Public Culture Research Initiative (University of Cape Town) as well as a member of the South African Poetry Project (ZAPP)