 Yes, an amazing, amazing colleague. And I just want to share for context, even the lab has been working at this intersection of climate and performance for a long time. But it's a particularly auspicious moment because there's a new school of the environment in Earth Commons that we're really a deep partner with and helping to imagine and shape looking ahead, distinctive not only curriculum, but kind of program and platform around how the arts and performance and the really critical issues around climate and the environment that all of these folks are passionate about and working on can intersect. So this conversation is not just a reporting out of amazing work, but we really see it as generative and catalytic as we start to work with Pete Marra, the visionary director of the Earth Commons, to sort of really hear at Georgetown and beyond, think about the lab as a kind of center for this work. So we want all of you in that conversation and today will be an amazing way to start it. So I'm going to hand it over to our moderator, our amazing Agribilepo Abner-Galina, who will make sure everyone else gets a few. So enjoy our honor. Thank you so much, Derek. And thank you to our audiences here. I am Abner-Torres-Galina Jr. I come from the Philippines, has born and raised there and I'm grateful in honor to be here, especially this afternoon to be sharing this space with very wonderful beings who are working for our Earth. And today we are called to this conversation our One Earth Artist Engaging Climate. Before I continue with them, I also wanna just take a moment for us to perhaps invite you to close your eyes for a moment and just take a deep breath and just listen to all the sounds that you can hear right now and try to zone into all the sounds that you can hear inside your body. And if it would help to put both your hands on your heart like a dove, just feel your heartbeat and how the air flows inside you. And in every breath you take, I want you to notice how this air flows and travels and where it goes and where it hides and where it moves and how it lands back to your own body and how we share the same space right now. And just to give a moment to acknowledge the abundance that we have in this moment, the air, the land, the fire, the water. And all other life systems would help us balance this ecology. And for a second be more intentional as we listen to each other and this topic on climate of what your heart is speaking to right now. Thank you. I've said glad to be sharing this space with you today. And we'll be discussing climate in an hour or less. And right now, I would already say that if only we could do that and solve that in an hour. But it won't give justice definitely. So I'm excited how this conversation continues afterwards. And then just to give you a bit of background, we'll ask each panel to introduce themselves and how they're entering into this context. And then after which they could share the local problems that they encounter in their own communities locally or in their countries. And after which we'll see more of their works and we'll see the exchanges that happens after. And if we are lucky to have more time then perhaps we could do a question or two. All right, so let's start. I've introduced myself and to tell you more, I am leading a multi-artist collective called Black Canvas which is dealing with the intersections of care, culture, global justice and ecological healing. And it's also geared towards really fostering artistic leadership among young artists to be dealing with these through community engagement and collaborations. And so far, I have directed works with Department of Education, Disaster Reduction Management Services. And still I'm working on their projects for climate advocacy shows and writing toolkit for this. Recently I've also been part of the ITAC International Teaching Artist Collaborative Climate Artist for this year which allows me to do one local project on community leadership in Cadizini, Agra's Occidental in the Philippines. That's for me and I'm excited to listen more from you, Maya. Well, first I wanna just thank Abner for introducing us to this space and I wanna thank everyone who's present in it to have this discussion about our earth but also an extension of ourselves. Good evening everyone. My name is Maya Smith. I am an alum from Georgetown University, graduated May of 2020 when the pandemic was really picking up. I remember going for spring break, coming back to campus like everybody move off. So it's so great to be back in this space after so long, I wanted to start with that. I am an advocate for healing and I'm an advocate for our planet and as an advocate I often think about sustainability. When we talk about environment we think of nature, plants and animals and so a lot of what I'm doing is thinking more of sustainability, how we connect human people and our society with the institutions that help structure our society alongside our natural environment and also still acknowledging the history that comes with that and the future that we get to create. More tangibly, I'm currently teaching English to kids learning English in Baltimore City and we just finished up a unit on climate and it was really amazing to see students who come into class, can't write paragraphs, struggle with speaking English and seeing the work that they produced by the end of our project and I'm happy to be here this evening to have a conversation with this panel. So thank you. Thank you, Maya. Yes, snaps to that. And yes, Irfan. Yes. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. My name is Sayyid Irfan Abizadeh and I'm a high school student. So I just came to the United States. It has been like seven or eight months. Last month we were on the same panel discussion, Maya and I with Mr. Ghur, the former vice president of the United States and beside that I'm a climate activist and it has been like for seven or eight years that I'm doing climate activism and environmentalism. So I'm grateful to be here and have a wonderful conversation with our fellow and with you. And yeah. Yes, thank you, Irfan. Really wonderful work there. Yes, please, Katie. Hi, everybody. My name is Katie Pearl and I am the co-artistic director of a theater company called Pearl DeMore. It's about a 25 year collaboration with the playwright, Lisa DeMore. And I also teach theater at Wesleyan University. And I think I come to this conversation as somebody who makes pretty theatricalized gestures that invite our audiences to consider their own relationship to this question and reality of the environment. Perhaps they're people who haven't had to think about that. And so our pieces try to create space for that. And I'll talk about a couple of them today. Great, yeah. We'll see more of Katie's work later on. And lastly, yes, Katie. Hi, everybody. I'm really honored to be here next to such wonderful beings. My name is Gio. I'm a current lab fellow. I'm from Mexico. I studied history, but then I rebelled from the academy and now I'm a performance artist. It's been four and a half years now. And I use my body to fight against gender violence and the constant and insatiable looting of our land resources. And I'm based in Guadalajara, Mexico. And well, I'm here at this panel because I think that Earth Caring is a revolutionary act, like Cinti SA said yesterday. This is my little revolution. And it's also like in times like this, Earth Caring is resisting and it's going against the heteropatriarchal narrative where there is like this impossibility of creating other futures. So I think Earth Caring and fighting the system, that really turns me on, you know? So it's... Yeah. Is that a clue? Okay. That's it. Thank you, Kio. I share this fellowship with Kio for 2021 and 2023 for the Global Love Fellows. So yeah, thank you for that. I think I'm more interested now with where you're coming from, what are the problems in your local community or country or if you can be more specific of this moment of encounter like, oh, I'm gonna deal with this problem. I'm gonna deal with this issue that you know is related to climate. But of course, we know that it's systemic. There's intersectional perspectives there, but yeah, I'd love to know. Anyone can start, can share? I can go first. Yeah, yes. Thank you very much again. So I'm coming from Afghanistan. Many of you like, as I told Mr. Ghur and the audience last month to where I was on the panel discussion with them, I told them that everyone in the United States and Western countries and in the international community, they think that Afghanistan is just war. There is just poverty. But it is funny that last week I was writing an article with one of my friends at my school about climate change in Afghanistan about poverty, hunger and starvation. And he asked me, what should we put the title of the article's name? I said that I think we have to put the title's name Afghanistan's hidden struggles. Because climate change, no one knows what's going on in Afghanistan. What the people are dealing with climate change. For example, two days ago on Thursday, there was a flooding and there was storms in 12 provinces of Afghanistan. I have the number, 500 houses has been destroyed, 2,000 has been damaged, 300 head of livestock killed and some 3,000 acres of crops damaged. And about 30 people have been killed and 40 others have been injured. So my community is dealing with a lot of problems. We have a lot of issues right now in Afghanistan. We are dealing with a lot of things. Everyone knows that now we have hunger. 25 million people are there under the line of poverty and they're in urgent need of food. But have we ever thought about climate change? What's going on in Afghanistan with climate change? No. When I was in Afghanistan, when I was like eight or nine years old, I've witnessed that many people are dying in Afghanistan. I thought that it might be just war, bombing, killing. No, but I did research. I researched about the situation in Afghanistan. I found out that eerily, 20 to 30,000 people are dying because of climate impacts such as droughts. Now there is an ongoing huge droughts in our region, in Afghanistan, in India, in Pakistan, in Iran and in Central Asia. But the center of this drought is Afghanistan. Now Afghanistan is a volatile state. No one cares about Afghanistan. Since the war in Ukraine started, Afghanistan is being forgotten by the international community. No one knows where is Afghanistan. Last year when I just came, when I just arrived to the United States, one of my schoolmates, one of my friends asked me that what do you have in Afghanistan? Do you have electricity? Do you have power? Do you have car? We have to care about Afghanistan. We have to care, not just Afghanistan, we have to care about those countries that are impacted and being impacted by climate change. Kabul city, the capital of Afghanistan. Last year in 2020, yeah, I mean, from January to March of 2021, each week 8,000 people were visiting hospital because of what? It was not because of bombing or because of killing. It was because of air pollution. The size of Afghan Kabul city is very small. It's very small. It's a smaller, maybe the size of Kabul city, maybe it's the same size of Washington DC, but the population is about six million. There is one million car. There is air pollution is really devastating the lives of Kabul citizens. So this is Kabul, about Afghanistan generally and entirely. We have some neighbors. I told Mr. Gurl last month that India and China, there are neighboring countries. They're emitting carbon emissions, but those carbon emissions, they're coming to our country and our people are suffering from those carbon emissions. We have water pollution. 80% of Afghanistan's population, they do not have access to clean water because of what? Because of insufficient infrastructure and the usage of groundwater. Yes, and you may ask that, oh yeah, we invested in Afghanistan two trillion dollars. We have invested in Afghanistan for 20 years. That's right. I don't deny that. Yeah, that's completely true. But we had some problems that international community had to focus on that. We had corruption in our government. Now we don't have government in Afghanistan. Yeah, we don't have any government. There was like two or 300 climate activists, including me. I was not just climate activist. I was also peace, civil rights, woman rights and human rights activist. I was working closely with high schoolers, middle schoolers, with college students, with university students. I was a part of an organization. We were organizing some conferences, some sessions for youths and for adults to come and to share their ideas, to share their thoughts with us. We have to find solutions for that. But unfortunately, suddenly everything changed and we don't have, right now, we don't have anything in Afghanistan. Irfan, thank you so much for sharing that and for the clarities, for the facts. And it seems to me that this is where you're coming from, of your firsthand experience, of there's immense care for all these issues because this is happening to your people. And I could say likewise in the Philippines where it seems that when we talk about climate, just for the beginners or those who have just entered a space into this conversation on climate, that it seems like we're waiting for a doom. But the idea of climate emergency is already happening now in many spaces and it's not like we're waiting for this next storm. It is affecting all our food systems, labor, safety, security. And thus, yeah, the crisis is really in the gaps and the injustices more than the effect itself and how prepared we are with this. And I think later, I'm excited to learn more on how you respond to this with your practices. So first, I want, this is string true with your communities or where you're, and when you talk of communities, it can be just your school, your country. Yes, Maya? What Irfan Sherk really resonates with me is he's pulling in from his personal experience and that's where it begins, right? When you think about the climate crisis, it begins with your proximity to space, the physical space, your environmental space, but also your social space, your political space, your nationality, culture. And I think, I couldn't help but I'm just so proud of you Irfan and what you are doing because at the core what you're reflecting is acknowledging what is happening in this space around you. And like you Irfan, I grew up in east of the Anacostia and I grew up in North East Washington, D.C. and I make that distinction because when you think about a river, a river is such a device of tool that divides people and there are countless injustices happening globally and the School of Foreign Service encountering the social, political and environmental crisis happening abroad to have you sitting here on this stage, an audience to hear you, to hold witness to the climate crisis is happening all around us. The emergency, the climate emergency is now. And so when I think about my own proximity to that, I think back to just growing up here in the nation's capital of this country and the amount of injustice, the amount of disordering that is interwoven within how we practice our society. When you think about gender, you think about race, you think about class and all those have impacts that are a reflection of how we treat our environment. It includes all of those things. And so I wanna thank you for like bringing that into our conversation. Yeah, thank you for highlighting that too, Maya. Katie, Keo, you wanna like share briefly, like is there like a close encounter to these certain problems in your community that allows you to say respond through your art later on? I think in juxtaposition to what Airphone was talking about in terms of being on the front lines or even Maya was talking about, I feel like one of the things that we're trying to respond to is people in our circles lack of ability to feel that encounter. Like the climate crisis can feel so theoretical to so many of us still, even though the globe is in the middle of a climate emergency. And so trying to respond by saying like, how can we use this kind of storytelling to wake up imagination, wake up awareness, create possibilities for a relationship for people who aren't feeling the direct impacts. And I understand that you're also dealing with this in the context of like the university working with different sectors, right? And seeing opportunities there to change something in the policies. And I'm sure we can hear more about that later. Keo, would you wanna share like what's with Mexico? How do you feel that this climate emergency? I think what you just said, Katie, about people not knowing how to deal with like such a catastrophe that it apparently is inevitable or that's what we're told. And it has to do I think with also a lot of ecological guilt and that paralyzing us. But I think that what we have right now like this initiative art is like a great tool to shake off all that ecological guilt and to find new ways to relate with our environment because I'm hearing about polluted rivers, I'm hearing about polluted air and it resonates because it's the same in Mexico, in my city I know contexts are completely different but at the core it's the same problems right now in Guadalajara we're suffering from monoculture like excessive monoculture like the agave plantations to make tequila have gotten so massive and on the outskirts of the city it's three problems. The agave plantations, the berries and the avocados. So they just take everything off like all of the endemic plants and they do this massive, massive fields of monoculture and they're calling it like the agave landscape and there's like a lot of tourists coming but what many people don't know is that this is very, very bad for the land itself and for pollinators which I will be talking about pollinators afterwards but it's terrible and I mean what I wanna say is that we're all in this together no matter where we are in the world whether it's the states, whether it's Afghanistan, the Philippines or Mexico. Yes and as I was invited here my first reaction was like oh it's interesting, I'm moderating it, I'm coming from a country who's really one of the highest vulnerable to the perils of the crisis of the climate disasters and yet we are the least contributor to the problem and how unfair is that, right? To be here in this land right now, to be sharing the space and knowing that the people, my people are dying, are literally dying and we don't know when is the next flood in this locality and all of a sudden like they're just numbers. All of a sudden like you know you hear high end and I mean what can donations do really? It's just absurd really all these gaps and through the years this has been clear to me that the problems of the climate did not start just yesterday or like it started from when we were extracted by so many things you know but from when we were robbed by so many opportunities to grow as a country. It started when we were colonized and we are still and we are traumatized as a land and it's archipelagic and it's even already hard to think of nation as a concept and such like 7,100 plus islands and then you know we have here this crisis so people don't have time from the grassroots they just wait for the next storm to come you know and then wait for the next donation and it's sad it's a sad narrative. I have so many stories to tell of course so we kind of want to be very strategic about this and when I entered the lab this is what I felt like I think we have to be in this kind of conversation to make changes but at the same time it happens in our on the grassroots level so it happens all the same time and for sure you also contribute to the solutions sometimes you also contribute to the problem so now let's go into a more creative way of approaching this because some of us luckily are gifted with these languages and how are you can you share more about that so we have roughly a few minutes each to share your works because there's no other way to communicate that to the people like how they could also access that or you know enter your space. At the key point like art is so exciting because I think it was, I was here during like the alumni reunion and one thing that I think a Shawnee Kodige had said was that artists are meant to create art at times like this because that's when all of us are really looking for something beautiful and I think we've forgotten the beauty of our planet and the beauty of our human civilization and we have to get reconnected to ourselves and to each other to our nations to our people and all people beyond all borders because we share the planet, we share this world therefore we share the burdens, we share the scary stuff we also share the beauty and we also all have opportunity to create something really beautiful now and moving forward despite what we are coming from so I think, yes we hear you and that's what I wanna ask like do you have something to share to us like what's up with we hear you how was that experience, what is it like for people who don't know? I loved up theater company, Caitlyn, the lab they're just doing such amazing and great work I can't even begin to articulate all the amazing people and groups involved in creating this movement which really is grounded in deep listening listening of oneself, listening of one's community listening of the world and then the projects that they're doing creating platforms to have conversations like these you have to talk about the things that are kind of hard to talk about even if you don't have the language and the pretty little words like you have to begin and this past month as Airefone was sharing we had an opportunity to perform at the Kennedy Center perform at the reach to help remind these conversations over at the colon ice exhibit and doing the project has been really transformational for me because it's making me consider and reaffirm my own proximity to activism and creating positive change and so what I encourage all of us to do in this space is just to continue to listen and observe in the capacities that we can and to make the changes and the movements and the ways that we can and trust that we're surrounded in community with people who are doing the same, who are. Is there anything that we could see or watch or a website perhaps where we could like check more about this we hear you so they search we hear you and then they could read more about this now for sure like there are people who wrote about it they are launching a website I forgot I don't have that for today so it's okay but they're launching a website they're gonna do another performance in Sweden and there's a lot to come and I guess I could perform a small excerpt from the performance itself give me one second as I pull up my script so I think I'll begin this is just to give a little preface this is the closing of the performance itself and I'll begin so in the year 2078 I will celebrate my 80th birthday if I have children then maybe they will spend that day with me maybe they will ask about you we've come here to let you know that change is coming whether we like it or not the real power belongs to the people I'm fighting to heal I'm headed towards recovery it's okay to be scared not all scary things hurt and just because things are scary doesn't mean they are unsafe but we are hurting in a world that's sick tired and scared but I won't be other anymore I'm going to find us a place to be safe and healed so to you I ask when when will you join us when and where will we choose to be I don't have much more to say but I am here to show you I hear our voices calling out to me from wherever we stand together I'm being pulled towards that place and time where we exist and I'm here to remind you that it is possible only if we transport ourselves there together I know you are tired I know we are hurting but the future is calling to bring us home a home on a planet that's healed existing in sustainable systems where society and environment are harmonious I'm heading towards building a future and a home where all of us can be safe within let's get there let's build there together I wish you could do the whole performance of us or we're only here today or some of us on the top um but you'll see maybe you could come to the Philippines too one day you know I'm interested in what could that mean um I'm interested with this grid you have and where have you landed in what spaces have you articulated this clarity thank you very much that's a very good question actually as I said when I was very young very young I was involved with this kind of amazing uh I mean panel discussions we had open discussions when I was very young so um since I came to the United States um I was working with an organization called LearnServe International so it was an opportunity that was given to me and I was I tried to because I've been through a lot of things I was traumatized I was like I was I was thinking about my country my home country Afghanistan I was thinking about the people all not the people in Afghanistan all the people around the world they're suffering because of this kind of issues and problems and after that so it has been like three or four months that I'm working individually I'm I'm trying to build up awareness among our community among the high schools and I have some partners that we will found an organization this summer and we will try to first build up awareness and to campaign for climate change and because it's a very good opportunity for me as Maya said that we shared this planet yes this is our home we all have the responsibility to take action to stop climate change and I I have that feeling I have that the obligation towards my planet towards the life of the lives of our next generation that we have to create a change I'm cutting from one of the greatest leaders of the world his name is Mahatma Gandhi he says if you want to see the change first you have to be the change yeah we have to start with ourselves and then we have to change our community and that's what that's why I'm always thinking about climate change and about environment yes and yes go on yeah thank you thank you very much I'm just also like because as I've said like we we are and a very interesting moment here to be able to like share all your stories to the people but I also want to get to to Kio you were talking about this as in a way as an embodied you know practice that when we we talk about it but also and Kio works with the body as as a medium is that correct Kio so perhaps you could share as well to us through some of your slides like um okay it's maybe if you could put it on thank you maybe like yeah help okay but first Kio how do you respond to this well as as I was as I mentioned before I mentioned pollinators and during lockdown I started to read the words of I'm not seeing and don't have a way and about their concepts on multi-species companionship and collaborative survival and so I decided that I wanted to make an alliance with an endangered species and I chose the apis meliferabee which are honeybees and because a friend of mine he's an apiculture and he he was he's working with bees and he said that the bees that he had at the city were much more healthy than the bees that he had at the outskirts of the city and I was like what how I mean it's a polluted city and they're in the field so and he was like I think it's because of the they don't use that much pesticides in the city as they are using now in the outskirts with all this monoculture that I already talked to you about so I saw this gap to enter there like to talk about the city as a refugee for pollinators and for bees so I decided to invite a queen bee to establish her colony in the rooftop of my house her new home and on the day of their arrival it was more than 40 000 bees and the queen I to make a seal of this multi-species alliance I offered the hive mask of my face and I put it inside the hive so the bees would finish sculpting the mask and with like honey pollen what will you see now let me show you so this is the day the bees arrived and this is their house and now we have like more than four stories so they've been growing a lot and then that's the mask in two months after I gave them the mask well these are these are the bees working like on the mask and then it's a collaboration with it there they are when we met like he was looking for is it queen bee the first time we met online ah yeah I was looking for a queen bee yeah right and then well this is the end result and it was really interesting because it's like they decided to like because what I wanted to do with this mask was like to to make uh to question the the binaries that they told us they're rigid on like nature culture human animal the self and the other and I found that that it was really interesting that they decided to do like a half and half face so there's Poland there's honey that's ready the honey that's not sealed is honey that has a lot of humidity humidity still in there so it's not ready to be like eaten for the bees and uh there's also like cells the the bigger cells that you can see are for male bees and then the smaller ones are for a feminine bees and then well it's it's a project and it's called mujerapis and it's through different mediums that I've been working like multi-species performance like photography I'm talking about ecocide goes hand in hand with feminicide and there's also like sculpture and ceramics and this is a project it's called a room of one's own and these are refugees for wild bees and they look for cavities like tubular cavities in different places but because right now we are experimenting a lot of habitat loss they there's not enough cavities so these cavities that are like menopause like in the form of a breast that's where they can go rest and nest so that's why it's called a room of one's own and it was like placed in a park in very in various in different parks of the city and then to finish off I would like to show you these work in progress it's sounds recorded from the hive and manipulated and then like and with my voice on it so there you go I feel like for a moment there I felt very sticky but this is a nice flow no I started with this excerpt from a performance a theater performance and then you know how your work with the youth intersects with your activism and and your performance art is in fact like also an embodied lived experience and activism and now we're on the bees as a way to dissenter ourselves from the top of the ecology I'm reminded of the ocean filibuster then embodied like in your piece Katie um now we're we're going to that we're going to the ocean from the beast it's true I am so inspired by all of you I'm just really really grateful to be here before we get to the ocean though I think I want to talk about the forest forest um so I wanted to show and share a little bit of two pieces of pearl demors um and the first one I want to share is called how to build a forest and it's an eight hour performance installation where on a bare stage the audience can come in and witness seven people building very slowly and obsessively a four a fabricated forest made out largely made out of petroleum products over the course of six and a half hours people can come and go they can get up close they can sit and watch it's it's complete for half an hour and then the whole thing gets taken away in the last hour so it starts from from a bare stage and ends on a bare stage and if we can play that video I have the eight hours compressed to like a minute and 12 seconds and on one side of the screen on the left side you'll see sort of the whole thing and then on the right side you'll see these close up moments and one of the things we were we were interested in in a couple of things but we were Lisa my collaborators from New Orleans and this was in 2006 we were really reeling from Hurricane Katrina also the BP oil spill was around that time and we wanted to think about how theater how we as theater artists could really respond to that and we started to think about how long it takes something to emerge in the natural world and how or a city frankly and how quickly it can be eradicated and so the framework of an eight hour work day where humans can go in and like take the top off a mountain that took hundreds of years to to get to that point the hubris of that was something we were interested in exploring and then also in terms of theater conventional theater making all this time and resource goes into making something the audience sees the very top and then it all gets thrown out and so we were interested in flipping that script and inviting the audience into the process of making decentering like the final perfect view and so after we did that project we were really interested in how to bring people in in this way so rather than sitting back and watching that you were you were part of that system you were part of that system more recently and actually right now I'm in the middle of shepherding a tour of our latest project called ocean filibuster where we where we wanted to use the tools of theater video lights storytelling sound music to create a mythological story where the audience could contemplate this imagined or real perhaps future in 40 50 60 years time whenever it's going to happen so I'm going to show about four minutes if that's okay feel free to stop us of this piece ocean filibuster and in the piece the audience walks into a theater that is set up to be a global senate a future global senate called the global federation of humans on earth and they meet a character called Mr. Majority who is proposing a bill to end the oceans as we know them he calls it the new seven seas he proposes to shrink the world's oceans down into manageable and marketable lagoons he has all sorts of systems of how we're going to get rid of the water develop the land that's left behind and turn to human engineering science and technology to do all the jobs the ocean does and when he opens the bill up for debate the first person who shows up to speak against the bill is the ocean in human form so you're going to see just a little of the of the two of them and one of the methods the ocean uses to bring people into their world so go ahead today is a good day wherefore the ocean she has descended into unfathomable chaos and wherefore New York City is now a small island of memorials and Osaka is a deep water tourist attraction accessed by submersible musk mobiles and wherefore the seat of global government is now split between Geneva and Seattle we the members of the global senate come together today to vote on the most important piece of legislation of my time the end of ocean bill I want you to go with me to a place beneath the sea carved out from the water the land will be set free sudden hills and mountains and valleys where you stand you'll watch your sons and daughters as they populate this land no more troubled oceans only placid lakes and streams refineries and wheat fields as far as you can see no more sinking no more swimming you can ask for more drowning and self-pity it's time for you to soar from the country called pacific to the mountain thank you for the floor mr. majority and for laying out the bill so clearly without a smidgen of manipulation i roll and uh i am grateful to have this time to speak on my behalf and yes when i say my i do mean my because i am the ocean deeper into your watery self deep blue dark blue blue black and maybe you hear and you're like oh my god help what is that as the missile test explodes somewhere over there you don't know it's a missile test you don't have those words because you you are a stoplight loose jaw dragonfish in the mesopelagic zone of me well in human terms about 1800 feet it's totally dark but that doesn't matter much to you when the blinking red and green lights just below each of your eyes bioluminescence light produced by a living organism your phytoplankton have been declining for years thanks to your rising temperatures exactly and you know you know why can we please pull up the ocean disaster notification system thank you let's take a look shall we what is this you cannot ask for help this isn't help this is part of me all of me the mix of me it's become impossible to translate my immensity with just one voice this filibuster is under my purview and Mr. Majority chill thank you Katie it's very interesting that you have turned this into a musical in which like you know literally like to hear the ocean sing if you know and at this point I know it's a surprise that we have come to almost to the end of definitely if my dream would have to deepen this further into the solutions perhaps that we think right and then I reflect well I was looking at this like the solution is already like we are doing it in a way so I'd rather us step into like few seconds of sharing what is either a dream or an invitation to the community we have here in this moment which I could definitely count by my you know multiple fingers yeah as we close perhaps you could either like share how do you want to move forward with this or how do we want to invite our community here with the gathering into your world or into our earth maybe Kio then thank you a sentence or two would be so sweet well bees communicate by dancing you know like they would tell each other how far their food source is by do it and I'm gonna do it for you the waggle dance okay so I invite you to do it and it'll make you feel better thank you um candy um is there anything sure I think I invite all of us to start letting go of the word I yeah that um that we are also a community in within our own bodies and then in every step throughout that so to take care of the ocean to take care of the environment to take care of the cities the air it is the same thing as taking care of our own selves well I think that first I have to say that as I said I mean we all have the responsibility to take action and to change ourselves and to change our mindsets we have because we all have the responsibility to uh save and protect all our world I think all of us know what are the solutions all of us we all know that what are the impacts of climate change how what how we can stop that I want to find out to Secretary-General of the United Nations Antonio Gautres which two weeks ago he said that we have three more years to stop climate change but I think if we would have three more minutes three more minutes these leaders the world leaders would not stop climate change if we would have just three more minutes chance to stop climate change these leaders would not stop climate change I'm pretty sure and from for the poor countries like Afghanistan I want to say that please help those countries as well as we care about climate change overall because those countries are being impacted mostly by climate change if the United States here burning fossil fuels using gases using oil it impacts Afghanistan and Philippines on the other side of the world and we have to care about those countries as well thank you very much I guess as we're closing I do want to thank you all again I'm just filled with so much gratitude to be here with you guys and all that the art and the ideas and and the relevance and the realness and the urgency and all that is coming change is coming and we are doing it actively every day as we embody ourselves embodying our world I guess what I would like to leave us with is going back to to what what has been shared in this conversation which is both listening internally listening externally to the world around you and in still finding sustainability peace and balance our world is literally coming from a global pandemic our world's climate crisis is a sign that collectively we are sick and we are coming from a history that was structured to not be sustainable and healthy and just but we collectively have an opportunity as we've all shared to make that change happen and it has to and it's going to so find rest find peace find sustainability it's coming your way it's coming our way and I am excited I am excited from the B dance to the we dance to listening to excitement yes this work can be tiring and exhausting and for some perhaps you know the conversations and our echo anxiety and all that but all of these feelings and emotions all come from a place of love I believe in our collective we honor anger and grief trauma all coming from a place of because we care because we love right this is all different rhythms of the heart in which if we only understand it we are mad at this because we care so much for life and not just but this time not just for us you know actually other species are going to be just fine after us it's us too it's our families I think I want to pick up from from all of these wonderful sharing that this is not really closing this is a continuation rather an invitation to to grow the community and to start from where there is love start from where you are say I was at the one workshop last time with Miranda and like where do you really start there's so many problems but start start where you are right now start where you are aligned and when the mind and heart and body aligns I think that you are in the right space lastly I haven't really shared much with with what I do in the country but anyway it continues to go on I'm working with institutions there as NFC said this is a strategic game a long game so so the key is really to like have the stamina for this and looking at this focusing the next 10 20 years of otherwise there are irreparable damage and too late if you know to look back and say we have not done anything you know so I can wait for all these like fabulous things that could happen in the arts and just like devote ourselves within the climate and we were talking about this Katie like all the things that we fight for somehow is reduced to this idea that our home is a threat our home is a threat and so you know just like the pandemic that have deprived us of the space to share stories in these spaces with the climate it's a slow kill to our lives to our food systems to everything and as I mentioned about the intersections we work on we cannot work on the climate ecological healing without really working on global justice we cannot and we cannot work on global justice if we cannot work on a culture of care it's just impossible to care it's just impossible to achieve justice without really caring and I think this these are the moments when we are allowed and invited to care a little more perhaps to see different plans and I am so honored and grateful to share with to share this space with you today to learn from you to continue the conversation to imagine a better world for us to the center ourselves from this egocentric system patriarchal system that has all brought us here in this damage so thank you so much there is hope in this because here you are present here in this space thank you so much we have one more event today you have a little break and then we will be back we will really begin at 330 because this event involves collaborators who are joining us on zoom from other places in the world so please come back a little before 330 like sanctuary 2325 so we can really get started at 330 we will have this that last discussion around migration and children and the refugee experience and then our closing rituals for the festival see you then