Keynote: On Decolonisation and Climate Change and the Interrelation of Both

24 February 2021

Dear mentors, speakers, participants and partners,

I'm delighted to welcome you, together with Katie and Anaïz from the TFA team and Angeliki from the 2023 ELEVSIS team, to the first Module of the Atelier for Arts and Production Managers. Huge thanks of course go to our partners ELEVSIS 2023, Drosos Foundation, Zoukak Theatre Company, Artlink and Creative Europe to make this programme possible, and especially to our longstanding partners as in Open Society Foundations, and our initiator, the European Festivals Association. Thanks to our mentors and speakers, and to Mike van Graan for developing this programme with us.

I would like you to close your eyes for a moment and imagine we are in a small harbour town in Greece, 40 minutes away from Athens, in the old workers Union building, only a 2-minute walk away from the harbour and the sea. We just had delicious Greek coffee and are looking forward to mezze in the sun later on. Only last week, Greece, like Belgium, by the way, was still covered in heavy snowfall, with spring temperatures foreseen in the weather forecast.

We are not meeting physically for this Module I, but let's make each other a promise that we will meet in Beirut at the end of the year to make up for that. Both we, as well as Beirut, will need it.

We are currently facing circumstances that are often out of our control with this ongoing pandemic, and vaccination strategies that are getting off the ground quickly in some places of the world, and not at all in others, due to the same market-driven strategies that have enlarged already existing inequalities. We try and make the best of these circumstances and to find solutions to facilitate these regional and/ or global exchanges, which are needed now more than ever. To make sense of the time we are living in, to not go through this alone, to identify what is outside of our control as well as what we can have an impact on.

Whenever I do these introductions, they are closely related to what I have read recently.

There are two things that stand out. One is a letter from the Mexican artist Lazaro Gabino Rodríguez of the artists’ company Lagartijas Tiradas al Sol  in response to Jerome Bel a French artists, related to Jerome’s non-flying policy. Another is a letter from Emily Johnson, a First Nations artist from Alaska now based in New York, to the National Endowment for the Arts, to share with them as a Yup'ik womxn and artist her experience with the Executive Director of Peak Performances at Montclair State University, Jedidiah Wheeler.

Both letters are indicative of our times and written by people speaking from a space of underrepresented voices, or from a space where their artwork has mainly been able to exist and develop thanks to funding from rich countries, located in areas heavily affected by the fallout of climate change - though not necessarily responsible for it. Where Lazaro describes the Mexican artists' reality and what not flying would mean for him in these circumstances (infrastructure as in no extensive railroad system, funding, coproduction, partnerships, access to international work etc.), Johnson responds to white male dominancy and colonial approaches of large institutions. Working with Emily Johnson includes agreeing to a far-reaching decolonisation policy of the organisation and signing up to a decolonisation rider.

So many things are changing today, change that does not necessarily go in a seemingly good direction, bringing people and places to the brink of what they can take, or challenges they never could imagine they would have to take on, as in post-explosion Beirut.

We see the loss of mobility, incredible losses of a sector, loss of income, rising inequality and a growing divide between those who are near the well and those who aren't.

At the same time, what I see as moving in the last months is people speaking up, be it black people, LGTBQ+ people, women, First Nations people, the formation of new movements and networks,  the rise of the collective need above the individual need.

When talking with people from the Greek festival network that came out of the Atelier for Greek festival managers which we organised with Elefsis 2021 last year and out of which this Atelier grew, the conversation only one year ago was often about the fact artists did not take care of each other, there were no solidarity mechanisms, or joint movements – all this has been shifting in past months with a rising MeToo movement, with artist coming onto the streets in a ‘live art work’ to support art workers etc.

There is kind of momentum – for huge change to manifest – but when we talk about transformative change, when dealing with current issues as decolonisation or climate change, we need to look at the consequences in a broad perspective and on a large scale, not only within our own realm of effect.

As stipulated above, mobility of artists, including air travel has to do with 'infrastructure of countries,' 'livelihoods of people,'… change, even well-intended, is not always good. We need to think beyond the impact of our own, sometimes privileged context.

In both cases, the letters are addressed to white male directors who have been working in very privileged positions. Another conversation I had with a dramaturg of a major institution, who was responsible for the diversity policy within that institute, also talked about a personally harmful and traumatising experience, in which as soon as he tried to move away from only the programming in order to change the structure, the governance, and challenged the status quo, his efforts were stopped.

What I see is, in all three examples, that artists don't want to be a ‘token’ anymore for programmes that sound good but don't do good, that work around 'decolonisation' without knowing what it stands for, that try to be radical only because it's fashionable, that work on a diversity policy which cannot touch the board of directors, that tell us we should all stop flying now, while we have not contributed as much to international flying as that one artist has done up till now…

All these things relate to the same colonial structure which is being kept in place by those in power, who address the issues, thus silencing the crowds, have others pay the price, but who do not delve into the complexity, difficulty and bravery that real transformative change asks for.

The dialectic, the conversation around these issues is very important I believe, and the fact that some things just do not pass anymore. Actions are taken in the public sphere to oppose these forces and draw attention to the consequences these actions can have, as for example the internal voices daring to speak up now about the behaviour of this director from Peak Performance within their institute, confirming Johnson's experience for which he will hopefully be held accountable. 

If we want to be 'artists of the future' as Jerome Bel calls it, we cannot NOT take into account decolonisation issues, social injustice and climate justice and we cannot consider one issue without the others, as climate justice is interrelated with social justice. This goes beyond an individual decision of not flying anymore in a context where this decision does not impact a livelihood in the same way it would affect many others. Which doesn’t mean I believe it to be a good idea Jerome Bel is not flying anymore, and proposing another way of international collaboration which obviously seems to work for him. We do need to address these issues, as there will be no future if we don't. These are the themes that drive our times.