activism in art//

‘No progress into retreat’: ANOHNI on the intersection of music and a dying planet

“We need art in this moment of polycrisis.”

That is how UBC geography professor and author Naomi Klein described humanity's current state of being — a multitude of crises — while welcoming singer-songwriter ANOHNI to the small audience in one of the Chan Centre’s black box theatres.

The artist joined Klein on stage on October 4 in a conversation co-hosted by the UBC Centre for Climate Justice and the Chan Centre to explore her work in a time of global ecological crisis.

ANOHNI began by establishing her positionality as a Transfemme who lived through the AIDS epidemic and 9/11 and how those experiences have helped her come to terms with dealing with ecocide (the destruction of the planet by human activity).

“To see that evacuation of species or cataclysmic loss, the way that communities can shudder and fold — I think there's something within Transfemme experience that gave me a precedent in my body for being able to sit with stuff.”

She further talked of the scale of the climate crisis and how we got to our current stage — by “malevolent design” of the petrochemical industries involving decades of denial, blame and fearmongering tactics.

“That's why it feels so overwhelming, you know? Because it's so deeply infrastructural. And it's not even just structure of our minds, but it's also within the genome of our bodies.”

ANOHNI elaborated on how she “viscerally” carries the stories of our ancestors being scapegoated — whether in climate or Queer contexts — and experiencing violence through life within her.

“It's all in my nervous system,” she said. “It's informing, in subtle, unconscious ways, every gesture that I make as an artist.”

Looking at ANOHNI’s discography, the thread of connecting nature and the human experience is clear. Her 2016 album HOPELESSNESS marries dance beats with humanity’s role in ecological destruction — and in turn, our own destruction — in songs like “Why Did You Separate Me From The Earth?” and “4 DEGREES.” Her lyrics from “Marrow” — “Suck the / oil out / of her face / Burn her, burn her / Burn her hair / Boil her skin” — explicitly depict the extractivist economy and its effects.

The talk then shifted to discuss the wide-sweeping impacts of the destructive hierarchy of industrial companies so deeply ingrained in society. ANOHNI recalled an anecdote of her father and his inability to imagine climate cataclysm because of the petrochemical-funded misinformation he had been bombarded with.

“He couldn't imagine that something as steadfast as nature was ever going to bend to our will,” she said. “And our generation was the first generation [that] really had to, on a slightly bigger scale, start to reckon with that.”

ANOHNI spoke to that reckoning, emphasizing that we can’t continue with our current systems of extractivism, capitalism, patriarchy and colonialism if we want to repair our relationship with nature.

“There's no way to progress into retreat. And what the Earth asks for is retreat. She asks that we stop. If we want to exist with the rest of biodiversity, we have to stop.”

Many of these feelings are expressed in ANOHNI’s latest album, My Back Was A Bridge For You To Cross. It blends soft soul music with genuine feelings of despair and tenderness, timelessness and urgency. “Why Am I Alive Now?” reflects on being witness to disasters like droughts or species extinctions, while “It’s My Fault” explores complicity in Earth’s extractivism.

“I think of it like I'm sounding a bugle,” ANOHNI said. “My job is bugle.”

And although ANOHNI has been sounding the bugle for the past few decades, she notices how people still aren’t paying attention as things get worse and worse and grapples with fear for a disastrous future if we don’t change course.

“I'm scared of the future. I don't like it … I hate it,” ANOHNI said. “And that's made infinitely more irritating by my complicity as an author of it, as a passive author of it. That is excruciating, and how do I start to unpack that?”

To a group of students, scholars and activists — all grappling with the same question — her response was comforting.

“All I can say is slowly. Start. Try.”