The climate crisis is best understood from a multitude of perspectives — and what better way to do that than through different art forms?
Last week, UBC Sustainability Hub’s climate cohort organized the Transformative Solidarities festival on campus.
In collaboration with UBC Exposure, the Hatch Gallery and Pacific Institute for Climate Solutions, they set up a week complete with climate-themed panel discussions, film screenings and a cultural celebration full of performances.
Nina Malekyazdi is a sustainability ambassador for the climate cohort of the Sustainability Hub, and was one of the lead organizers of the festival. She believes that events like these are key to helping people realize — or remember — the true extent of such a wide-reaching issue.
“When you look at the climate crisis today, and the extent that it's reached, it's not really an issue that can be viewed in isolation anymore,” she said. “It's just as much political as it is economic [and] social. That was kind of what we had in mind when making this theme … how important it is to have this sense of solidarity.”
Malekyazdi thinks of the climate crisis and its consequences as an example of “slow violence,” at least for people living in the Lower Mainland.
“When something really bad is happening, but it doesn't affect you directly or it's not happening near you, you don't feel that sense of urgency, and you don't think that it's your problem.”
But our summers are only getting warmer, and the effects of the climate crisis are becoming more and more apparent, especially in metropolitan areas. It’s a horrific realization to have, and one that can be overwhelming to cope with alone, so organizers kept this in mind when planning the festival.
“We wanted to build a community of like-minded individuals, so you can build a network for yourself, but also tackle those sentiments of climate anxiety and climate grief [and] how to channel that into something proactive,” Malekyazdi said.
The organizers decided to loosely group the events into three sections, moving through each stage over the course of the week.
They started with events based on unlearning preconceived notions about the climate crisis and related themes, then focused on relearning new information — ending the week with discussions around ways to move forward and take action against the issues they had brought up.
Malekyazdi’s personal favourite event was a trivia game put together by a fellow sustainability ambassador who had the chance to go to COP28 this past November, noting it was interesting to gain an insider perspective on the ways different countries are handling the climate crisis through a fun yet informative format.
Blurring the lines between entertainment and education was also a main goal of the festival’s final event, which was held in Dorothy Somerset Studio last Friday. The cultural celebration featured a wide variety of performances — ranging from comedy sets to gut-wrenching personal essays — all tied to our relationships with land and nature.
After a week of potentially emotionally heavy discussions, Malekyazdi said embracing lightheartedness and the joy of creating art is essential to finding the motivation to drive climate activism forward.
“We were not necessarily tackling the easiest of subjects, but we really want to build this sentiment of hope,” said Malekyazdi.
“We were really aiming to have a variety of diverse voices at our panel, because so many times, the conversation is just so one-dimensional, just one perspective. There's so much going on in the world that we don't know about, that's different from our reality, or what we know to be our reality.”
Nina Malekyazdi has previously written for The Ubyssey's culture section. She was not involved in the writing or editing of this article.