For centuries, the story told about Latin and Native American cultures was one of conquest and extraction. Enid Brun tells a different one. Through Nativas – the non-profit platform she founded to connect Indigenous and Latin American women artists, makers and thinkers to the rest of the world – she traces what she calls “the creative migration”: the movement of the art, wisdom and worldview of the Americas into global culture, on its own terms. Having shaped brand campaigns for the likes of Adidas and Swatch before building Nativas, Enid speaks to both sides – how this creativity is already reshaping music, design and fashion worldwide, and the difference between collaboration that honours a culture and appropriation. Her argument is that the centre of creative gravity is shifting, and the brands and creatives who learn who is actually shaping culture and how to work with them with respect, will have a better chance at defining what comes next.

Speakers: Enid Brun, President & Founder of cultural media platform Nativas. Ex. DDB, Reebok, Swatch.

Creative technology is moving faster than the industry can keep up. AI can generate a campaign in minutes, new tools appear weekly, and the definition of “creative work” is being rewritten in real time. When everyone has access to the same tools, can an agency still find a genuinely original idea or is innovation just making us faster and not better? In this live edition of Uncut, The Subthread’s editor-in-chief Alex Zeevalkink sits down with two of the sharpest creative leaders to get honest about how they innovate and to get their take on the future of creative innovation.

Speakers: Dillah Zakbah, Deputy ECD at Fold7; Wayne Deakin, Chief Creative Officer at Bray Leino; Alex Zeevalkink, Editor-in-chief of The Subthread (Host)

Most of us now experience the internet through a handful of algorithmic feeds, all of us more or less scrolling the same thing. But there’s another side to the web, and that one is more personal, handmade, strange, and built for joy rather than to sell anything. Matt Muir has spent over a decade cataloguing it in his weekly newsletter Web Curios, and co-founded the Tiny Awards to celebrate the small, non-commercial sites people make for the hell of it. In this talk he takes the audience spelunking through the internet’s overlooked corners – the sites that probably won’t trend and aren’t trying to monetise you or your data – and shows why creative people would do well to spend less time in their feed and more time exploring. Expect a tour of genuinely surprising things, and quite a few super creative ideas worth stealing.

Speakers: Matt Muir, Founder of Web Curious and Tiny Awards

Everything is starting to look the same – the same fonts, the same tone of voice, the same safe ideas. We’re going through a “blandemic”: a creeping normalisation of culture that has become the enemy of original work.

This is what motivates this talk by Elliot Pigram, managing director of cultural insights studio Øutlier, in which they'll makes the case that the antidote isn’t found in the middle, but at the edges. It hides in the weird, the niche and the overlooked corners most brands are too nervous to go near. Drawing on Studio Øutlier’s research, they’ll show why the fringes of culture are where distinctiveness actually lives, and how strategists and creatives can escape the age of average and make work an audience remembers.

Speakers: Elliot Pigram, Managing Director of Studio Øutlier

Games like Red Dead Redemption don’t just depict the past – they make you believe that it’s reality. That sense of a world being “authentic” isn’t found in the history books; it’s a creative act, engineered through trailers, developer diaries, making-of features and obsessive craft designed to convince players the world is real. Dr Esther Wright studies exactly this: how game studios manufacture and market authenticity, and how ideas about history get shaped into something you can sell. In this talk she takes the audience inside that creative machine – the techniques studios like Rockstar use to make an invented world feel true – and draws out what brand- and world-builders can learn from it: how belief is designed, why detail earns trust, and where the pursuit of “authenticity” starts to decide whose past gets told. A look at world-building from someone who studies the most convincing worlds we have.

Speakers: Dr Esther Wright, Senior Lecturer in Digital History at Cardiff University