Conversations on Creative Climate Leadership Podcast
Episode 5: EXPLORATION
SPEAKERS
Louis VI, Zoe Rasbash, Mateo Chacón Pino, Farah Ahmed
Farah Ahmed 00:00
Hi everyone, and welcome back to Conversations on Creative Climate Leadership. I'm Farah Ahmed. I'm the climate justice lead at Julie's Bicycle, and I'm here with the wonderful Louis VI.
Louis VI 00:11
Hello, hello, hello. I reckon let's go straight into it. Who have we got this week?
Zoe Rasbash 00:16
Hello I'm Zoe Rasbash. I am juggling lots of things right now, but I'm climate action researcher at Watershed based in Bristol, and I'm also editor and podcast producer and co-host. It's fun to be a guest at Shado mag, the shado-lite podcast. I'm also a freelance creative and climate justice consultant. But I think most importantly to this discussion is I'm currently a student studying degrowth and political ecology at university autonomous and so currently based in Barcelona, at the moment, I'm currently thinking a lot about the role of arts and culture in a socio ecological transformation, specifically thinking about degrowth. So locating arts and culture within, within degrowth strategy, policy, specifically thinking about the city scale, thinking about how does arts and culture and like the network of amazing, grassroots arts and culture organisations that are dying in the UK, how we can build alternative economies that both see them thrive, but also those those arts and cultural networks engender that transformation.
Mateo Chacón Pino 01:24
And I'm Mateo Chacón Pino. I'm an art historian. I'm currently living in Kassel, where I'm in a research assistant at the University of Kassel and the Documenta Institute. I'm writing my PhD on the historiographic narratives of exhibitions. How to exhibit, how are they placed? What kind of narratives do they tell, and how can we use that to tell more compelling, more ecological narratives, instead of falling into traps? I'm also a freelance curator, sometimes writer, art critic, and I just most recently, I did a little project with the CCL seed grant money CCL Switzerland, together with Dorian Sari and Yves Regenass as where we tried to develop a format for more political participation of the cultural scene in cultural policy and sustainability policy in Switzerland.
Farah Ahmed 02:24
Yeah, in this episode, Zoe and Mateo are going to take us through Exploration, and we're going to really interrogate what that means, and hopefully this will take us on another bend around our journey.
Louis VI 02:39
Can't wait. Zoe, Matteo, welcome to the podcast. Very pleased to have you with us. This series is all about creative, Climate Leadership, and I want to begin by focusing on what these words actually mean, the creative, the climate, the leadership. What does that mean to you guys specifically, and how does that live in your day to day work?
Zoe Rasbash 03:14
I had such an existential crisis when I did my creative Climate Leadership residential with Julie's Bicycle. We had a discussion around leadership, and I had a full blown like, I'm not a leader. I don't know what I'm doing here. And like, Allison tickle was actually very kind to me, and was just like, we all have to be leaders. Like, right now there isn't time for everyone to be like, no, no, I'm not a leader. It's like we have to have a more collective, holistic and iterative understanding of leadership, where it's not like one person who leads us all to like a utopia. It's like we all have to step into our power, look at what's around us, look at our resources around us, and try and make the best of that and whatever form of leadership feels comfortable to you. Like, whether that's kind of like stepping into a speaking role, or whether that's actually you just like, want to bring people together to talk and to like, engender alliances and like and like, share ideas, we have to step into that. We have to, we don't have time to be like, I'm not sure. I don't know if it should be me. So that was a really useful conversation to me in terms of this space, and thinking about, like, how do we feminise leadership in the sense of taking it away as from like one form of power to like, a collective project, and where do I, like locate myself in that and like feeling comfortable. It doesn't have to be like, a lot of pressure. It can be, it can be shared.
Mateo Chacón Pino 04:23
I also had my own kind of crisis when we during the workshop, we had the moment of, let's talk about leadership, and then who's gonna listen to me? Who's gonna follow me? Do I have something for people, or that inspires people? And then it was rather like, Hey, I I do have something that I can give and I'm just gonna try to work with those who want to receive it and those who want to share something with me, and then grow from there. And then, it doesn't really matter who's leading or what leadership actually is, in regards of the creative heart, I always like to go back to David Graeber the great one, and he's saying of it doesn't have to be this way. And that is also something that inspires my research is trying to understand why we are here, where we do certain things as we do, but not to continue doing them like this, this, but rather to try to imagine new ways or other ways of doing stuff.
Louis VI 05:34
I love what you're saying just there, Mateo, because it's yeah, we essentially exist in someone's imagination, and that means, hopefully we can imagine something better. And there's, you know, there's a lot of nuance to what you're saying in around the leadership word Zoe and it needs to evolve in its definition, but its need to evolve, and also our approach, and I guess maybe then a better way to to to continue this this chat is, is the word around this episode. And each episode, we have a characteristic word, and the word this episode is Exploration. What do you think it means to have exploration and going about your work, and can move to explore that for a few minutes. Mateo, maybe you want to kick us off.
Mateo Chacón Pino 06:26
Exploration is not really a word that I encounter or that comes to mind in my everyday life, researching necessarily, maybe also because of some connotations that feel a bit problematic to me, like the idea of exploring a territory, and the implications of belonging and ownership of this territory.
Louis VI 06:54
So the implication of something being unexplored.
Mateo Chacón Pino 06:57
Even like the idea of something unexplored, like this weekend, I was at the workshop, and there was this really nice German lady participating, and very well meaning person and very sweet. But there was constantly this, this narrative coming up of the discovery of the Americas. And so this kind of connotation of exploration as like now in the Americas. I mean, Abya Yala was not undiscovered. It was already known to people. It wasn't terra nullius. It wasn't the place that needed exploration. But I'm sure there are other more positive ways.
Louis VI 07:37
No, I love, I love that you picked up on that. That’s really important. Because, you know, at the moment, I've been getting particularly irritated because people are wanting to go to Dominica, where my family's from, because they feel it's so unexplored. And it's like, Nah, you know, for 1000 years, please don't come and quote, unquote, explore it. Because, yeah, it's, it's funny, because it, yeah, I hadn't thought about that. The other side of the meaning of the word until you, until you explained it just then. Because I think it's quite easy to go, Okay, we're exploring new ideas, or exploring different space. But also there is contextually, you know that word has been used to do some horrific things in the world. You know, the term Explorer. So that's a brilliant way to put it.
Zoe Rasbash 08:30
That really, I actually, really appreciated you saying that to us. I've actually never thought about that before. And it's like, I think, especially thinking about, like, this conversation and the context of research and how, you know, research is another part of that exploration, like western research exploration. This was all part of, you know, colonial exploitation and the creation of, you know, racial hierarchies and all of these, like, awful things. That's the legacy of it, really. So I'm, like, trying to think of maybe something that, like, feels truer to what I feel like me and the folks that I work with and the folks that I'm like, you know, connecting with like, I think it's maybe more like a curiosity, like a curiosity and a movement towards connection is what it feels like. Because, yeah, it's really interesting to think about that word, and then, how do we reframe what we're trying to do? We're not trying to do new things, like, we're not we're really just trying to create connections to, like, transform the world. But a lot of the knowledge is already here, and it exists. You know.
Louis VI 09:40
It's funny because you touched a bit on that, on the word research as well Zoe, but you know, Mateo talking about, you know, your background in research and academia might seem like the antithesis of a conversation that's on a podcast that's supposed to be about connecting art and culture to the climate storytelling. But. And you know, academia has been accused of being elitist, and its inaccessibility. But also, you know that curiosity and knowledge and understanding of ourselves, as you're saying and our past, is the only way we're really going to have a real grasp. But having a, you know, a livablefFuture, in my opinion, how can, how can what is discovered is now also, is now a difficult word. But what, what? What concerning that's been discovered, or, you know, relearn and in research. Be you. How can we use that creatively to help us understand that past and present of this huge umbrella of the climate crisis?
Mateo Chacón Pino 10:54
I should have brought some coffee. First, a quick reaction to Zoe, because I really like that you brought curiosity back in. Because Louis, I believe that the reasoning for bringing such a word into the discussion wasn't the connotations that I brought up, but rather this idea, the aspect of curiosity and trying to learn from each other. But to come back to your question of the narratives, yeah, this idea of exploration recently has been very like this connotation, at least not the word itself, has been very present in my mind, because so I look at really at what does an exhibition make an exhibition? And I'm starting to dig into the history of exhibitions. When do people start to actually exhibit things? And for a long time, we have this chamber of curiosities. We have royal collections and stuff like that, or temple collections, or just, you know, a gathering of objects. But then with the colonisation of Abya Yala, and this covering in parenthesis is like they start bringing in stuff from this so called new world to show to the people, and this is when the first exhibitions come up. And the other history of exhibitions also comes from, from the circuses and the so called freak shows, where also, you know, someone comes up and exhibits humans for a short while. And this starts to converge in this kind of special exhibitions where the newest stuff from the New World is shown to Europeans. And this is something that I would really like to dig in more into the coming next in the coming years, to understand how the idea of a special exhibition, of a temporary exhibition, in its roots, is actually incredibly violent and incredibly colonial, and therefore also cons consuming or enticing to consume a lot of CO2 and energy. Just understanding this, I do hope that this kind of help to think of new ways of exhibiting that could be more sustainable or be more inspiring to live a sustainable life, instead of continuing this logic of, oh, we need a new exhibition. We need new stuff. We need new narratives all the time. Maybe it's just like changing the way that we narrate instead of what we narrate.
Louis VI 13:48
Yeah, very much so. And for those that might not know, Abya Yala is correct me, if I'm wrong, but it's, it's like it's the Indigenous word for Latin America. It's a way to confront the term of labelling, you know, Latin America and America, is that correct?
Mateo Chacón Pino 14:06
Yes, absolutely.
Louis VI 14:07
Like Zoe, a lot of your work is done around, I guess, climate communication as well. When people read about climate change every day, how do we tell these stories, whether it's new stories or old stories, in a new way, to those that are a bit fatigued by, you know, the vastness of climate change and a lot of the To be honest, despair language that's been used around it. And you know, you mentioned a lot about degrowth, what does that exactly mean as well.
Zoe Rasbash 14:42
Oh my God, again. How long have you got? Okay? Um, I think this let me try and figure out my thoughts and what order to say them in, because there's a lot of stuff here. I think it's interesting because, yeah, around this, these words, like, researcher, writer, communicator, I always feel such an amount of imposter syndrome. I'm like, I don't. We do that, but actually have been thinking about it a lot, and I think in terms of, like, telling these stories for so long I was working, or, like, in you know, spaces with, you know, comms people and everyone's like, we just need one big narrative that's gonna bring everyone together. We need to crack the climate change, like comms. Once we've cracked it, everyone will rise up, and then everything will change. And it's like, that's just not how it's going to work. That's just not how it's going to work. Because the way that climate change is working is everybody is contributing differently, and everybody is going to be affected differently. Yes, we will all be affected, but that is going to look very, very different, even with my city of Bristol, like, depending what area you live in, right? Like lives will change in different ways. And also that's the same in terms of mitigating climate change. Different people have different responsibilities for how their lives should change to tackle this crisis. And so this is why I always talk to, like, grassroots arts artists and arts organisation, because I'm like, You know your people, like, better than kind of like, you know the Guardian, better than like the you know the national press. You know your people, you have developed relationships with audiences and communities. You know what their concerns are. You know what their needs are. You can speak about climate change, and it's not like universal, kind of stressful, apocalyptic way, but in a way where we're talking about, like, real transformation for communities on the ground, and making that connection between, you know, fighting climate change and fighting wealth and inequality, fighting social inequality, and being like, look this, this. This isn't all doom and gloom, like we are facing the crisis, which requires transformational change that largely should see a huge transfer, transfer of wealth from the super rich to normal people and to our infrastructure that makes life better for normal people. It also brings down our carbon emissions, and like the best people who are going to be at telling those stories, telling those stories is the communities within, within and of themselves. So I, you know, I'm brought into a lot of like, grassroots organisations to be like, what should we say about climate justice? I'm like, Hey, man, you already know. Let me facilitate a conversation. But you already know what your concerns are for your communities. How do we build off that? Because they're not two separate things. It's the same thing. The inequality and the struggles that people are facing every day are part of this. Are part of this kind of, like, the way that we need to communicate this crisis. So that's part of it, I mean. And like this, all I think comes under this, you know, umbrella of degrowth, which I will try and sum up in a couple sentences, because I'm four months into a degree, so I'm a little bit brain scrambled. I've been doing too much reading, you know, and you're sort of too deep in to have a clear thought. But the idea of degrowth is kind of addressing these issues, which is first of all, at the moment, if you look at, you know, global society by this, this standard called decent living standards. So that's not just everyone having their basic needs met. It's everybody being able to have, like, the right to let to have, like, the right to, like, a joyful, good life. It's like, I can't remember the exact number. I think it's like 70% of the world are not meeting decent living standards, and that's including in Global North countries and rich economies, right? 70% or around that number. Let me fact check that afterwards. But we have the productive capacity to meet those needs seven times over. So we have the capacity for everyone to have a good quality of life, but all of that productive capacity and all of that resource has been hoarded by the uber rich. So we can change the world. We completely have the capacity, the resource, we have the infrastructure, but we're not doing it because our economy that won't let us do it. So the idea of degrowth is like, looking at, how do we degrow certain areas of our economy move away from this idea of, like, endless growth because, like, fundamentally, that's so stupid. Like, we can't grow everything forever. We can't keep consuming. Like, we have to face that. Like, how do we strategically do this in the most you know, the richest economies that are consuming the most and the consuming the most stuff that we don't need. How do we retool those parts of the economy to reduce that energy consumption, reduce our materials consumption, while also making sure that's being repurposed to meet everyone's needs, to have the to have a good life. So it's basically just like retooling the economy, especially in the most wasteful countries, like the UK, for example, where we're consuming so much, but still people are living in poverty. The economy isn't working. Something needs to change, so degrowth is about that. And I think, you know, degrowth might not be great on comms for everyone, but meeting everyone's basic needs, saying, I see your struggle. This isn't your fault. The economy is doing this to us. That's, I think, a jumping off point. I don't know,
Louis VI 19:27
Yeah, that's huge. And it is. I do wonder at what point growth got so decoupled from the natural version of the words like, growth in nature requires a cycle. It requires things to have periods of you know, death and matter to be broken down, for the new things to grow. It's not something that is like a continuous, you know, upward, hard line graph, like it's very much in a looping cycle. And I think, but also collectively as people that work and and or and speak about climate change, we also fail, collectively, failing in helping you know at your average people to understand that we're not talking in a sense, we're not talking about climate change. We're talking about everyone having a better future. And that's not just humans, that's all the beings on the planet. It's like, you will have an infinitely better quality of life if we solve this problem. But yeah, I guess it also depends on who's defining stuff, and that very much goes back to the language and the kind of conversation we've been having. And, you know, you make such a good point at that, at the you know, we are such a small we're the mercy of such a small minority in the way that the system of the planet is is working in this weird, narrow definition of time that you know is called Modern Times, where we extract and so much for such a few and yet such a majority suffer. Mateo, how do you feel about the International Union? Because I know you work a lot around this word, but how do you feel about the International Union of geological sciences, projecting the proposal that we are in the Anthropocene?
Mateo Chacón Pino 21:26
I think it's just another page of the conversation. I do not recall exactly where I got the disinformation from, but I do remember that somewhere it said that, for example, the introduction of the Holocene, um, took 80 years of debate among geologists. So, you know, I do think it's part of just trying to be incredibly truthful, um, trying to really get to the ground of things. There were some claims about procedural issues that I want to acknowledge, but I am just not that close to the matter that I could have an opinion on it. And then the other side of this, of the coin is, does this really matter? Like because geologists are working on a completely different matter than what we've been just being that we are discussing right now. Um, they, I do believe that they do care about social inequality, about the inequality of the climate change effects. They are incredibly aware, probably more so than us, on the anthropogenic cause of climate change. They're just not yet ready to talk in these terms of the Anthropocene on this, but in the same statement to the rejection, they acknowledge that this, this term, will continue to be important in the conversation. And they did acknowledge also the arts. And I do think that for us, it's as long as it's somehow productive for us to use the word and keep the conversation going. It's going to be fine, but I wouldn't be dead hung up on one term, because even before the rejection, we already had such a rich debate on which is a proper term? Should we be talking about the capital-o-cene? Should we be talking culture-locene? Should we be talking about the plantation-o-cene about the necrocene? Does it really matter how we call it, or does it matter more what we are able to achieve with certain words, with certain communication, with certain language?
Louis VI 23:55
I do. I mean, a lot of your work is around these distinctions as well. When you know you did a dissertation on the distinction of art and nature, do you think they are distinct? Are the way that we approach these two things distinct?
Mateo Chacón Pino 24:17
Yeah, mean, I'm still working on it. I hope to hand it in the coming months. But yeah, I took this title as a working title, kind of as a provocation, and to point towards this idea that these are separate things, which doesn't seem to be but there is a history behind this idea, and this is what I find more interesting. Where does this idea come from? How do we reproduce this idea with new exhibitions, with new narratives, with new cultural production too. So we also have a role in these kinds of narratives. How to perpetuate it? Do we perpetuate this situation? And yeah, that's the curiosity behind the title. Are we really separate? That's a big question. I do not believe that I alone can answer this, and I'm sure this is rather something more of a process than an answer.
Louis VI 25:26
That's a good answer. Yeah. I mean, I guess I kind of want to dive a bit into stories of your own personal work and whether then you're old and Zoe, when, when have you thought? Like, yes, this. This is what sums up a creative climate action, or creative climate communication.
Zoe Rasbash 25:51
Oh my god, I'm gonna have to just like, copy Mateo and say and be like, it's a process. It's always okay. It's like, it feels like, it's like, you know this, this ongoing space that I found myself in, which is like, how do we bring about a better future, associate socio ecological transition to a better world, and thinking about, like, really realising, actually The crucial, the crucial role that arts and culture has to play, that it has to play, has been many, many, many, many, like small moments. Because I think when it comes to thinking about arts and culture, like it's so crazy, like I've been thinking about this a lot, it's like so many of the impacts of someone having a cultural experience, or someone a group of people, doing something creative and cultural together. It's really hard to tangibly measure the impact of that, right? You know within yourself, you know within your people, and you maybe see like, you know, over time, like how this, this experience, or this series of experiences, has changed someone, or changed, or changed or impacted or become one thing that was part of a, you know, a transition it's really hard to measure under, like, our current, you know, dominant system of how we track if something's good or bad, or successful, not successful, and actually, like, it's almost like I go back to, like, small moments where I've, you know, seen, you know, for instance, I worked with uninvited guests who are collective, who use kind of sound experiences to help groups of people imagine the future of their city. And we did this with a group of young people from this was at Watershed, with a group of young artists from Lagos, from Durban, and from Bristol. And one of the young people said to me after that, Wow, I've never been able to think positively about the future before and like that was such a small moment, but it stuck with me so much, because it's like they might not have even said that after that session, but they would have felt it, but they just felt, you know, moved in the moment to say that. And it's like there is no ticking off a box for that. That's just like, these small moments that, like, make us feel like the future we can participate in making it better. And that's like, the crisis we find ourselves in is that we all like we're in a crisis of apathy, where people feel like they have no power and they can't change anything. And when you have a small moment like that where someone feels like, Oh, I'm part of this world and I can participate and I can think positively about the future. That's like, it's just like, that's what it's about, and that's what you know, when we talk, you know, as researchers might say, I think we like, probably both find that there's this like hierarchy of, like, how knowledge is created, or what knowledge is legitimate, or like, like the, you know, the research that we need to do to be able to do this transition in terms of like data. And it's like, there is no data for the cultural transformation that we need to do and arts and culture need, there needs to be a reverse of, reverse of this hierarchy, where arts and culture are on the same like are considered one of the many tools and lenses of knowledge creation and that we can use to come together, to imagine and build something different.
Louis VI 29:00
It is that thing, because I think there's especially now, it feels especially intense in the world. And I think, you know, I was having a conversation with my housemates the other day. I think it was even yesterday, and it was just like, God, we just feel like this sense of just despair at the moment, and it's quite easy even, you know, knowing what I know that we could be moving towards, it's like, God, yeah, but how are we going to do that if the government simply won't tax the rich? First though, you know, like, there's all these different moments of things that people are becoming extremely apathetic to and you're so right. It is a crisis of apathy. I think it's really difficult to just give people the hard facts and truth and not have anything created. Around it and expect people to be, feel like, Oh yeah, I'm motivated for change and imagining a future, we've got to be, we've got to be creative. And sadly, you know, we see people like Trump get in because they are, unfortunately, as bad as the story is good storytellers. So we're, you know, we're here and on in one, in many ways, we're losing that, that creative storytelling battle to get people motivated enough for something that's really good and really exciting. People being more motivated by, yeah, the right wing. Are there examples of creative climate leadership that you've seen that may have been overlooked so far?
Zoe Rasbash 30:53
I actually think this is a really interesting time to revisit that word leadership, because I think this is so linked to our crisis of apathy. I think that you know, under our current economic regime, where individualism is rife, it's beaten in to all of us. It's beaten in to me. And I think, from talking with lots of apathetic people, that it's there, like, there's this idea. They're like, well, I can't change the world, so there's no point in trying. And I just want to, like, smack people on the head and say, Yeah, you can't change the world on your own. You can't change the world on your own. You're not going to rise up and, like, become a dictator and save us all. So yeah, that's if you're thinking, if you're thinking, if that's how you're measuring your success, that's how you're measuring your self-worth, I, individually, can't change the world, then yeah, you're that's right. You're not going to be able to do it. The whole point, all of this is collective, like that. All of this is collective. And it takes, it takes a take. We have to take a long and this is something that I, I'm doing at the moment, like, long, hard look at my ego and be like, okay, if I'm trying to think on the scales that I want to change things, aka capitalism, I'm going to feel completely overwhelmed, because that's not possible for me to do on my own. I have to do on my own. But if I focus on the little bit, my little bit around me, with the people and I'm connecting with, and build that out slowly, from the grassroots, up my little bit of the world in Bristol, my little bit of the world, you know, in London, and the people that I work with, yeah, like, yeah. Then we'll see, then we then we start to see kind of change. We start to see how narratives shift. Like, I feel so blessed that when I joined watershed four years ago, nobody had even heard of climate justice, and then I came in, yeah, now we're all talking about climate justice, and we're really connected with the community. We're learning from the community around us who've been working on climate justice. And like, that's something I feel really proud of, you know? But it wasn't me on my own. That was, like, many conversations with people being like, this is what I've learned about climate justice in organising. How does this relate to us as an arts organisation? Now we're really thinking about, like, structurally, how we can make a difference that, like, shifts over four years. That's like, my little bit, that's my tiny little bit, right? And then all of the people that I work with are doing their little bit, and that's you have to, like, tackle the ego. But I think there's so many amazing examples of creative climate leadership in this space, and I've been thinking about a few examples in relation to research. And do you guys? Have you guys heard of the Land Art Generator Initiative? I think it's a really amazing example. So it's a competition that moves between different cities. And what they do is they run a competition for different local teams to design what would like a renewable energy infrastructure here look like that is both beautiful or creative, but also meets the needs and responds to the local environment. Anyone can submit a design. So you got school kids, artists, researchers, scientists, they partner with the city municipality and have a panel of local judges. And the idea is, is what you're doing is, like, really engaging people with, like, how exciting and beautiful this transition could be. It's not giving us up, giving up stuff. It's abundance, it's beauty. And you're also fighting nimbyism, because you're saying, Look, we're all engaged in, like, creatively thinking about our city. It's inviting people into be a part of processes like urban planning that have always been kind of inaccessible, using arts to like, to, like, build that, like, local power. And I always looked at them as an example, because I think it's a really nice example of, like, community based research, community based engagement, and using the arts to to really help people feel excited about the future, rather than like, Oh no, I have to, like, drive my car less or whatever, you know.
Louis VI 34:21
Yeah I really like what you said that, you know, imagining what this, you know, clean energy system would look like, but it has, you know, both, it has to be efficient, but also beautiful. And I feel like we've lost that, that second part of being like, there's just been maximum efficiency, cheap and, you know, maximum saving on costs and forgotten about what is important in life, which is, you know, day to day experience for people's happiness. I think you know, where's the beauty and stuff. I was walking around Central London the other day, and I was just like, I mean. Who imagined this? Why? Why is it? Why am I being, you know, hit by crisp packets and sideways grey rain, and there's no, I can't hear birds over, over, the cars. It doesn't make any sense to me. And no one else looks like they're enjoying it either. God, I mean, there's, there's so much more we could talk about on this topic, and I feel like we're only just getting into it, but we're running out of time, sadly. But people, for people listening to this, some will be familiar with, you know what the grand scheme of what we've been talking about, the creative climate leadership aspect, but for others, it's going to be a totally fresh concept to them. So yeah, to finish up right now, essentially, you've got the floor people were listening. What would you ask the person that's listening to this podcast right now to do next?
Mateo Chacón Pino 35:52
I don't know, like, have, have a snack. Enjoy yourself. Like, don't make it harder than you. You're the only person who knows what's worth living for, what's worth fighting for, and that's where all the power lies. And if it's community or there it's a really nice wine, it's good enough.
Zoe Rasbash 36:17
Yeah I mean, I don't want to give anyone homework after Mateo said, everyone have a nice time. But I think..
Louis VI 36:23
No, go ahead.
Zoe Rasbash 36:24
I think it's just like, really look around at where you are. And like, don't, don't worry about, don't try not to worry about, like, everything else, but like, look around you at where you are, what's great about where you live, what's, what's kind of shit about where you live? What is this? What's the stuff that people care about and like and like? That's all fuel. That's all fuel. Hmm, that's renewable energy for, for transformation, for connecting with people and helping and helping yourself and others around you feel like you really have a stake in this world. Like we can, we can, we can change the areas around us. Like that does happen, like we can transform it, and that happens through people getting involved with stuff. So just Yeah, hello, look around you, appreciate what's going on, and then look at what's terrible, and think maybe we should do something about that.
Farah Ahmed 37:25
So Louis, what did you think of that conversation?
Louis VI 37:28
That was another really good one. I another one where we challenged the definition and language, which I think is a reoccurring theme now, but Mateo was challenging the actual like word that we had for that episode, which was exploration, and completely flipped it on his head in a really interesting way, where he's saying, you know, talking about how you know, the explorer term, indirectly, kind of implies something is undiscovered, and why, you know, and this weird kind of Western colonial need to discover. And I think that was a brilliant, brilliant point that is worth remembering. It's like, you know, and that's on a human level, but that's also on a more than human level. There's, you know, places that don't need to be discovered. There's been things living there in harmony for a long time, and I thought that really blew my mind.
Farah Ahmed 38:27
Mm, you know, there's this idea sometimes that that what we're looking at is new knowledge, but some of the knowledge that is going to help get us out of the crisis that we're in is really deep old knowledge as well, and and that's the thing that we have to really marry and constantly remember, is that that this is something that we've as humans have lived on in harmony with the with the earth for 10s of 1000s of years. We know this. We know how to do this.
Louis VI 38:59
Yeah I love what Zoe said as well about letting the local people be the experts as well of the storytelling like they they know what it needs to be about to make it relevant and relatable to them.
Farah Ahmed 39:14
Yeah I always, I always think about, you know, would my aunties know what I'm talking about? Would the guy who runs the corner shop down the road know what I'm talking about, and if, and you know, what do they think about it as well? And this is something that sometimes we don't actively and proactively sort of question and consider is, who is the work that we're doing for?
Louis VI 39:41
Good point. Good point. That was another good one.
Farah Ahmed 39:44
Thanks for joining us and continuing on this journey with us. It was episode five, so we've only got one more left. You excited Louis?
Louis VI 39:54
I'm excited. My brain is nearly full. I've nearly completed the classes. So yeah, I'm excited. About getting my accolades and finishing the sixth one and hopefully being a bit more clued up on Creative Climate Leadership.
Farah Ahmed 40:07
Join us again wherever you get your podcast from. Thanks for listening to conversations on creative climate leadership. It's a podcast from us here at Julie's Bicycle, a non profit, mobilising the arts and culture to take action on the climate, nature and justice crisis. Big thanks to our funders and partners who've supported the work of the creative Climate Leadership Network and the making of this podcast, Pro Helvetia and Stiftung Mercator Schweiz for CCL Switzerland, as well as the European cultural Foundation's culture of solidarity fund, and Porticus and a thanks to our host, Louis VI, who's a member of EarthPercent, the music industry's Climate Foundation, who support JB's work on climate action with the music community. Thanks for listening.