From my apartment window I see the blind spot on the corner. Over the course of eight years, I witnessed countless close calls and a handful of accidents. On one occasion during early lockdown, I heard the not-uncommon sound of screeching tires. Peering down at the street, I saw two men jump out of their souped-up sports cars. In their shock, trembling, shaking clenched fists, they yelled unintelligible threats at one another. Circling like two rabid dogs waiting to pounce, they snarled and foamed. From my perch, I could see the veins in their necks throbbing. Neither advanced and eventually they both drove off indignantly, perhaps both realizing they could have killed themselves. And yet unwilling to take responsibility, unwilling to yield.

Lockdown turned me into a street-corner voyeur, peeping through my window at the clash of cultures, the contention, the constructed absurdities, and the mean-spirited, often-brutal narratives that are woven into the world. While I tiptoed around the shadows of my apartment trying to observe the goings-on of the world outside without being seen, I realized over a year had gone by and I had tiptoed around myself and everyone else, avoiding being at all.

I woke up one morning during the pandemic spring to the sound of James Brown blasting down the block. I went to the window to see what was going on when I noticed a white guy who lives across the street stomping back up the block away from the source of the music. A few doors down, a black guy turned and walked towards him, just as a cop car was pulling away. He glared down the block at the white guy, pointing his finger and yelling: “I see you! You fucking racist! Call the cops on me? We supposed to be neighbours. You are a racist! I see you now!”

The white guy stopped in his tracks in front of a white woman with a Black Lives Matter poster hanging in her window, who had come out on her porch next door to check on the commotion. He asked: “Did he call me a racist?” Then he turned around and took a few steps towards the black guy, who had turned the music up a notch by now.

“I’m not a racist! You’re the racist!” he yelled, pointing back at the black guy who waved him off as he walked back to his yard. The white guy turned towards the white woman and threw his hands up. “Can you believe that?” he exclaimed incredulously. Shaking her head in what looked like a mixture of confusion and disgust, she replied: “Unbelievable. Of course not, I don’t think you’re a racist.” He thanked her, glaring back down the block, his naturally pink skin now turned red. By this time, the music had been turned down and within a half hour completely died out.

A few months later during the pandemic summer, I heard a skittish caw coming from the sidewalk below. In my irritation, I peeked out and saw a woman pushing a shopping cart stacked with boxes and bags park in front of the hydrant downstairs. I couldn’t make out what she was saying, but it sounded like she was having a heated argument with someone who had wronged her. She proceeded to unpack the contents of the shopping cart, which may have constituted all of her worldly possessions, and organize them on the sidewalk. What began as a meticulous exercise quickly turned haphazard, anxious, chaotic. She paused and looked around—a 270 degree scan, as if to make sure no one was watching—then tossed a box on the cart, which quickly fell off, spilling the contents across the sidewalk. Perhaps sensing my lurking presence, she hastily stuffed the rest of her belongings in the cart and pushed off down the block and around the corner, stopping every few feet to reorganize her collapsing life.

For the last eight years, I have lived above a young couple with three kids and have been a witness to their trials and tribulations, struggling to survive in NYC. I’ve heard the screaming matches and tantrums and felt the feet stomping in and out, doors banging open and shut. During the pandemic fall the husband was still furloughed from his hotel job, the kids were out of school, and the mother was constantly ranting; the whole lot were clearly going stir crazy. When I took out the trash, I would find brown paper bags full of empty whiskey bottles, and once, while I was talking to the father, a bag of coke flew out of his wallet and landed at my feet, just out of eyeshot of his kids.

Things got worse from there, and before the ambulances and cops were called to his house a third time I heard him bellowing and threatening to kill himself. He was taken away and returned some hours later, looking run down. A few days later the wife and kids moved out. I haven’t seen them since. Over the months of lockdown, his face bloated and his eyes became permanently bloodshot. He would ask to borrow money, starting with $100, bargaining down to $50, and finally accepting 20 bucks as consolation. He wasn’t a bad guy, and I empathized to the degree that I could, but eventually I started avoiding him. When I returned from a trip in March, I discovered that he had moved home to Bangladesh. The apartment downstairs has been empty ever since.

Going “back to normal” is not a sentiment I relate to. I did not like the way things were, any more than I like the way things are now. Was it better 

 than it is now? I think many people—here and elsewhere—would agree that while the pandemic’s impact on social, political, and economic structures has been unprecedented, the uncertainty, tension, and collapse that people face on a daily basis is not.

The story of my neighbour, like any of these incidences, did not begin with COVID. 

 who leave the devastation of our parasitic existence and its brutal impact on one another and the planet, to fate, and God, and all our best intentions. Triage is all we know how to do now, oblivious or fully aware, that the wound is far too deep to recover. The only thing left to blame is our lack of imagination. The only certainty is that no matter how obvious the blind spots, at any moment now we’re most certainly going to crash.

Blind Spots

Over the last few years, a popular joke from the 1995 movie 

 by Mathieu Kassovitz has come back in style. It goes like this. “Have you heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he keeps saying to reassure himself: ‘so far, so good … so far, so good … so far, so good.’ How you fall doesn’t matter. It’s how you land.”

For many in Europe the full descent into fascism and the inevitable death splatter has not happened yet. But for those in Belarus, fascism’s boot has been pressed firmly on the neck of the country for nearly three decades. Censorship has become 

, while artists and journalists are routinely imprisoned, often for charges as oblique and ill-defined as “offending the fatherland.” Foreign non-governmental organizations operating in the country

such as those supporting women’s or queer rights—are barred from accepting foreign cash donations, leaving very few options for young Belarusians who desire change within the country. Trending toward complete authoritarianism, many in the landlocked Eastern European country have had enough.

In August 2020, tens of thousands of Belarusians took to the streets to protest an election that United Nations Special Rapporteur on human rights, Miklós Haraszti, described as “neither free nor fair.” The protests erupted days after President Alexander Lukashenko was ushered in his 6th term in office. With an estimated 250,000 taking to the streets, and the world watching, the self-described “last dictator of Europe” swiftly and predictably ordered police to violently repress the demonstrators.

In the ensuing months, Lukashenko made international headlines by forcing a commercial jet flying over Belarusian territory to land so that police could arrest and imprison an opposition journalist. He has ordered the arrests of hundreds more, including Vitold Ashurka, a politician who died while in police custody in May 2021. But with the world transfixed on the Taliban’s victory in Afghanistan and ongoing security threats from ISIS, it seems that many in the West are overlooking the bleak reality that many Belarusians face on the very doorstep of Europe.

The events taking place in Belarus today will lay the foundation for the next generation, but for many who remain in the country change in regime could not come any sooner. In addition to gross mismanagement and economic stagnation, the former Soviet republic has tried to play both sides in post-Cold War Europe by offering concessions to the West and the EU without alienating its most important and reliable partner in Russia. During the last year, however, Lukashenko has done plenty to alienate EU and Western partners thanks to his decision to violently quash protests and arbitrarily jail opposition figures, actions which have led to new sanctions against Belarus.

The struggle for visibility within the country’s art and cultural sector is of course very minor compared to some of Belarus’ domestic and geopolitical problems. Nevertheless, if one takes the Breitbart Doctrine at face value––the idea that "politics is downstream from culture”––it follows that some of the country’s leading artists and intellectuals may have some interesting, critical, and perhaps even revolutionary approaches to art.

In May 2021, nearly 100 artists, theorists, activists, and grassroots organizations from Belarus and its diaspora came together for an exhibition entitled КОЖНЫ ДЗЕНЬ: МАСТАЦТВА. САЛІДАРНАСЦЬ. СУПРАЦІЎ [Every day: Art. Solidarity. Resistance] at the Mystetskyi Arsenal gallery in Kyiv, Ukraine. The exhibition drew inspiration from tactics of resistance, ranging from street art and graffiti to protest and performance art, and functioned as a collective expression of opposition to Lukashenko’s rule.

The sprawling exhibition and post-exhibition reader highlighted how oppositional artists in Belarus are operating today. The exhibition glossary and concept was co-curated by Sergey Shabohin, Maxim Tyminko, Antonina Stebur, Marina Naprushkina, Andrei Dureika and Aleksei Borisionok, who were driven by a shared desire to look at the political power of art as a vehicle with which to spur social awareness, political change, and new models that could function in opposition to existing political power structures in Belarus and elsewhere.

A central element of Alena Davidovich’s work is the popular slogan for the women’s and feminist movement “Fight Like a Girl.” Davidovich has said: “The wall painting was made to draw attention to a new creative approach in non-violent resistance where the game changers were mostly women.”

The common slogan shouted at protests across Belarus is “Everyday.” Similarly, the works displayed at the exhibition “shout” their dissent from the walls. Upon entering the gallery space in Kyiv, the first thing one hears are sounds of protest blaring from the speakers. The exhibition being intentionally bereft of headphones was a curatorial decision, says Borisionok, intended to create a cacophony of protest chants and noises. “We wanted visitors to hear the sounds of protests as they entered the gallery, to feel the sounds as a visceral connection to protest movements in a way visitors could instantly connect with and relate to.”

With the sounds and video displayed in the gallery, the exhibition effectively employs the documentation of violence to address the mechanisms of state security. In doing so, they position art within its archival function, allowing visitors to see, hear and understand the mechanisms of Lukashenko’s brutal state violence.

The notion of protest choreography is one of the exhibition’s key themes. It refers to tactics used by artists and activists with their body as the main medium. This can be solidarity chains or single-person demonstrations, assemblies with thousands of people, walks around residential neighbourhoods, parties, concerts or a combination of these forms. “Unlike the passiveness of political language and monologue,” the organizers write, “an important feature of protest choreography is shared bodily experience.”

One of the crucial phrases underlying and giving voice to this definition is used by activist Nina Baginskaya, who repeatedly says “I’m walking” when stopped on the street by riot police. Or the phrase “I’m going out!”, the last text message sent by Raman Bandarenka, the 31-year-old Minsk-based artist and activist who died at the hands of Belarusian authorities during demonstrations against Lukashenko in 2020. The tragic circumstances surrounding Bandarenka’s murder was not lost on those who attended the exhibition, many of whom have come to see him as a martyr for the Belarusian cause.

Bergamot, one of Belarus’s most iconic performance art groups, Volha Maslouskaya and Raman Tratsiuk installed a video that reverberates through the halls of the Arsenal as a way to directly address the troubling and often terrifying tactics employed by the country’s shadowy security apparatus. In 

a three-minute video shot during a residency in a village close to Brest, the group unveils how detentions are often carried out by masked officers in black, with no identification, recorded only via phone cameras.

Jana Shostak, the Warsaw-based Belarusian artist, initiated interventions using only her voice. Shostak gained fame after her one-minute performance 

 was broadcast across Polish TV and popular culture––an action she does in order to draw attention to the blatant misconduct of Belarusian authorities. Shostak employs the scream to comment on the hopelessness and despair many continue to experience in Belarus today, galvanizing communities and the media to stop, pause, and reflect for one-minute. The performance has become legendary for the manner in which she infiltrates political, social and media spheres.

Nadya Sayapina's multimedia installation 

 depicts the artist and her cellmates’ personal experiences in the Akrescina and Zhodino pre-trial detention centers. It was not only an experience of fear and frustration, but also solidarity, caring, and “quiet” tactics of resistance. Caring for each other, empathy, interpersonal relationships, support systems and sisterhood––forming lines of solidarity where weakness opposes strength and imagination becomes a political tool.

КОЖНЫ ДЗЕНЬ: МАСТАЦТВА. САЛІДАРНАСЦЬ. СУПРАЦІЎ [Every day: Art. Solidarity. Resistance] sheds light on how new tactile forms of resistance are taking shape online. One example is 

(2019-2021) by the collective eeefff, which encapsulates how code-based computer algorithms can create networks of resistance that double as art. The project grew out of their research into outsourcing––the hidden labour supporting many platforms and IT companies. eeefff created a fictional space in which labourers can discuss themes like alienation and the possibility of “algorithmic solidarity” among the so-called “digital proletariat.” They take the installation of an office fun zone to blur the boundary between work and play, effectively deaccessioning IT from its capitalistic deployment.

The exhibition also includes archives and protest imagery from pan-European comrades Dan Perjovschi, Nikita Kadan, Karol Radziszewski, as well as Slavs and Tatars artists. But what makes the exhibition distinctive is that it is tactile provocation of activist struggles in Belarus and an example of how art can function politically.

 (2021) refers to the current protests in Belarus, political struggle, and state violence through the discourse of fascism. The topic of fascism and victory over it has for a long time been central to the contemporary state ideology of Belarus. Since the start of the uprising after the 2020 presidential elections, both the state and the protestors accuse each other of fascism. In turn, these positions are criticized by the academic community for historical untruths. The video, part of the 

 project, traces this symbolic struggle and the political, social, affective, and symbolic effects it produces.

The ability for Belarusian artists to develop creative new ways to resist is one of the other keys emanating from the exhibition. In an installation by Sergey Shabohin, the artist, curator, activist, and founder and chief editor of the portal of contemporary Belarusian art, 

, reveals layers of paradox and irony installed on the streets of Minsk. Shabohin’s installation consists of an archive of a 20-day procedural exhibition and a multimedia installation that refers to the metaphor of “social marble” — a cheap marble-patterned plastic film that municipal services in Belarus use to cover up graffiti on real marble. The work includes texts, photographs, terms, quotes, documents printed and glued on the wall from dozens of activists who contributed to the 

. What makes the project so unique is its tactile relationship to activist struggles in the country, an example of how artists are utilizing different media to undermine state control over information in public space.

While the basis of direct action may seem palpable to some, especially in response to the Lukashenko regime and the massive protests that have been erupting as a result, other artists in the exhibition take more subtle approaches to intervening in discussions around art and politics. Andrei Dureika’s wall painting displayed in Arsenal, for example, was initially an attempt by the artist to understand the situation in Ukraine. In 2015, he painted the phrase “There are no words…” on a street in St. Petersburg in response to Russia’s aggression towards Ukraine. The work, now displayed inside a gallery in Kyiv, along with dozens of other Belarusian artists who are now in the midst of a political crisis of their own, seems especially pertinent today. With Belarus and Ukraine both seemingly in free fall, it’s anyone’s guess what the outcome of this may be.

perhaps the only words left are from the one falling from the skyscraper. “It’s how you land.”

“A Gift for the President” is one of the most famous actions of contemporary Belarusian political art. It was a reaction to events in the country, including the end of Lukashenka’s first term as president on July 20, 1999.

The artist went to the square in front of the Presidential Residence,

dumped a cart of manure onto the asphalt, put devalued million ruble banknotes, the new constitution, and an election poster with Alexander Lukashenko on top, and stuck a pitchfork into the pile with a banner saying “For five years of fruitful labor!” There was also a Belarusian red and green flag on the bottom of the cart. The flag and coat of arms used in the action are symbols of the regime and of Soviet restoration and refer to 1999 & 2021.

Replica of the object used in the action “A Present for the President ‘For Five Years of Fruitful Labor!’” held on June 21, 1999 at 38 Karl Marx Street in Minsk to the dramatic turning point in the modern history of Belarus — the 1995 referendum, after which the national symbols (the white-red-white flag and the Pahonya (“pursuit”) coat of arms) were abolished and Russian became an official language.

Ales Pushkin was detained almost immediately afterwards. The court sentenced him to two years of probation and five years of deprivation of rights. 17 years later, in 2016, after the exhibition “ZBOR. Belarusian Art Movement” at Izolyatsia space in Kyiv, Belarusian customs officials confiscated the photo of the action that was displayed at the exhibition and the work was declared extremist by the court.

In her work “Amusing Pictures,” Mitrichenko describes her experience in Belarus. This is a picture diary, a report on one day in the life of the artist. But at the same time it is also a record of the emotions felt when experiencing from a distance events that cannot be influenced. According to the artist, “Cultural heritage, the history of art, big social turbulences, global political and cultural shifts, they are just patchworks sewed together from a huge number of small peculiar stories, little insignificant events, family tales and personal anecdotes.” In sewing together this patch-work blanket out of visual quotes from contemporary and classical works, and fastening them with notes from her diaries, the artist turns reflections about censorship in art, professional activity and political crises into fascinating comics.

In this work, artist and activist Sergey Shabohin refers to the metaphor of “social marble” — the cheap marble-patterned plastic film that municipal services in Belarus use to cover up graffiti on real marble. “In this symbol is the capacious image of the political structure of modern Belarus, where caustic ‘capitalist’ aerosol pigments are so deeply absorbed into ‘Soviet’ marble that they can’t be washed off and all that remains is to cover them up with Chinese-made film.”

The archive documents how civil society in Belarus was born, with key prerequisites and dates; how protest moods emerged and were transformed; and how everything resulted in an organized, peaceful revolution. The documentary materials include a timeline of the rise and development of protests, as well as a glossary of the new civil society.

There are also texts, photographs, terms, quotes, references and dates in the form of documents printed and glued on the wall. Contributors: Vika Biran, Aleksey Bratochkin, Volha Hapeyeva, Mikhail Gulin, Yuliy Ilyuschenko, Andrei Karpeka, Alexei Kuzmich, Marina Naprushkina, Nadya Sayapina, Antonina Stebur, Irina Sukhiy, Nikolai Khalezin, Vladimir Tsesler, Olga Shparaga.

The video refers to the current protests in Belarus, political struggle and state violence through the discourse of fascism. The topic of fascism and victory over it has for a long time been central to the contemporary state ideology of Belarus. Since the start of the uprising after the 2020 presidential elections, both the state and the protestors accuse each other of fascism. In turn, these positions are criticized by the academic community for historical untruths. The video traces this symbolic struggle and the political, social, affective and symbolic effects it produces.

 is a traditional Belarusian shirt with decorative embroidery. Artist Rufina Bazlova fills this method of embroidery with political context: she literally embroiders the history of the Belarusian protests, documenting and coding it without using traditional written narrative. Embroidery was always on the periphery in the hierarchy of the arts — the way the women who created the designs were excluded from history and deprived of their vote. For Rufina the use of embroidered is not only a return to a traditional Belarusian craft but also the inclusion of those excluded or deprived of the right to vote. “Weak” groups — women, pensioners, people with (un)limited abilities — play an important role in the Belarusian protests. As it turns out, a majority of the population are excluded from the political sphere. Embroidery was traditionally a collective practice: women gathered together to embroider and share stories. Embroidery is a practice of solidarity, both in terms of execution and from a formal perspective. The red crosses on the fabric are a metaphor of networks, coexistence and coupling. Finally, Rufina uses a play on words in the title of her work. In Belarusian, the words 

 [to survive] rhyme and differ by one letter. “The History of Belarusian 

” underscores the unprecedented level of state aggression against protesters.

was curated for ArtsEverywhere by Nikolay Oleynikov.

Freefall Off a Skyscraper

 occupy a massive white room in the Prado in Madrid. I’ve never stood before them, but as a painter I’ve long studied his work. The paintings are confounding—considered too dark and depraved to be enjoyed, while the artist himself was too celebrated to be subject to critique. It was initially painted on the walls of his farmhouse, 

 (House of the Deaf Man), on the outskirts of Madrid. Although Goya himself was losing his hearing, the estate was in fact named after its former owner. 

After Goya’s exile and death, the plaster was stripped and stolen and eventually found a home at the Prado. Considered by many to be a series of abominations, there are presumptions in art historical thought that the images' harrowing themes were a manifestation of Goya’s intense depression, disillusionment and/or dementia from war and illness, reflecting his steady mental, emotional decay. The nightmares of a pathetic, feeble-minded, dead man walking, albeit still a master.

 as mindless or paranoid ramblings. They are distinctly Goya, farcical nightmarish expositions on human ugliness. Nor are they cynical, which disturbing images often are typecast as. They are as funny as they are sad.

Like Goya, director Milos Forman—who passed away in April 2014—was witness to the horrors of war and the degradation of the human spirit. Forman lost both his parents to the Holocaust. Two decades later in 1968, he fled the Russian invasion of Prague, emigrating to the United States. Forman's last film was 

, itself an analysis of the madness of war and the requisite human ugliness.

Watching the lead up to the 2020 U.S. election brings to life Goya’s 200-year-old caricature studies of humans in grotesque states of uncertainty, fear and greed. Clamoring over one another, howling and burning in Boschian landscapes, all these self-proclaimed “leaders” shout their slander and vitriol over one another, never putting forward consequential ideas or fruitful plans. Disgracefully subsumed in wresting power from another depraved and disgraceful opponent, the bar for decency isn’t just low any more, it’s dead and buried. It harkens to the madness that is fomented when institutions completely forget the basic needs of people they were created to serve. The ugly, divisive politics of the U.S. at present is unsettlingly similar to the madness of the Spanish Inquisition, Nazi Germany and Cold War Czechoslovakia; all the ways that repression through the puppet politics of human deprivation leads to individual and collective psychosis.

The fate of Goya’s farmhouse and estate, the House of the Deaf Man, seems a fitting metaphor for the deafening of reason amid the din of global populism and the continual pillaging of the earth along with our sanity and dignity. Goya’s work, like Forman’s, shows that tragedies resulting of human greed can—through painting, film, music, theater, comedy and all forms of creative expression—be translated into honest and powerful learning experiences. Sarcasm is not necessarily cynicism. A dark interpretation is not always the same as a dark intention.

House of the Deaf Man

"People of Flour, Salt, and Water" was conceived as a learning process, providing a framework, a method, and a way to formally organize what was learned during the 2019 summer session of Free Home University, hosted in Castiglione d’Otranto (South of Italy). The process unfolded around three major struggles: that of local farmer-activists who are protecting and regenerating their land, and producing forms of sharing and commoning; the struggle of the refugees, migrants, and displaced people; and the struggle of young artists and activists trying to make sense of it all. Zapatismo was the lens through which participants analyzed their own stories, conditions, and possibilities, providing the group with a set of tools and a praxis with which to resonate.

During the making of the film, the participants engaged in several exercises, one of which was called “A Land We Can Call Our Own” whereby they painted a large table as a map of an imaginary land, with rivers, mountains, fields, and the sea. They also made characters out of dough: a dog to keep the thieves away, a duck and her ducklings, a refugee boat, a tree of life, and even a small Ghanaian Village. This land and its vulnerable ecosystem, including its inhabitants, became the backdrop for stories and relations to emerge, intertwined with those of the participants. As a result, the film is a fiction deeply grounded in their lived experience.

People of Flour, Salt, and Water became a film those of us on the team could call home, particularly thanks to the leading role of women guiding a process centred on care. The film’s director, Tsaplya Olga Egorova, and choreographer, Nina Gasteva, both members of Chto Delat, proposed storytelling, theatrical, and somatic exercises that helped the building of trust, intimacy, and collective work. Alessandra Pomarico of Free Home University guided a reading group, opening up the fables of Subcomandante Marcos to invite a multilingual translation as a way to position the group and their own struggles. As the local hostess, she also made sure that everyone was well-fed, well-rested, feeling good, and heard. Composer Elina Lebedze added sonic experiments and sound-based explorations to the process. Donatella Serafino taught how to make fresh pasta, shared many songs, and recipes, and the struggle she participates in as an activist of Casa delle Agriculture. Asya and Glasha—daughters, artists, activists, and learners—held the common space with fierce care and sharp questions. 

Produced by Chto Delat (Olga Tsaplya Egorova, Nina Gasteva, Dmitry Vilensky, Nikolay Oleynikov) & Free Home University. 

Curated by Alessandra Pomarico and Nikolay Oleynikov, with the support of Musagetes (Canada), and Regione Puglia.

Shot in Castiglione d'Otranto (Andrano), Puglia, Italy, 2019.
Choreography: Nina Gasteva
First camera: Mattia Epifani (MUUD Films)
Second camera: Dmitry Vilensky, Nikolay Oleynikov, Giacomo Goldoni
Sound: Elina Lebedze
Participants: Rebaz Ahmed, Modou Ceesay, Augustine Emanuel, Giacomo Goldoni, Ebrima Kayeteh, Aglaya Oleynikova, Friday Okodogbe, Christian Peverieri, Emiliano Peverieri, Alessandra Pomarico, Luigi Schiavano, Donatella Serafino, Rita Tamiello, and Asya Vilenskaya

People of Flour, Salt and Water

As the Arab Spring raged across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in 2011, artists and writers came to the forefront, bearing witness to mass political upheaval and acting as leaders within the revolutions. At the time, I ran an organization called freeDimensional which supported artists, cultural workers, and activists who, as advocates for social justice and defenders of human rights, face repression and violence. We received dozens of requests for support in 2011, a number that continued to rise steadily in the following years. Many of the artists and writers we supported had already been forced to leave their homelands and were living as refugees or political asylees, mostly in western Europe.

The difficulties they faced were multiple. Many were unable to find gainful employment in their host countries, making their creative practice untenable. Many suffered chronic health problems and untended injuries from police interrogations, imprisonment, torture, and willful neglect, exacerbated by poor living conditions in detention centres and refugee camps. But by far the greatest difficulty for most was the psychosocial impact of being separated from their families and community—being forced to flee quickly without time to plan or pack, then finding themselves in an unfamiliar and oftentimes hostile new landscape, uncertain if or when they would ever be able to return home. Some suffered an overwhelming sense of political impotency, rooted in the steady obliteration of their artistic identity as the ordeal of forced exclusion rose to define them personally and professionally—now they were "refugee artists."

Many of the organizations and networks that support at-risk artists and writers focus on immediate needs, such as health, housing, and legal aid. Their support is results-based. The importance of cultural connectivity and political participation is more difficult to measure, so it's often overlooked; but the need is indisputable. Imagine a writer from Zimbabwe finding himself in a small Scandinavian town, without a community to engage, in a drastically different climate, with language barriers and little or no access to food-ways or familiar cultural practices. While safe from the impending risk at home, the individual is now at risk of sociocultural isolation and its damaging psychological manifestations. As time in exile draws out, feelings of invisibility become pervasive and further debilitating. In this context, autonomous platforms for political dialogue can open what Hannah Arendt called, "the space of appearance," in which individuals can become political—that is, become visible in public as equals in conflict.

Ahmedur Rashid Chowdhury, known professionally as Tutul, is a Bangladeshi publisher and writer who founded the award-winning publication 

 gained a following as part of the “little magazine movement” in Bangladesh. By 2004, they had established a reputable publishing house and would print over a thousand publications in the ensuing decade. In 2015, after several prominent bloggers were killed by Islamic extremists, including his colleagues Avijit Roy and Ananta Bijoy, Tutul was attacked by a mob in his office in Dhaka. He barely escaped being hacked to death with machetes. He fled to Nepal and eventually was relocated to Skien, Norway, by the International Cities of Refuge Network (ICORN). Unable to publish in Bangladesh, Tutul turned his efforts to establishing 

's online platform as a space where he and his forcibly displaced colleagues could publish their work. 

's web magazine has grown into a communicative ecology for refugee writers to continue to produce work that reaches new audiences and creates a space of appearance for a community forcibly excluded from politics in their homelands and often in the countries where they relocate.

Via a similar path, Iranian journalist Parvin Ardalan became ICORN’s first guest writer in the Swedish city of Malmö. An editor and human rights activist, Ardalan faced persistent persecution for her work denouncing gender apartheid in Iran. She was imprisoned in Iran in 2007 on charges of “threatening national security.” Upon release in 2009, she relocated to Malmö with the help of ICORN. In 2013, Ardalan launched 

, a compilation of texts and images that document and celebrate the lives of immigrant women. For Ardalan, it was a way to continue her activism and craft by engaging with displaced lives in her new country, sparking a critical dialogue across their varied yet often parallel experiences.

Without the support and advocacy of ICORN, Tutul’s and Ardalan’s projects would have been far more challenging. Most refugees are not respected writers and artists with access to grants, awards, and residency programs or the largesse of the literary and art worlds. However, the proliferation of the Internet, fueled by a generation of tech-savvy refugees, has resulted in the creation of new digital spaces in which to share writing and art. One example, from 2018, is 

, a web “zine” created by a group of young women who were transferred from the overcrowded Moria Refugee Camp on Lesbos Island to temporary housing at the Plaza Hotel squat in Athens.

The voices of young Arab women are routinely excluded from popular political discourse in the MENA region. Rather than pry their way into existing political spaces, the Plaza Girls manifested one of their own. It comprised not only the published zine, which circulated in various forms, but the intensely social space of its making. Chloe Ruthven, a volunteer who worked with the Plaza Girls, recalled the lively, unrestrained political exchanges of their working sessions in her fascinating "

," originally published in April 2018. Their most recent issue, 

, weaves together reportage, poetry, and satire to show the psychosocial texture of forced displacement. The intelligence, wit, and sense of purpose conveyed by 

 is absent from most conventional news reports. As with 

, these putatively "powerless" young people gave themselves the power to be political simply by choosing to speak and act together through their zine.

I’m writing a diary
That remains one day
And says we had the Plaza Girls
          — Plaza Girls, issue #2

Digital platforms like these help preserve culture across continents despite geographic distance and limited mobility. Since the civil war broke out in 2011, over five million Syrians have fled the country, scattering to neighbouring Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, and across Europe. Syrian installation artist Khaled Barakeh was studying in Germany when violent conflict broke out in Syria. Given the political nature of his work and the sustained attacks against artists and writers by the Assad regime, Barakeh was unable to return home. Sharing the urgency of his colleagues who had been forcibly displaced, adrift in an uncertain future, he founded the online platform 

Based in Berlin, coculture operates as an umbrella for a variety of artistic and curatorial initiatives addressing the “different facets of the challenges faced by displaced cultural producers.” Barakeh and his newly-formed team are currently developing the Syrian Culture Index (SCI), an interactive database and communications platform for displaced artists from Syria and the larger MENA region. SCI will function as a repository for Syrian artists and writers to share their work with colleagues and develop collaborations with other refugees. Corollary to this database coculture has created the Syrian Biennial, a traveling exhibition that links different cities to which Syrian refugees have migrated. A third project, "Through Solidarity, We Survive," offers a platform for artists to express the social, political, and cultural effects of COVID-19, with a focus on those living in exile amidst lockdowns, quarantines, and polarizing politics.

After fraught and treacherous journeys, refugee artists and writers who relocate to cities in Europe and North America often find increased access to cultural institutions and other support structures. This helps them integrate into local communities and find the resources to develop initiatives like coculture. However, such resources are rarely available to refugees finding exile in poorer countries. This can be particularly true of Internally Displaced Peoples (IDPs) who are often marooned indefinitely in dilapidated, ramshackle camps with no education or employment, barely surviving off of rations provided by the state or international NGOs.

In the northernmost region of Myanmar, a series of desolate IDP camps stretch along the border between Kachin State and China. Sixty years of civil war between the Kachin Independence Army (KIA) and the Myanmar military junta has left hundreds of thousands of ethnic Kachin displaced and struggling for sovereignty in the face of cultural extermination. For the Myanmar military the resource-rich territory at the headwaters of the Irrawaddy River is too lucrative to relinquish. Some areas are controlled by the Myanmar military and others by the KIA, both of which have a vested interest in keeping the conflict alive and keeping the refugees in limbo—as expendable leverage—political pawns on whose lives no value is placed.

In Laiza, a small town in the jungle on the China border, generations of Kachin refugees have grown up in the narrow crosshairs of two warring armies. The news, reliable information, arts, and culture are nearly non-existent. What little outside information makes it to refugees in the camp is obtained via unreliable smartphone connections. Anthropologist and visual artist, Fu Guosheng, began working with youth in Laiza in 2010. She soon realized that these young people might never travel or relocate to see the world beyond Laiza, and had no appropriate psychological support. Guosheng began bringing pencils and A4 paper to the camp, asking young people to simply write down how they were feeling. This was a question they had never been asked before—one she understood to be a political act in and of itself. Eventually she partnered with a local NGO and secured funding for paint and canvas to use in painting and writing workshops focused on themes related to the experience of violent conflict and forced displacement.

Gathered together in a dusty, dimly lit, ramshackle classroom in 2019, drawing and writing to their experiences and sharing their work with peers, the young people of Laiza are participants in their own political discourse, opening the possibility of a political identity. Through these brief but repeated interactions, the youth find a space for respite from the brutality inflicted upon them by external political forces.

In the past ten years Fu Guosheng has worked with thousands of youth in Laiza and other camps in Kachin State, amassing a collection of close to 20,000 works. The pieces reflect both the horrors of war and the ways in which young people hold on to hope and imagine a future of their own making. Paintings and poetry from these workshops have been published in magazine and book form as well as being exhibited in cities in Myanmar, Thailand, China, and France. Guosheng has on occasion been able to raise money to bring some of the young artists from the camps to attend the exhibitions. For most, it is their first time leaving Laiza, with the added thrill of being valued as artists and writers—to see their work in print and on display—and to have the chance to communicate with people far beyond the confines of the camp. Because the rebel army and the military go to great lengths to keep the situation in the camps hidden and their residents silent, the presentation of the paintings and poetry are one of the only ways they can become visible in a public discourse as the audience engages with their texts and images.

Refugee camps come in many configurations. Unlike Laiza, which despite being rural is tightly packed, the Bidi Bidi refugee settlement in northern Uganda is a sprawling 275-square-kilometer expanse of land, home to more than 250,000 predominantly South Sudanese refugees. The camp is comprised of five zones between which there is no affordable or consistent form of public transportation. Basic materials for artmaking—pen, ink, paper, paint—are not readily available in the camp, which is a three-hour drive from the closest city.

Ray Styles is a South Sudanese storyteller and aspiring young filmmaker. He was forced to discontinue his studies in 2016 when violent conflict broke out in the capital, Juba. His father was killed and he was separated from his mother. After escaping indentured servitude with the rebel army, he made his way across the border to Uganda and found his way to a UN refugee meeting centre deep in the forest. After being transferred to the Bidi Bidi Resettlement, he dedicated himself to bringing the stories of refugees living in the camp to the outside world. Using a digital camera with a broken screen and his own cell phone, he set off on a week-long journey (the first of many to come) to conduct his own survey of Bidi Bidi. Making stops at each zone along the way, he called ad-hoc meetings to spark dialogue with others from various, sometimes hostile, ethnic backgrounds, introducing the idea of visual storytelling through workshops. While recording interviews, Ray recruited other young people to join this grassroots cultural movement.

Ray is gradually building a community with what limited resources he has. Utilizing Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, he posts short videos produced with Bidi Bidi residents, while assembling a network of young people, filmmakers, artists, and activists in adjacent camps, also in the region and internationally. It presents, in some ways, a new articulation of the concept of the “zine,” manifesting as social media exchanges. Riddled with memes and gifs, chat chains have become “scrapbooks” of content collectively assembled by young people to express their relationships with, and perspectives on, popular culture and current events.

In Bidi Bidi, preexisting political hostilities between regional ethnic groups—Dinka, Nuer, Equatorian—persistently pose challenges to peaceful resettlement. Ray’s approach is to disregard ethnicity in his organizing. He begins every session with the immutable question: “Why do people kill?” a provocation that is both neutral in relation to ethnicity and ubiquitous in relation to the war in South Sudan. Sitting under the canopy of a large acacia tree in Bidi Bidi, Ray and his recruits convene a space for political discourse to lay bare the shared physical and emotional experience of forced displacement and the trauma of survival. Despite the ethnic violence that brought these warring tribal groups together, it seems to be a common sentiment that they don't want to continue fighting. Rather, they see Bidi Bidi through Ray’s lens of optimism, as having the potential to be a peaceful refugee territory. This is of particular importance as the conflict in South Sudan drags on and loses attention (and therefore any support) in the international news media so that refugees increasingly are left to their own devices (or kept on life support by meagre government and NGO charities). Ray harbours no illusion that sharing these stories through video will change the situation from the outside. But the activity itself creates a new politics engendering hope. Further, Ray says, “sharing our stories with the world is the only way we get to communicate with the world.”

Considering the preexisting isolation and poverty that young people in Laiza and Bidi Bidi endure, the global COVID-19 pandemic has thrown down additional obstacles to convening and co-creating. Already meagre rations in the camps have been reduced as transport in and out has been restricted heavily. This will undoubtedly result in worsening health conditions and loss of life, while pressures to survive will exacerbate tensions in families and between neighbours who come from varying tribal groups. With schools not fully operational, the few creative outlets on offer for young people take no priority. Given the churning confluence of social dysphoria affecting these communities presently, creative outlets could serve to mediate psychosocial trauma and provide the community with useful information on health and safety. But even those NGOs that do incorporate art and cultural activities into their programs rarely recognize these modes of survival as essential. Further, they often go to great lengths to stifle political discourse, for fear that inter-ethnic tensions might explode. They often impose restrictions on open dialogue and institute transactional systems of charity and compliance. Ray’s organizing practice is an act of resistance to this denial of refugee agency.

At the same time, new challenges—social distancing, working from home, remote learning, and other transformations brought about by COVID-19—hold some promise to expand the increasingly innovative digital artistic and literary spaces online. This might not be as beneficial for young people in places like Laiza and Bidi Bidi, but it could circumvent the scarcity of materials in most places. For groups like the Plaza Girls it could act as a catapult for their artistic and literary pursuits. They will face an increasingly treacherous landscape of surveillance, censorship, and draconian social control that threatens to mute political dialogue on social justice and human rights issues.

“Day by Day,” laments the Bangladeshi publisher in exile, Tutul, “Bangladesh is going to hell.” He means the authoritarian regime that's kept the same party in power for thirteen years. COVID-19 has opened the door to increased social control and a crackdown on writers and artists critical of the government. In June, Mustaq Ahmed, a writer and commentator, and the political cartoonist, Kabir Kishore, were arrested and detained for critiquing the government’s handling of the pandemic—in a Facebook post. And they are among the lucky. In Bangladesh, extrajudicial killings are a daily occurrence. Yet Tutul holds steadfast to the power of literacy. He believes in “reading and writing’s unique process in changing [people’s] mentality and way of thinking, and its role in improving society.” Tutul believes that, in a time of expanding digital media and inarguable political urgency, “younger generations will become readers again. How do we give them the information and knowledge? We need to improve our technique.”

Refugee Zines

In late March, UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres issued an appeal for 

 and mitigate the spread of the virus to refugee camps. His plea reflects the fragility of public health systems in the settlements, where overcrowding, underlying health concerns, and a dearth of medical supplies, testing kits, heath care workers, and financial resources could present a doomsday scenario in the case of an outbreak. Should COVID-19 infiltrate the camps, communal water stations and World Food Program distribution centers for rations would become “

,” transforming places where all refugees go to collect essential resources into "hotspots" where the spread of the virus is accelerated.

 to armed groups to cease attacks that are at the root of the refugee crisis, and instead 

. His appeal has predictably fallen on deaf ears, as violence in Central America, Syria, Afghanistan, Myanmar, and South Sudan continues unabated. Hate, after all, never bows to reason.

A sombre truth we have learned about COVID-19 is that although the virus spreads indiscriminately, it is the poor, the hungry, the stateless, the homeless, the elderly, and the sick who are at greatest risk. Sadly, the characteristics that define the most vulnerable populations among us are the same characteristics that define the 70+ million refugees and internally-displaced peoples (IDPs) living in UN-administered camps and settlements across the globe.

In France and Belgium, where COVID-19 cases are spiking, emergency services workers in the Calais refugee camp reported that the number of 

 in a matter of days. Humanitarian organizations working in regions that have yet to experience widespread contagion are seeing the first signs of a coming wave.

“Confirmed cases of COVID-19 have been found in some refugee camps and communities with a large number of IDPs in Afghanistan, Iran, Gaza, and 

,” says Dr. Paul Fean, Global Roving Youth Advisor with the Norwegian Refugee Council (NRC) based in Jordan. “Refugees and IDPs are often susceptible to COVID-19 due to high (internal) mobility, living in overcrowded conditions, and lack of clean water, sanitation and decent healthcare.”

Potential flash-points include Mediterranean entry points to Europe (Greece and Italy), Syrian civil war refugee host countries (Turkey and Jordan), relative safe havens from internal African conflict (Uganda, Ethiopia, Kenya), the borderlands of Afghanistan and Pakistan, the frontiers of Bangladesh and Myanmar, and the war zones of Yemen. Should COVID-19 reach these camps, the scope of tragedy would be incalculable.

In advance of the wave, Alight (formerly known as the American Refugee Committee) is providing refresher courses on hygiene to health care workers, ensuring that critical supplies are stocked and increasing the number of doctors and nurses on shift. They are developing lightweight 

 that staff can carry and distribute around the camps. Daniel Wordsworth, CEO at Alight, says the volume of water that is needed as their biggest challenge. “We want them to be in as many locations as people are on a particular day: clinics, school, or water points.”

Richard Akim, a South Sudanese filmmaker and refugee living in Bidi Bidi, Uganda, 

the world’s second largest refugee settlement

, says there have been no reported cases in the camp, but neither are there any testing locations. The Office of the Prime Minister and the UN High Commission on Refugees (UNHRC) are relying on isolation—which Bidi Bidi has in abundance—to combat the spread of the virus, issuing an order to cut off all roads leading to the camp and cease public transportation.

In lieu of help from the outside world, Akim says that refugees are taking matters into their own hands. “People in the camps are aware of the global COVID-19 crisis. They are socially distancing and staying home to keep themselves safe.” The most significant change to people’s daily lives, he says, is that World Food Program (WFP) rations have been decreased from 12 to 8kg per month.

Fear and isolation have given rise to a more perverse threat to public health in Bidi Bidi: the spread of misinformation. “A lot of refugees are getting news and updates from people who have access to the internet in the camps,” says Akim. But there is a dangerous rumor circulating that COVID-19 can be cured by “drinking tea without sugar and having sex,” which sadly calls to mind the tragic falsehoods spread in the wake of the AIDS epidemic.

The Norweigan Refugee Council is working with the UNHCR and other NGOs to disseminate guidance provided by the World Health Organization (WHO) and “conduct awareness campaigns to share information on hygiene practices.” But Dr. Fean explains it’s challenging to disseminate information effectively in cross-cultural settings because “refugee populations need adequate and correct information in their own mother tongue.”

Perhaps the most functional venue for mitigating the spread of misinformation is schools, where students receive critical information and guidance and pass it on to family members. From Dr. Fean’s experience, young refugees and IDPs tend to have strong networks and keen interest to support others. They are often the ones “sharing information about how to stay safe from COVID-19 through social media and with friends and family.” Unfortunately, the benefits of keeping schools open has thus far been outweighed by the potential risks.

“Most countries affected by COVID-19 have closed educational institutions, which means that refugees and IDPs are also out of school,” says Dr. Fean. “NRC’s country teams are adapting educational programs for children and youth so that learning can continue through remote teaching using the internet, radio, or self-learning. We are also considering how youth can have positive roles in their communities, such as through the involvement of youth participants in hygiene awareness campaigns.”

Another sombre truth, though, is that very little can be done to attenuate the spread of COVID-19 in the camps other than enhanced hygiene, hand washing, and social distancing, all of which feels feeble and woefully inadequate in the face of a growing pandemic.

The impending crisis is forcing humanitarian aid organizations to find creative, sometimes unprecedented, solutions. “In Jordan, for example,” says Dr. Fean, “NRC, in partnership with UNHCR, has completed cash distributions in Azraq camp so that Syrian refugees can purchase cooking gas, diapers, and sanitary items. NRC also contributed to distribution of hygiene kits to refugees residing in Azraq camp. A group of NRC staff are staying in Azraq camp so they can continue to support refugees while travel restrictions have been put in place across Jordan.”

Although heroic efforts are being undertaken by health care workers across the world, the pandemic has disproportionately affected wealthy countries, leading some to call 

” It is not. Wealth, access to medical care, and social security render no one immune to the virus. But those who walk the earth utterly defenseless, whose very survival requires another’s act of mercy, who have no home in which to sequester themselves or refrigerator to store their food, will suffer unimaginably should COVID-19 reach their tent cities.

Amid the fear there are glimmers of hope. Refugee health care workers from Venezuela, Iraq, and Syria are being called to the front lines to fight against the virus in their host countries—England, Colombia, Iran, and the US among them. Others are taking on the monumental task of educating and caring for the most at-risk populations within the camps. COVID-19 is not the great equalizer, but it may be the great moralizer. When all is said and done, we may learn that only by protecting the most vulnerable can we protect ourselves.

Spatial Clusters: Covid in the Camps

On 14 February, 2020, thirty years after the Voyager 1 space probe turned around on the edge of the solar system and captured an image of Earth from 6 billion kilometres away, human civilisation found itself plunged into the Covid-19 pandemic and on the cusp of environmental calamity. To Carl Sagan, who designed the Pioneer Plaque and the Golden Record for the Voyager missions, the photo was an emotional reminder that this planet, this tiny speck of space dust in the galaxy, is our only home and we must take care of it:

Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant…

In early November 2021, the eyes of the world were on global leaders gathered in Glasgow, Scotland for the 26th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. But not to be outdone, a rag tag group of global environmental activists showed up and did their very best to shake things up.

While world leaders including Boris Johnson, Joe Biden, Narendra Modi and Jair Bolsonaro were on hand to negotiate for their own interests, Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin were conspicuously absent, preferring to show their disinterest by sending members of their attaché.

Flanked by giant inflatable Pikachus, Friends of the Earth Japan issues a statement demanding that Japan end funding for fossil fuel projects in Southeast Asia. Pop culture is a powerful vehicle for proliferating messaging––this scene also 

It is important to note that Boris Johnson's government did its very best to curate the 

 COP ever. Many participants from the Global South were denied visas, while vaccine issues and constantly changing quarantine requirements prevented many others from attending. Boris Johnson’s government attempted to make travel as difficult as possible for Global South participants, specifically those from progressive civil society.

Wielding a giant banner, activists played recorded messages from those of us who could not access the COP. This action was held once outside the conference centre entrance as delegates walked in, and again inside the halls of power from which broader civil society was excluded.

Climate justice activists who made it to Glasgow responded with a big, bold action and a battle cry: “Nothing about us without us!” © Hanae Takahashi/Friends of the Earth Japan.

As activists, we know the deck is severely stacked against the vast majority of peoples on this planet. But we show up anyway, whoever can make it, to be a thorn in the side of world leaders and to speak hard truths within those echoing chambers of power. Our weapons of choice are art installations, props, flags, banners, and our loud, indignant voices amplifying stories from grassroots movements across the globe.

It was freezing in Glasgow on the evening of

 10 December, when a group of international activists gathered to commemorate

 the 26th year anniversary of the murder of Nigerian poet and activist, 

 and the "Ogoni 8," who were killed for opposing an oil extraction project in Ogoniland in the Niger delta. A banner reading “Fossil Fuels, Not Here, Not Anywhere” was placed near the convention centre entrance next to images of coastal Nigeria.

We brought to Glasgow statements from the fight against fossil fuel extraction in Mozambique, Togo, Ghana, Indonesia, Canada, Uganda and elsewhere. These are not isolated struggles against fossil fuels. We are collectively challenging the entire logic of the extractivist "dirty" energy system. © Hanae Takahashi/Friends of the Earth Japan.

Earlier in 2021, we released a report titled 

Chasing Carbon Unicorns: The deception of Carbon Markets and “Net Zero”

. The report called out developed countries and polluting corporations who peddle "false solutions" to the climate crisis. “Net zero” pledges, carbon markets and offsetting, 

Beyond the clever titles, the solutions are in fact little more than sophisticated shell games negotiated by Global North countries to allow the world's worst polluters to continue polluting as long as they pretend to reduce carbon emissions elsewhere. What they offer are reforestation campaigns, financial remuneration the form of carbon credits, and hollow commitments of future unproven technologies that they claim will "suck" carbon out of the atmosphere. The quest to offset carbon emissions not only fails to reduce fossil fuel emissions at the source, it poses grave harm to communities in the Global South that often fall prey to violent land grabbing and unchecked human rights violations.

A giant carbon unicorn joined the rally for climate justice on Glasgow Green, 6th November 2021. © Hanae Takahashi/Friends of the Earth Japan.

Scotland’s national animal is the mythical unicorn, so what better symbolism could there be than an almost 2-meter-tall carbon unicorn head, sporting an oil rig as its horn. The unicorn made its first appearance at the Global Day of Action on the 6 November alongside nearly 150,000 people marching in the rainy streets of Glasgow.

The unicorn exhaled plumes of blue smoke, billowing alongside flags that read: ‘Dismantle Patriarchy Not the Planet’, ‘Climate Justice Now’ and ‘People Power Now’. The carbon unicorn 

made it into a visual story run by the BBC

, helping spread the narrative that carbon markets are like chasing a carbon unicorn; it may sound useful but it doesn’t exist!

Her Royal(like) Highness ceremoniously turned off the faucet to a raucous crowd of environmental activists and onlookers gathered on the streets of Glasgow, Scotland. © Hanae Takahashi/Friends of the Earth Japan.

To mark the 46th anniversary of the Queen turning on the UK’s first oil pipeline, activists staged a mock ceremony on the 3 November outside Glasgow's Royal Concert Hall in an attempt to persuade MPs in the UK to vote against new drilling in the North Sea Cambo oil field. Activists erected a life-sized caricature of the UK’s most prized possession, Her Royal Highness the Queen, who made a cameo to “Turn off the Tap.”

The final outcome of COP26 is nothing short of scandalous. While many delegates from the Global South struggled to attend or make their voices heard, fossil fuel corporations were present in full force, with 

. It will be remembered as another betrayal of the Global South, who see their plight as having been abandoned by high carbon-emitting OPEC countries and left to deal with costly transitions to clean energy, economic loss and environmental damage without essential resources or support.

The last days of COP26 saw a disappointing outcome emerge from the negotiations. Civil society mobilized to fight it. We took over a plenary hall to hold a "Peoples Plenary," in contrast to the planet-wrecking negotiations unfolding in the room across the building. Over 

800 people performatively paraded out of the conference venue 

carrying lines of red fabric, representing the red lines that were being crossed by those in power. © Hanae Takahashi/Friends of the Earth Japan.

Perhaps it is no surprise that this was the moment a deal was finally forced through on carbon markets. At COP25 in Madrid in 2019, Friends of the Earth and our allies in progressive civil society mounted a fierce attack on Article 6 of the Paris Agreement (which allows for carbon markets), which prevented a regressive agreement from getting enshrined there. At COP26, the UK government 

. Disgracefully, rich countries opted for the Glasgow COP-out while hanging developing countries out to dry.

There are real solutions to the climate crisis, and people power is the key to unlocking them. We need a value system that prioritizes the centrality of life, not greed nor profit. People are doing this everywhere already. They are building 

clean, socially-owned renewable energy solutions

, transforming our food systems and supporting peasant agro-ecology, protecting forests through community forest management, and building an economic system that prioritizes and redistributes care work. People with all their creativity, acting in community, from a sense of love, solidarity and justice can move mountains. As Carl Sagan waxed poetically in the 

…every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there––on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

Our planet is facing an integrative and compounding climate crisis: 

rising global temperature, warming oceans, shrinking ice sheets, glacial retreat, rising sea levels, extreme events, and ocean acidification

 represent clear and present dangers to humanity. Many have painted climate change as an issue for future generations, but it is an issue for all generations and all peoples. What is often left unsaid is that the climate crisis is inherently unjust—affecting the poorest, most vulnerable peoples the hardest, even though they are least responsible for this crisis. An example of this inequity are the coastal communities of 

Mozambique, who were battered by Cyclone Idai in 2019

, the deadliest tropical cyclone ever recorded in the South-West Indian Ocean basin, even though Mozambique produces 

0.02 percent of the world carbon emissions

We activists are often labelled as trying to save the Earth, but we are doing nothing of the sort. We 

 do anything of the sort. The Earth will be fine. The planet was here long before us and will be around long after us. We're the ones in trouble. Our goal is to support humanity's continued existence on this planet, especially that of the poor and vulnerable who didn’t create these crises. We do it because they will be impacted first and most deeply. If we have any hope of stopping the demise of our civilization, we must listen to the communities who have the most to lose. They have a lot to teach us about what we must value.

Some may say that our vision is grand, but the alternative is terrifying.