 Bonjour, Côte Moyenne. Bonjour, bienvenue. Hello, Suzanne. Welcome to all of you who are here today in the auditorium of the Musée d'Amandin Grand-Duc Jean, Moudin, Luxembourg. And also welcome to everyone who is joining us via Zoom, wherever you are in the world. It's great to have you with us here today for this event. My name is Suzanne Cotter. I'm the director of Moudin. I'm delighted to be here with my colleague and curator of this program, Joëlle Vallabraga. I'd just like to share with you a few opening remarks before we pass on to introductions and then to our lecture today with Suzanne. The museum as a platform for artistic and cultural exchange is central to the mission of the Musée d'Amandin Grand-Duc Jean, as a collecting institution and in its presentation of the art of our time. In this current moment of global pandemic and urgent redress of social inequalities and injustices, at Moudin we are conscious of the fact that the museum cannot dissociate itself from the challenges faced by individuals, communities, and society globally. It is our privilege as people who work in the museum and who lead museums to be able to act on this recognition of the importance of the engagement of our museum with these issues of today and also to be able to think through how we might address them through our own programs. And it's this thinking in fact that has guided the development of the lectures and screenings which will be presented here at Moudin throughout this year, 2021 under the title of Radio Disaster. The program is inaugurated today with a lecture by Climate Justice Creative, Campaigner and Strategic Researcher of Environmental Justice and Decolonization, Suzanne Deliwale. And we are absolutely thrilled to have her with us today here visible on the screen. Joelle will say a little more in a moment to introduce Suzanne. I would also like to acknowledge Joelle Vallabraga for her curating of this program as well as Caroline Hoffman of our public outreach team here and public programs at the museum and our communication and engagement team and our technical team and led for this series of events heroically by Taufik Matim. In 2015, the member countries of United Nations announced their plan for a sustainable world under the title Transforming Our World. This was underpinned by themes of people, planet, prosperity, peace and partnership and driven by a vision for, I quote, a world of universal respect for human rights and human dignity, the rule of law, justice, equality and non-discrimination, of respect for race, ethnicity and cultural diversity and of equal opportunity permitting the full realization of human potential and contributing to shared prosperity. In aiming to achieve this vision, 17 goals for sustainable development leading up to the year 2030 were identified. Addressing climate change as one of these goals, the statement or the text of transforming our world states, climate change is one of the greatest challenges of our time and its adverse impacts undermine the ability of all countries to achieve sustainable development. Increases in global temperature, sea level rise, ocean acidification and other climate change impacts are seriously affecting coastal areas and low-lying coastal countries including many least developed countries and small island developing states. The survival of many societies and of the biological support systems of the planet is at risk. And it goes on. A new approach is needed. Sustainable development recognises that eradicating poverty in all its forms and dimensions, combating inequality within and among countries, preserving the planet, creating sustained inclusive and sustainable economic growth and fostering social inclusion are linked to each other and are independent. Also in 2015, for the same year in responding to transforming our world, UNESCO produced a recommendation for the protection and promotion of museums, their diversity and their role in society and highlighting the connections between museums and sustainable development. I quote from their document, museums as spaces for cultural transmission, intercultural dialogue, learning, discussion and training also play an important role in education, formal, informal and lifelong learning, social cohesion and sustainable development. Museums have great potential to raise public awareness of the value of cultural and natural heritage and of the responsibility of all citizens to contribute to their care and transmission. I want to end there, but I think I wanted to really frame why we here at Moudin have inaugurated this program, why it is important to us and how we see the museum as an active agent within this world that we're all living in and that serves people. We want to be able to be a place where people who come to the museum also recognize themselves, but we also want to be a place that strives to embody the values that look to achieve equality, peace and prosperity for everybody in the world. On that note, I'm going to pass over to Joelle. Thank you. So good afternoon to everyone, those physically present and those attending via livestream. Again, my name is Joelle Vallaberg. I'm curator of performances and public programs here at Moudin and today with Susan Kotter and Susan Dalewa. We are very excited to be launching this year-long program entitled Radio Disaster, the Climate Series Program. I'm very grateful to have this opportunity to have Suzanne here with us. I've been following her work for quite some time. Suzanne is a climate justice creative, a researcher, lecturer in environmental justice and a trainer in creative strategies for decolonization. She was voted as one of London's most influential people in environment 2018 by the Evening Standard and in 2009, she co-founded the UK Tarsans Network, which challenged the BP and the Shell investments in the Canadian Tarsans in solidarity with indigenous communities, encouraging the internationalism of the fossil fuel divestment movement. Suzanne had led many campaigns and artistic interventions to challenge fossil fuels investments in the Arctic and in Nigeria that violated the rights of indigenous communities and of those seeking justice in the wake of the BP Gulf of Mexico disaster. She has a master of arts and culture in Oxford, where she developed creative strategies to address the lack of representation and ongoing white supremacy in the climate justice movement. Today, we will listen to her as she shares her knowledge and wisdom in using creative skills in supporting environmental justice and indigenous rights. Suzanne will explore the relationship between white supremacy, colonialism and ecological degradation. Working via international and intergenerational solidarity, her work has sought to uplift those challenging the patterns which have led to the devastation of what we know of the Anthropocene. Following the talk, there will be a dedicated moment for questions. So for those attending in the auditorium, please keep them for later. And for those attending via live stream, you can use the chat form and your questions will be asked. With no further delay, I pass the word to Suzanne. Thank you for being here with us today. Thank you. Can you hear me okay? Very good. Great. So, yeah, thank you to the everybody at the museum and everyone who supported us to come together at this unprecedented time to have this conversation. Been very much inspired by rereading some of the works of Walter Benjamin. And today is kind of across between a quack book and also a radio transmission as I'm coming to you today across the internet. So I really wanted to, yeah, thank you again for taking this time as was mentioned in the beginning in the introduction remarks. The gallery and the museum plays a pivotal role in convening space for us to reflect on not only this moment in history and how we got here, but to reflect on the cultures of activism themselves so that we can develop the forms that we need as we move forward into this time of ingoing climate catastrophes, global pandemics and humanitarian disasters. So I just wanted to start off a little bit by bringing you into this image here and very much reflects where my work has been working both as a climate activist on the ground, mainly at the intersection of extraction and indigenous rights. That means that so much of my work has been in response in relationship to the fossil fuels and sites of extraction that are taking place globally. And I think that's really important for when we're framing the climate crisis that we think about the devastation and the destruction that is happening on the land already. We often think about the climate crisis as being this future phenomena, this Blade Runner-esque catastrophic thing arriving in the future. However, we know that this crisis has been the result of generations of extraction of violence to the land and to the territories where fossil fuels are found. So being open and being listening to those communities has been the grounding of my work. So this is actually a work called ECHO and it's a megaphone which I took the internal engineering of it and rewired it so that it actually became a listening device. And so it became an instrument, a way to really physically manifest and display a lot of the principles that were going into my work that before we get on the megaphone, before we take action before we develop our campaigns and put out asks into the world, we take this moment to listen and to understand and to digest the ways in which the climate crisis is already impacting communities on the ground, how it's interconnected with the generations of colonial violence of displacement of community from their territories and also as well as that devastation the range of strategies of movements of ways of resisting colonialism that have been taking place in there so that when we come forward with solutions and strategies they are intergenerational they are bringing forward that wisdom that's going to crumble in that space and I often say that we cannot solve the climate crisis with the mentality that created it so as well as challenging external racism external white supremacy and colonialism that's also very much a personal process of taking that time to actively listen to be changed as well by what we're hearing so as I mentioned as I mentioned again in terms of this framing of the climate crisis it's often talked about in terms of parts per million as changes to global systems however one thing that's really crucial and vital to the way that I entered into this work which as I mentioned was working with communities on the front line of extraction is that a lot of the destruction that we often fear has already taken place on the territories of indigenous black and brown communities so for me when I was studying in 2007 the global scale of the climate crisis and starting to understand that we had reached peak oil and that we were entering into an age of heavy oil so that includes tar sands fracking other forms of extraction these fuels require three to five times more water to extract the three to five times more polluting and as you can see from the image here this is the Canadian tar sands we often hear about the Amazon being deforested and the destruction that is taking place but we don't often hear as much about the destruction that is happening up in the burial forest the burial and the Amazon are often the two lungs of the planet so for me when I was looking at the climate crisis and looking at these tipping points and these tipping spots that they are often referred to as so as well as the Amazon the burial forest was one of those and what was happening up there in Canada was that the Canadian government was overwriting the rights of indigenous people to protect their territories and their land in order to extract tar sands fossil fuel so as I mentioned tar sands fossil fuel it's a heavy oil and in order to extract it it's not just a drilling process you literally have to remove the ecosystem so on the top you can see that an entire ecosystem not only is it one of the most important carbon sinks on the planet it's also home to numerous indigenous communities who practice the right to hunt and trap and fish their whole range of food sovereignty takes place on there and what the industry calls this is overburden so in order to access the oil they remove what they call overburden what we would call life in order to just extract the tar sands so the scale of the tar sands destruction if it goes ahead is the size of England and Wales most of the global corporations oil corporations energy corporations have been operating in the tar sands there's huge amounts of investment that have been happening here and as I said this isn't some future scenario this extraction has been happening for about 55 years already and you can see here that this is what it looks like once it's been the land has been devastated so you know I've been here and I've walked through this territory and when you're walking a cannon goes off every 3 to 5 seconds that's how they keep the animals from landing there huge amounts of animals and birds have died you can fly over this for quite some time and still not reach the end of it it's an entire reconfiguration of this ecosystem what has been coined as ecocide by the late lawyer Polly Higgins and that's a really important term for us to also bring into this conversation around climate change when we're thinking about the fact that this devastation is already taking place so ecocide refers to the devastation of a territory or ecosystem where it can no longer be rehabilitated and also the traditional practices the traditional ways of living on there cannot be exercised and that law ecocide is currently trying to be brought under the Rome Statute of Peace and the tar sands operators were tried for ecocide within a London Supreme Court Mark Trial so again this idea of this future scenario this future apocalypse is already there depending on which communities that you speak to so I just wanted to bring that term into the room to also think about that as well as the strategies for keeping the fossil fuels in the ground for protecting these ecosystems it's the way that we see the landscape that also needs to be transformed and that is part of the philosophical and cultural work that we must do to avert the climate crisis so as I mentioned this was back in about 2007 when I started to make the correlation between extraction heavy fossil fuels reaching pig oil and the importance and centrality of indigenous rights within that struggle if we look globally 80% of the biodiversity that needs to be protected is actually either under the rule of indigenous people that could be seeded territory and lands where the community still have the rights to that territory however governments such as the Canadian government which are seen often as liberal friendly governments continually are overriding those communities rights and what comes with that is also an epidemic of sexual violence and missing murdered indigenous women so with that extraction comes with it temporary farm workers man camps and a lot of the time I've been through some of those communities there's high rates of substance abuse with the workers as they themselves are traumatized by the destruction that is happening there so it's not even like these economies that are coming from fossil fuels are leading to great jobs or careers that are what we envision for our future so it's a totally rethinking of jobs and the kinds of risks that come with this kind of industry as well as well as the carbon emissions as I mentioned the high polluting carbon emissions of tar sands oil the plans for tar sands oil is to ship it from Canada through the pipelines along the west coast to Russia and to China so that's completely upside down energy calculus when we're thinking about shifting to renewables to shifting to localizer energy systems and this image here is from a walk that we took through the Canadian tar sands and that's a really what I wanted to bring up here is around the fact that you know there's been a real sort of resurgence or surgeons even of climate activism recently but it's really important for us to understand that we're walking into legacies of environmental resistance of communities that have been calling attention to this destruction for generations and that often what we think is needed what are the strategies aren't always you know getting from A to Z sometimes there are calls for working with ceremony with witnessing with bearing witness to what is happening there so in this instance as well as running campaigns we were called to witness the devastation and personally for me even though I was working on financial campaigns political campaigns when you witness that scale of destruction with the communities you are forever changed your whole internal psyche your own ability to think about who are we if that is the kind of economy and landscape that we are creating and I think that's really something important for us to think about as well being changed ourselves by what is happening and not just on a cognitive level but on an emotional and spiritual and physiological level as well so back in 2009 I attempted to put the Tarzan issue onto the agenda of a lot of major non-profit organizations so that's you know Greenpeace a lot of the organizations that were doing some of that work and what was very difficult was to make the connection between indigenous rights fossil fuels keeping them in the ground protecting biodiversity and indigenous rights and if any of you know or work in the sector the environmental sector is actually the second least diverse industry so as a young woman of color for me I immediately had to move into a space of entrepreneurship of innovation and creativity because I couldn't get the organization that I was working at that time to take this seriously so I started a really grassroots organization called UK Tarzan's Network and we worked to begin to internationalize and amplify what was happening on the front line and that was not just again the difficulties that the communities were under but also the analysis of the situation the analysis of how Tarzan's extraction was the continuation of colonialism how that sat with their rights to their sovereignty and also the complicity of the British crown so all of those elements being part of the campaign and also came down to the design so with the logo we had this logo which was you know a bloody flag it was first a black oil drip in the middle however the chief of the community and the Athabasca Chipon First Nation asked for that to be a red drop because he said that it's our blood oil it's our blood that is the cost of this oil so you know from the beginning of our organization all of our design decisions all of the framing decisions were led by and determined by the Canadian community and I think that's a really important point to note because you know when we did these actions this is the Canadian High Commission in London when we did these actions in London it wasn't necessarily us who were having the implications of them or the ramifications of them when Canadian Indigenous people speak up for them there can be these implications of having contracts removed and the violence increased white supremacy in their homes because as I mentioned there is this ongoing racism towards Indigenous communities that they're facing while they try and resist and protect their homelands so that's something really important for us to think about of those principles of collaboration of taking direction from the front lines and always being responsive to them and I think that came up in the opening comments as well to those communities and so what happened from that campaign was that as well as connecting the dots between the Canadian Government and the British Government and the Crown and how that relates with the treaties that the Britain signed with Canada we also started to think about other ways in which Britain was complicit in the extraction of tar sands and other fossil fuels that Indigenous communities are trying to keep in the ground and so this was the beginning of the divestment movement and what we tried to do was to expose the pipeline of money that was not only fueling these projects but a lot of these investments had not been checked for if the projects actually had permission to go ahead so under the UN Declaration of Rights of Indigenous People that is called the right to free, prior and informed consent so under that jurisdiction any projects that go ahead that get investment should have that consultation done before they go ahead however none of those projects in the tar sands have gone through proper assessment there's no cumulative impact assessment extractive industries continue to run free reign you know it's still that Wild West kind of mentality and so we started doing these kind of stunts at the annual shareholder meetings of the banks to expose not only again their complicity in the climate struggle but the human rights abuses the way that these banks were on one hand claiming to be leaders within the climate movement however investing in projects like these and it was also to expose the tar sands and the real risks associated with it as the Canadian government was trying to convey that this oil was cleaner than Saudi oil because Canadians respect gay rights all sorts of PR that was happening with that oil so that campaign continued for well over a decade and that has now internationalised into what is the divestment movement and I think the divestment movement is interesting and needs to continue but it's really important that it's connected to also asserting the rights of indigenous peoples as well as the climate impacts of those projects and the image below is we also as well as trying to stop future projects as we develop these relationships with the communities we were also responding to catastrophes that were happening and so the picture at the bottom that is the BPA GM just a few months after the BP brought a horizon spill and again what we did was we met with the community try to understand how they were picturing the crisis and creating these stunts outside but what was important was that we were also going into the meetings to convey the asks and the wants of the community so in this case they were asking for compensation for Fisher people as well as trying to look at the health impacts of Corexit which was being used to clean up the spill so that's another part of it as well that it's beyond just illustrating the catastrophe there's also a functional relationship where you are working with the community to use your access to power, your access to the shareholder meetings to push for the policies for the needs of the communities on the front lines as well as this wider rubric of pushing to start projects that are violating the environment and the climate and I think that's one of the key principles of climate justice and that's why it comes back to this image at the beginning of listening of doing consultation of deep consultation and sometimes that takes longer it can make the project longer it can have you on working across time zones but essentially it's building that deeper infrastructure to do the work and moving beyond illustration as well and so as well as exposing the pipeline between money and these projects we also took a look at cultural institutions so within the UK a lot of the major galleries and museums are sponsored by BP and Shell and what that essentially does is it supports those companies to have a social license to operate so what we try to do was to first of all even bring to the public attention the fact that there are these relationships between these companies and the galleries and then to use it as an arena to again bring attention to the catastrophes that are happening but also to bring into question the cultural complicity of the galleries as well and I think that there's two moments of that campaign and I think we have illustrated those relationships and I think we're in an exciting moment where galleries and museums are acknowledging their complicity and we're trying to think about how we can work together to move through that so this is an image from an action that happened at the BP summer party just a little bit after the deep water horizon and as I mentioned a lot of my work is as an archivist as well and I try and bring out these pictures and these moments of movement her story as well because often as women of colour we have to write ourselves back into that story so I just wanted to share some of those moments there for you there and continuing with that as well as the other sort of head to this beast so to speak we have the corporations the oil companies the banks in addition to that we had to also look at the role of the EU government and the EU parliament sorry and what we found was that actually within the EU there was a lot of initiative to keep this tar sands oil from flowing to Europe the EU was starting to understand the high impact of this fuel however what happened was that the UK government and the Canadian government started to collude together to try and undermine the EU directive and this happens a lot where we see oil companies their lobby interests trying to undermine the good work the legislation and the initiatives within the Europe to try and take action on limiting fossil fuels from initiatives so you know however this is quite a complex convoluted process if any of you have ever been involved in the EU parliament or the EU commission it's very esoteric this campaign went for about 60 years and so what we try to do was to work with other ways of trying to expose this and also try to help with our fatigue if you're constantly doing the same protest in the rain it just gets exhausting so what I try to do here was I worked with a felt artist Lucy Sparrow and we created this scene which was the felt impacts where she works with felt and we try to make a scene which showed the cancers and the tumours that a lot of these animals in the tar sands get from the accumulative pollution in the water and so we set up this scene outside of the Canadian Canada House in London again and there was a few reasons for that one was to expose the lobbying initiative it was also a way for us to bring other people along who couldn't necessarily do direct action so they could be involved in the sowing in the sowing of these pieces and that's one of the ways that we try to think about how do we access and create entry points for other people to be involved in this work who might not be able to take direct action either because of their legal status their physicality within England as well the racism that we experience from the police so we're constantly thinking about creating those new ways of people being involved and also reaching new audiences so for this it was reaching a pop audience as well so through that collaboration creating new forms creating new ways of bringing people to understand processes that can be a little bit esoteric and boring as well so that's just a way that we've been able to keep these issues in the press and sustain that and building on that that also means trying to use humour and trying to use fashion and trying to use other ways of also reaching those in power so this was a hat collection that we actually commissioned for Kate Middleton when she was going to Alberta Canada at the time of wildfires there however she didn't visit the tar sands so we commissioned these hats there was a series of ten they also went in Grazia with banner ads there so the idea was to again bring the reality of what is happening to the tar sands to people reaching new audiences and come to where people are as well they're already in the fashion magazines in women's magazines so how can we have that conversation there and how can we also work a little bit with the strange you know not necessarily always spelling it completely out bringing people into the conversation finding other ways to make that engaging and interesting and again all the time also always doing that not only for the audience but also for ourselves to avoid that burnout to avoid doing the same thing again to find new ways to enter into the same topic and situation so you know as I mentioned as we frame this at the beginning so much of this work is coming from a legacies legacies of environmental justice that as people of color we have inherited and so one of the environmental justice ancestors that I work with and when we say environmental justice just to frame that in terms of climate justice environmental justice is intimately tied to the rights of the communities who are indigenous to that territory so there is no separation between the fight for indigenous rights and environmental justice they're intimately connected it's also intimately connected for those people who are on the front lines of extraction and that can also include refineries and tailing ponds where oil is extracted as well and so for me I take a lot of inspiration from Ken Sarawira and Ken Sarawira was a member of the Agoni people and led his people in Nigeria to resist Shell from the occupation of his lands sadly that resulted in his execution along with the Agoni 9 and I think that speaks to the power that communities have in resistance to these projects and the thing that was so important about Ken's work was that Ken moved between being an activist, a playwright a dramatist and a comedian he had a radio show and a TV show which communicated to the communities about their rights about the ways of resistance and that is why he had so much power in that movement and I think that's really important when we think about the production within movements it's not just to illustrate the situations but it's the key way that we give life force to our movements, how we keep them interconnected and how we connect them through the generations as well so a few years ago was the 23rd anniversary since the execution of Ken and the Agoni 9 and so I was really humbled to work with the communities in Nigeria and with the British Nigerian artist Sakari Douglas Camp and we made this she made this sculpture which had the names of those who had been killed as well as I accused the oil companies of genocide written along the side and what was really interesting about the sculpture was this had moved across the UK for many years doing education work and it was a huge role in Nigeria and for the 23rd anniversary the community in Nigeria asked for the bus to come home and so we thought about how we could get the bus back to Nigeria in the back of it there's also a theatre there was a library it was really a chance to do that community education work so we actually tried to send it back to Nigeria sadly because held up the colonel who was actually responsible for the execution of the Agoni 9 took the bus away we never saw it again but we used that as a way to use this the absence of the bus as a way to still get a story to try and raise awareness within a new generation about Ken Sarira and the Agoni 9 and we worked with late designer John Daniel who produced these images for us and we got these on again radio the hip hop radio station started sharing these on twitter and it became this movement for this bus so it was a really powerful moment how this bus this sculpture this gesture of solidarity and this kind of almost bizarre gesture to get it across the sea and to take it home captured the imagination of people and was able to transmit that story of the Agoni 9 so as I mentioned at the beginning of this talk a lot of this ancestry a lot of this history of the environmental movement has been erased in the last few years with the onset of groups like XR and the incredible work of Greta but at the same time it's really erased a lot of the communities who have been doing a lot of the work we often call it the struggle within the struggle the struggle to keep our visibility and it's not again it's not just the devastation that we face but also the strategies and solutions that we hold in the movements so and this reached a peak I would say in 2019 and what we found was that we were having to really really push back against Extinction Rebellion and different groups because the strategies of nonviolent de-reduction that we were using weren't being respected, the resources were going as well it's very interesting that a lot of the resources for XR actually come from people who are involved in the expansion of Heathrow airport it's just an important note and while we need multiple voices and multiple actors we really went through an in-violence and erasure of the work that we were doing so at that point I switched to trying to think about how come we as cultural producers work to continue to elevate our voices to resist that erasure not just of us in this moment but of these environmental legacies that we come with and it's very unfortunate that a lot of people of colour have had to enact use so much of our energy in the last few years just to stay visible just to re-educate climate activists and to try and keep our place within that movement so for me the way I went about doing that work was I worked with the social sculpture lab in Oxford and tried to develop processes of reflection for organisations, for campaigners to try and think about the power and the privilege that they hold and this was a process that I created where holding dialogue and conversation really asking very simple questions about people's relationship to power and how that relationship shifts the design decisions that you make, how it shifts the strategies that you make and through coming through that process of self-reflection to think about those design decisions can be different so a really simple example of that would be people's history of relationship with the police and how that based on race and class how that might change or willingness to be arrested or when you escalate that tactic so that's been the way that I've been trying to create a self-reflection about the power and the privilege that comes with the design decisions that we make so that we're not necessarily blaming each other we're not reaching that impasse but we're coming to a self-reflexivity about how we can create those cultures and to also even acknowledge that there is a culture inherent within environmental activism that needs to be challenged as well so with that work which has become kind of the heart of the work that I've been doing at the moment has been to come into the space of research into reflection to think about what are new ways of activism that we can engage with so this is a research station that I created we're called ECHO and about re-centering our cultures of activism so rather than constantly finding ourselves in resistance to the white supremacy in the movement how can we be in a generative space where we are thinking about the strategies and the tools that we need so leading people on walks with the megaphone with the listening devices bringing people into inter-disciplinary spaces as well so we set up a podcast with ECHO which looked at new ways of working with international movements around the climate movement and also bringing people into conversations so that people can understand that some of the issues around race and white supremacy that they experience in climate activism aren't theirs alone and also more importantly or just as importantly is spaces for allies to listen to understand what is being asked of them to re-shift that culture so constantly finding those soft spot generative spots where we can understand how our design decisions within activism are impacting each other so that we can make new decisions as well and I think this has reached a new crux I would say in the last year when we're thinking again in terms of this overarching framing of the climate crisis when it's thought of as something in the future or something that might happen that's just not the realities for communities on the front lines of this and so that's why we also have to think about the climate crisis as being work of critical care of humanitarian work as well. Last year there was a cyclone, a devastating cyclone unfam which took place in May at the beginning stages of the pandemic and this cyclone was one of the largest to impact northern India, Bangal and it didn't even make it onto the radar, not just of the international press but also within the climate movement and that's because of this framing of the climate crisis as being this future scenario of being parts per million somewhat abstract meant that people were disconnected from realising that this cyclone was part of the climate crisis so those organisations weren't activated and there was a severe disconnect at the moment between humanitarian organisations and climate campaigners so we don't have this space in between that is responsive to the climate disasters that happen so I said about working with some young artists who were generating work at the time so these were some of the devastating but also all inspiring images were coming out of that movement and we used those to get fundraisers, get awareness but it was a very devastating moment for me personally as well to think about how do we scale up how do we scale up this responsiveness and how can the art community connect this broken telephone that we have between the front lines and how can we bring our skills and resources to this moment and reframe the climate crisis as also a humanitarian crisis and so as we think about that and we think about the next generation I often think about the next generation of activists and I've had to sadly give up so much of my energy mental health to resisting the white supremacy within the movement itself so we really need to think about how for the next generation can we make sure that it's inclusive that along with Greta that the other communities the other youth of colour are represented not only as the diverse faces but also the strategies the generational strategies that they bring with us as well so it's really important that we don't replicate that in the next generation and I think as cultural producers as people who programme and are able to lift up voices the cultural institutions have a really important role in doing that and this is another work as I mentioned having to just stay visible has become a whole job into itself we don't even get as much time to work on the climate strategies themselves so this is another way that I worked with a group in London and they were doing these billboards Davina was working on this, it was called Arrivals and Departures so they had these beautiful billboards and people could submit the names of people who have arrived on the date and when they've left so I did a takeover of that to share some of the names of some of the environmental justice people that have taught me and I tried to make sure that it was intergenerational as well a lot of the times people who are visible in the climate movement are those who have the bigger Instagram followings and some of my teachers like Tom Goldtooth doesn't even have Instagram but he's been leading this movement as well so also thinking how do we both embrace the digital age but how do we make sure that it's intergenerational and that we're not losing that knowledge and wisdom as well so I think I'm just coming close to the end here but I just wanted to sort of take us into this next moment that we're in and I'm really inspired by this image here which is actually a crypto coin which was created by artist MIA and she created this cryptocurrency crypto coin as a way to generate funds for a humanitarian disaster that was taking place in St. Vincent because of a volcano eruption and I think it's a really interesting place for us to leave off in terms of thinking about we're in this moment where we have really reached a mass awareness of the climate crisis I think the need for illustration we kind of moved past that those people who are going to believe it are with us if they're not going to believe it at this stage I don't think they will and I think it's really important now that we shift into a new moment those of us who understand the climate crisis who understand the gravity of it that we start to move into spaces of thinking about the strategies the cultures the collaborations the resource allocation that we need moving into the future and also what does this work look like as well as challenging governments as we move forward into the carp coming up with international agreements all of those things and geoengineering unproven technologies like carbon capture and storage all of those things need to be questioned and for me that's where the arts and the critical reflection on the cultures of activism has been crucial we need safe spaces to be able to reflect on the strategies that are moving forward and again I can't emphasise enough the lack of diversity the lack of leadership of communities of colour within the climate movement and that is why I've been more effective and being able to do my work within the art space and it's really really crucial so for instance with whoever holds the money holds the strategies and so when we're in this moment now where we need to decolonise the climate movement and that means as I said not just listening to those on the front lines of the crisis but also having spaces where the strategies that we hold both generationally and because of the empathetic relationship that we have to the front line and the relationships that we hold to the nature that we can both develop the kinds of communications that we need to break that broken telephone in moments of crisis in moments of education but also that we can start envisioning some of these new technologies and new ways of responding to the climate crisis so thank you Thank you Suzanne that was really inspiring I would like to start the Q&A with one question so as I myself work in the cultural sector is to know what are in your opinion concrete key ways in which we can meanfully engage with those who are on the front lines of the climate crisis sorry I think one of the first ways is through events like this through centering the voices of black and brown and indigenous cultural producers and sometimes it's not always obvious necessarily always artists in the regular sense we create organisations we create movements, we're architects of movements so giving space to tell our movement stories is really important as I mentioned that movement archiving so that we can understand the histories the other part would be to think about not also just bringing folks in to be speakers but allowing us to curate programs that would bring huge amounts of resources into movements as well and capacity building as well the other ways is residencies as I mentioned to you I'm a researcher and often the capacity to reflect on your practice to reflect on what's happened the strategies that you're doing and convening can mean the longevity of that movement so how can you resource sort of residencies and spaces as well so all of the ways that we're programming around climate change to make sure that those resources are going to the people who've been holding that work at the beginning as well and then the last thing I would say would be the point around having the conversations about questioning the strategies that are being used for climate change and that allyship that we need because that isn't necessarily happening in the climate movement thank you are there any questions from the audience in the auditorium no okay so I'm just going to read a couple of questions from the live stream first question what do you imagine as the key shifts taking place to the culture of activism as we move through the pandemic yeah I think one of the parts of that has been rethinking direct action and how we can take that and in some places it's decreased but in other places increased and I think a really important part of that is we think about the farmers protests in India and there the the protests haven't stopped through the coronavirus so about how do we support people with the increased need for masks for vaccinations for those who are on their front lines and thinking about the difference between a protest which is something that's orchestrated and a movement so often when communities are responding to oil spills on their territory or increased pollution on their territory and they don't have a choice if to protest or not it's really important that we provide the support for that I think we've also seen an increase in digital communications like this so there's this amazing potential for us to be in conversation with each other to reflect on what we're doing and also to learn from some of the mutual aid models that have emerged how can we bring those mutual aid models those relationship buildings into the future of the climate work as well thank you another question from the live stream sorry one second yes okay so what are your short term future plans what is your next battle okay well I'm teaching a module on ecology futures so I think it's really important to continue to have this safe space whereas cultural producers we can unpack the power and privilege that we hold in our design decisions and be able to change them so that's part of tutoring and that ongoing practice I'm also supporting the development of a podcast which is going to be an international podcast that looks at black and brown scholars who are responding to the crisis so I find that really fun and the other part is I'm working with a playwright in London who's writing a play about the experience of being a black man in the climate movement and all of the difficulties that come with that and navigating your diaspora community so I'm helping to develop the online component of that because people won't be able to go to the theatre they'll be watching it online and then we'll be having discussions and campaign building around that So, if there's no more questions I would like to end the Q&A with the last question, so as we already previously discussed in our preparatory Zoom meetings it was very important for me for us to launch this program with the point of view of the younger generations to value the importance of intergenerational knowledge and for the same reason I would like to close the lecture asking you what advice give concretely to young super young activists who may be completely daunted by the problems that we are facing and the work it would take to fix the problems we're encountering. Yeah, I think the one thing would be to connect with your environmental justice ancestors, you know, as a way to counter sometimes the violence that we experience of white supremacy in those spaces, trying to think about how within your own culture, within your own legacy that you have have that ancestral knowledge of connecting to that, also trying to take time to take nourishment from nature as well, if that's possible. I know that's not always possible for me. I know that that's how I keep that energy up and also finding ways to connect to those elders who are still alive. I know that's difficult right now, but, you know, making time for that conversation, learning about those histories as well, and then also being okay with the grief, I think, given yourself that time for that grief, especially in the pandemic and working together and also, you know, leaving your ego at the door a little bit and not feeling like you have to do it all, that you're in an ecosystem of communities and relationships to do this work. Great. Thank you. So I would just like to remind everyone that the next episode of Radio Disaster will be, will take place on the 9th of June. We will have curator and researcher, Choose Martinez, who will discuss about the marine ecosystem and the dramatic decline of the water systems. If the screening, the lecture will be followed by the screening of the movie Sea Lovers, a film by German artist Ingo Niermann. And for more info on the program and to book your seats, please check Moodam's website. And I would like to thank Suzanne. It was great and wonderful to have you here with us. And I wish everyone a wonderful afternoon. Thank you. Thank you, Suzanne. Thanks.