Earth Rising: Messages from the Pale Blue Dot

Clara Arnaud

Clara Arnaud

Clara Arnaud is a French writer, winner of the Ecology Novel Prize in France. Her literary work—both fiction and non-fiction—explores political and ecological themes, questioning our way of inhabiting the world. She has travelled extensively off the beaten track, mostly on foot or horseback, and has also worked as a consultant in international cooperation, leading missions across sub-Saharan Africa and Latin America.  Since 2022, Clara has dedicated herself to writing and activism focused on the preservation of mountain ecosystems. She lives year-round in a remote valley in the central Pyrenees. Her writing is naturalistic, paying close attention to physical, geological, and biological phenomena. Inspired by the anthropologist Anna Tsing, her work is driven by the question: How can we best use our research to stem the tide of destruction?

Instagram: @clara.arnaud.ecrivaine

Grubby Mitts

Grubby Mitts

Grubby Mitts are a wilfully eclectic nine-piece art-rock ensemble from Bedford, fronted by artist Andy Holden. Expanded to include a full brass section, the band combine joyful melodic pop, cinematic production and avant-garde experimentation, moving freely between orchestral pop, classical minimalism and post-punk. Their latest releases, the Valediction EP and album Love in the Misanthropocene, explore vulnerability, hope and love amid contemporary political and ecological precarity. Guided by their manifesto, Maximum Irony! Maximum Sincerity, Grubby Mitts balance playful absurdity with genuine emotional force. Their live performances bring music, video and visual art together in what feels like an exhibition in concert form, building through shifting rhythms and emotional registers towards crescendos of cacophonous yelping. They have performed at the ICA, Hayward Gallery, Whitechapel Gallery, Latitude and Austria's Donaufestival, and toured UK artist-run spaces. Warm, strange and exhilarating, they create poignant songs that tread a fine line between sentiment and experimentation.

Website: https://andyholdenartist.com/grubbymitts

Instagram: @grubbymittsband

Portrait of Grubby Mitts. Photography by Eva Vermandel.

Theresa Lola

Theresa Lola

Theresa Lola is a British Nigerian poet and artist. She has performed at the Jazz Cafe, Royal Albert Hall, JAZZx, and ICA. Her second poetry collection Ceremony for the Nameless was awarded the Derek Walcott Poetry Prize, while a poem from her first collection In Search of Equilibrium is studied in the UK's GCSE syllabus. Her debut visual poetry exhibition was Who We Beans. She has been commissioned to write for The National Gallery, Selfridges, and Nest New York. She holds an MSt in Creative Writing from the University of Oxford.

Website: https://www.theresalola.com/
Instagram: @theresa_lola

Image: Portrait of Theresa Lola. Photography by Jolade Olusanya.

Milkweed

Milkweed

Milkweed describe their sound as slacker-trad, which is both true and somehow insufficient. For three years Milkweed have refined a formula — taking existing source material (a folklore journal, a book on Welsh myths, another on Bronze Age human remains and most recently Thomas Kinsella’s masterfully stark translation of the Táin Bó Cúailnge), cutting up the words and feeding them through a woodchipper of lo-fi production and experimental folk music.

Website: milkweedfolk.bandcamp.com

Instagram: @mlkwd_

Image: Portrait of Milkweed. Photography by Poppy Warring.

Sharda Patasar

Sharda Patasar

Sharda Patasar is a musician and writer of Trinidadian parentage. Her creative practice is informed by her training in Indian classical music, its theory and philosophy. She was a grantee of the inaugural Caribbean Culture Fund (2024), for her project ‘Sounding the Caribbean Ecosystem: Women and Music’. The project focused on female musicians. It aimed, through the recording and archiving of ecological and community sounds, to foster critical and creative thinking through music.

In 2022 she was one of a cohort of twelve Caribbean writers selected for the Royal Court UK ‘Writing for Performance’ programme. She brought to the page theatre written in the form of a classical composition (gat) from the North Indian raga system, set to Indian classical and Trinidadian rhythms. Her heritage — Hindu and Caribbean — informs her philosophy of the diaspora. She questions in her performance and concept work, what it means to be all and nothing.

Instagram: @spatasar

Image: Portrait of Sharda Patasar. Photography by Softbox Studios.

Zane Rodulfo

Zane Rodulfo

Zane Rodulfo is a drummer and composer living and working in New York City. Born and raised in Trinidad and Tobago, he holds Bachelor of Music degrees in Jazz Performance and Ethnomusicology from Oberlin Conservatory of Music, and a Masters of Music in Jazz Studies from New York University. A Creative Capital Awardee and National Arts Club Fellow, he has partnered with and been commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum, Whitney Museum, Asian Arts Initiative, The Harlem Arts Alliance, the Brooklyn Arts Council and Hi-ARTS. Rodulfo focuses on publicly engaging work addressing decolonisation, the intersection of traditional and contemporary music, and ideas of transcendence. His work employs electro-acoustic music composition and improvisation, applying multimedia approaches to live performance and installation. A Trinbagonian, the communal and sonic sensibilities of steel band and sound system culture is embedded in his practice, and thus he carries the politics of innovation and resourcefulness amidst material scarcity.

Website: www.zanerodulfo.com

Instagram: @zanerodulfo

Image: Portrait of Zane Rodulfo. Photography by Pelham Goddard.

Nitin Sawhney

Nitin Sawhney

Dr Nitin Sawhney CBE is a globally celebrated musician, composer, and cultural advocate. Raised in South London, he excelled as a classical and jazz pianist, flamenco guitarist, and later studied sitar and tabla. Abandoning a law degree for music in the 1980s, Sawhney has since composed over 70 film and TV scores, released 13 acclaimed solo albums, and earned an Ivor Novello Lifetime Achievement Award, a CBE, and nine honorary doctorates.  His groundbreaking 1999 album Beyond Skin, a Mercury Prize nominee, fused Indian classical, jazz, and electronica, earning a South Bank Show Award. Albums like Prophesy (2001) and Philtre (2005) won MOBO and BBC Radio 3 Awards, while his film scores for The Namesake, Midnight’s Children, and Mowgli: Legend of the Jungle showcased his versatility. His 2025 BAFTA-nominated score for Disney’s Tiger follows his BAFTA-winning Human Planet and other acclaimed works.

Website: www.nitinsawhney.com

Instagram: @nitinsawhney

Portrait of Nitin Sawhney CBE. Photograph by Suki Dhanda.

TÄRA

TÄRA

TÄRA is shaping a sound of her own through a fusion of languages and cultures. As an Italian second-generation artist with Palestinian roots, she transformed her dual heritage into a distinctive musical identity that blurs genres and builds bridges between West Asia and Europe. Recognised within Spotify Equal, TÄRA is emerging as one of the most distinctive voices of a new generation. Her artistic journey is marked by collaborations with artists such as EMEL and Subsonica, positioning her at the intersection of Mediterranean, European, and global contemporary music with a growing international audience. Her latest project, Zefiro, has evolved into a multidimensional experience merging music, visuals, and storytelling, exploring themes of identity, rebirth, and cultural belonging. 

Instagram: @tarawave

Image: Portrait of TÄRA. Photography by Alessia Barontini, with styling by Sabrina Salem.

TIMPANA

TIMPANA

Can we imagine a future that does not need to abandon our roots in order to exist? This question runs through the work of TIMPANA (Alejandra Lanza), a Bolivian artist working across music, performance, and the exploration of the voice. Her work emerges from a process of listening again, recovering and recognising ancient memory, understanding the act of remembering as a way of recognising oneself and, at the same time, of imagining the future. She asks how these roots can enter into dialogue with the present and open a space towards what does not yet exist.

In her music, the sonic memories of Bolivia and other territories meet Indigenous languages such as Quechua and Guaraní, Afro-Andean-Amazonian rhythms, myth, ritual, and electronic music, as in her latest album, Gwandena.

Her discography includes Alma Perdida (2011) and Gwandena (2022), the latter released by the UK-based label Sounds & Colours. She also directed the documentary Viaje al Mar Verde and has collaborated with artists from Mexico, Morocco, Chile, Argentina, Italy, and Tunisia, as well as with international projects and labels Turntables on the Hudson. Her work has taken her across Europe, South America, Central America, the Caribbean, and Mexico. She currently lives and works in Mexico, where she continues to develop her musical and acting practice and is involved in the creation of the label Primavera Anónima, through which she will release her forthcoming work.

Instagram: @TIMPANAmusic

Image: Portrait of TIMPANA. Photography by Alejandra Lanza Lobo.

t l k

t l k

t l k is the artist moniker of vocalist and producer T L Klein. They centre the voice-as-instrument, in live and recorded contexts, with sound palettes formed from vocal layers, found rhythms, analogue synthesis and organic instrumentation. Fluid in genre and form, their works evolve from memory, dialogue, dreams and ongoing explorations into grief, selfhood, human behaviour and its coalescence and tensions with the non-human. t l k draws from far-reaching philosophical fabrics, including Taoism, minimalism, chaos theory, Deep Listening and the Internal Family Systems (IFS) model of psychotherapy. The core of t l k's artistic practice is rooted in 'The (act of) Noticing’, which forms the basis of their upcoming debut album.

Website: tlkvox.com
Instagram: @tlkvox

Image: Portrait of t l k. Photography by Giulia Spadafora.

Tong Wenmin

Tong Wenmin

Tong Wenmin is an artist working with performance, video, and installation, focusing on the way individual perception interacts with the physical world through actions that first appear counter-intuitive. Her work explores corporeal forms and the role of the body in meaning-making. She received her BFA from Sichuan Fine Arts Institute in 2012. Her work has been shown in solo and duo exhibitions including Macalline Art Center, Beijing; HOW Art Museum, Shanghai; He Art Museum, Guangdong; By Art Matters, Hangzhou; WHITE SPACE, Beijing. Wenmin’s work has also been shown in group exhibitions and festivals across China, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, Austria, Denmark, Norway, Germany, Israel, Australia, and the United States. She has taken part in residencies including MQ Artist-in-Residence: Art & Ecology Studio, Vienna, The Swiss Arts Council Artists’ Residency, and Offshore Residency, Dinawan Island. She won the Grand Jury Prize of the Huayu Youth Award (2018), First Prize in the 8th New Star Art Award (2018), and a nomination for the 5th Contemporary Sculpture Award (2017), among others. Tong lives and works in Chongqing.

Instagram: @tongwenmin

Image: Portrait of Tong Wenmin. Photography by Shen Chen.

Duruo Wang and Wenxin Zhang

Duruo Wang and Wenxin Zhang

Duruo Wang and Wenxin Zhang are interdisciplinary artists working collectively through The Con(tra)cave, a long-term artistic research project that examines issues of representation through a feminist lens. Rooted in their encounters with spaces historically marked as ‘sunken fields’ and geologically characterised as caves and concavities in the karst landscape of Southwest China, the project interrogates the political and cultural narratives that shape normative regimes of intelligibility and visibility. The Con(tra)cave is conceived as a practice of ‘unworlding’—it unsettles the demand for inclusion within established forms, while remaining attentive to the material and reproductive dependencies that sustain sociality.

Website: www.zhangwenxin.com

Instagram: @_duruo_ | @wenxinzhang

Image: Portrait of Duruo Wang and Wenxin Zhang. Photography by Huang Yi.