A New Leaf proposed project for COP26 the Climate summit in Glasgow during November 2021 planned in partnership with Transformance Institute in Brazil. Linking six communities in an artist and community led project linking Indigenous Brazilian and post industrial and diverse communities in Birmingham, Newcastle and Cardiff.
Lead UK academic partner Dr Susanne Börner from Birmingham University is a senior researcher in the field of resource (in)security, youth agency, vulnerability, climate and environmental justice. Susanne is on a Marie Curie Global Fellowship with the University of Sao Paulo, School of Public Health, to investigate young people’s local knowledge and social practices related to the food-water-energy nexus in relation to nexus threats (e.g., flooding and landslides) in disaster-prone communities in the Metropolitan Region of Sao Paulo, Brazil. Building resilience in the face of nexus threats: local knowledge and social practices of Brazilian youth (NEXUS-DRR)
Susanne is working with young people with social centres in the urban peripheries who we will link in the project with indigenous communities in Brazil and post industrial city based communities in the UK to reflect on concepts of good living.
We are collaborating with Stop Ecocide and their team focussing on Brazil, of international criminal lawyers, researchers and diplomats to amend International Criminal Law in relation to the Climate and Ecology crisis.
Main Artist and community collaborative partners:
Future Parks Accelerator Program, Birmingham
Digital artist Jaime Jackson, works with vulnerable multi-cultural communities in the birth-pace of the industrial revolution. Birmingham is the UK’s second most diverse city whose communities rarely use its canal network or green (park) infrastructure, even view ‘nature’ negatively.
Circus Central Network, Newcastle, England
Artist and cultural manager working in former pit villages of North East England, Hannah Thompson coordinates a network of youth circus artists who explore community, solidarity, gender and racial equality, and good living to deal with the intimate, silent legacies of industrial exploitation and its multiple social, domestic and post-colonial violences. The network is known for transforming inarticulate questions through interdependent cooperation and physical confidence.
Common Wealth, East Cardiff
Founded in 2008, Common Wealth is a female-led company whose theatre events include electronic sound, new writing, visual design and verbatim. Its theatre-work is campaigning, political and contemporary, made for community locations where non-theatre-going multicultural working class post-industrial communities frequent, prioritizing theatrical event over story to provoke the imagination and engagement.
Transformance Institute, Pará, Amazon
Embedded in 20 years of performance for transformation eco-cultural projects for vulnerable rural and riverside Afro-indigenous communities in the Amazonian state of Pará and Pataxó indigenous villages of Easter Mountain, Bahia State, performance artists Dan Baron Cohen, Camylla Alves and Ikha Pataxo enable young people to collectively revive and reinvent their indigenous and afro-brazilian roots to cultivate sustainable, good living communities. The Institute leads an annual Good Living Forum, YouTube channel of 110 videos, a Digital First initiative and the internationally recognized Rios de Encontro youth-led project.
Bucket Revolution, Florianópolis, Brazil
Marquito Abreu coordinates this Urban Agriculture association embedded in vulnerable communities, whose agro-ecological projects are internationally recognized. He has just been re-elected a Good Living councillor together with an elected Good Living Women’s Collective councillor, whose participatory mandate and policy-making value indigenous and traditional artistic cultures as living libraries of social and agro-ecological sciences.
Support partners:
1 Letters to the Earth (on-line website host for our project, UK culture-based climate change campaign)
2 Climate Museum UK (archives and promotes project outcomes in digital galleries and blogposts)
Network partners:
1 Community University of the Rivers, Pará, Amazônia
2 University of Sao Paulo, Brazil
3 Pan-Amazonian Alliance of Rivers
4 Pan-Amazonian Social Forum (FOSPA)
5 Federal University of South and South East Pará (UNIFESSPA)
6 Federal University of Bahia
7 Federal University of Santa Catarina
8 School of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences, University of Birmingham
9 Institute of Teaching and Learning, University of Oxford
10. Biophilic City Network
11 Centre for Latin American Studies, Cambridge University
12 World Alliance for Arts Education
13 Culture Declares Emergency
14 Stop Ecocide