What artists and cultural workers can do
We are calling on artists to help us assemble social media content with their artworks in ways that draw attention to what is happening in Brazil using their own international networks.
We are asking you to connect your work to the messages from Chief Ninawa Huni Kui and the "Teia das 5 curas" network of Indigenous communities, and to share the blended work on social media (Instagram and Facebook posts and stories, Tiktok trends, YouTube videos, etc.) with the hashtags: #all4theamazon, #foreveryonesfuture, #hauxhauxmovement.
This is important. Through your work, these messages can reach audiences that would not be exposed or pay attention to them otherwise, and you can affect them differently. We are not asking you to become a protagonist of this campaign, but to use your face/body/work to draw attention to the messages from the Indigenous communities. The sad truth is that non-Indigenous people in your networks will be more able to notice and listen to what you say about this campaign than to the powerful messages that are already coming from Indigenous people they don’t know in Brazil.
This task requires that we take a different stance on “art for social change” as we navigate the pitfalls, limits, paradoxes and possibilities of creativity within a Western sensibility - precisely in order to place Indigenous lives and rights at the centre of the climate agenda. When creating work for this purpose, we need to take account of our own cultural imperialism, colonialism and separability while not backing away from the challenge of trying to interrupt colonial patterns and reorient ourselves toward collective well-being and existence. To learn more about this ‘MDR’ approach that centers maturity, discernment and responsibility, visit the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures Arts/Research Collective website.
Drawing on the work of the Gesturing Towards Decolonial Futures (GTDF) Arts/Research Collective, we are inviting artists to use an MDR approach, which stands for maturity, discernment and responsibility.
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For many Indigenous peoples, art is not seen as an activity separate from daily life, and it is not a form of individual expression. Many Indigenous cultures do not have a separate word for "art," instead, we see art itself is a language that expresses the visions of the land dreaming through us. For the Huni Kuī people of the Amazon, art is the language of the anaconda, brought into the world through the sacred plants, who are being threatened by the destruction of the Amazon.
~ Message from the "Teia das 5 Curas" Indigenous network
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We ask that as well as sharing through your networks, you also upload your works to this dropbox (link also below) so they can be included in our photo gallery and re-posted by our social media team during the campaign. The works must be available on a Creative Commons license (specifically, CC BY-NC).
Please view the gallery below (sample works by Dani d'Emilia and Sarah Amsler)