Fearless: How a Public Art Movement Empowers Women to Change the Climate Narrative
On International Women’s Day, Parley spoke with Shilo Shiv Suleman, artist and founder of Fearless Collective, about the power of participative storytelling, the co-creation of beauty in public spaces, and the role of women and girls in dreaming a better world into reality.
Studies show women are more vulnerable than men to the consequences of climate change. A closer look at social structures reveals that women are a powerful and overlooked workforce holding the fabric of society together. As scientists issue dire warnings about the need to rapidly change how we live on Earth, it’s important to acknowledge that we can’t achieve progress with the same narrative and mindsets that led to the current global crises. We need a new approach, and more women, especially those of marginalized communities, telling the story. When women and girls are empowered to share their experiences, they lead on solutions that champion love over fear, and show what’s possible when we imagine a better future together. This truth guides the work of Fearless Collective.
Shilo painting a mural in Glasgow, outside COP26, in collaboration with APIB and other Indigenous leaders present to represent their nations at the event last November.
Founded in 2012 by artist Shilo Shiv Suleman, Fearless Collective is a South Asia based public arts movement supporting women and marginalized communities to move from fear to love through the co-creation of beauty in public spaces. On International Women’s Day, Parley and Fearless teamed up to present We Belong, a short film from an immersive storytelling workshop held with a group of informal waste workers from Vivekananda Camp in Delhi, India, where each woman shared what she thought was ‘wasteful’ in society and why she is essential — to herself, her family, the city, the world. Below, Shilo discusses her recent projects and approach to activism, the problem with doomsday rhetoric, and how we can create a contemporary narrative on climate change.
“I dream of a counter force of hundreds of women flooding the streets across South Asia (and the world) with love.”
Shilo Shiv Suleman — Fearless Collective
Q & A
What is your personal mission as an artist and activist?
I often say that beauty saved me because in a moment of fear in my own life art became both into the way I could express but also transform myself, and so I have no doubt in the ability that beauty has to transform societies. My personal mission as an artist is to reclaim our imaginations from fear, and to articulate and actively co-create the safe and sacred futures we do want to inhabit.
I dream of a counter force of hundreds of women flooding the streets across South Asia (and the world) with love.
My personal mission is also to reunite our interior universe with the natural world through public interventions and interactive geofeedback art and stands at the intersection of art, magical realism, social justice, nature and culture.
How can art change communities - and the world?
Art has the ability to make the invisible, visible. So when we co-create a piece of art together on the streets, we’re allowing for a bridge to be formed between communities, between individual realities, between us and the natural world. I believe that the stories that we tell particularly within cultural spaces and within communities have the ability to affect behaviors, attitudes and eventually policies.
What is the power of a collaborative mural?
While a lot of the art world strives on crowning the individual king, I believe that collective and collaborative processes draw from a more decolonial approach to art that allow for us to shape societies and realities together. There’s a reason why the folktales, the culture and rituals within spaces in India and the Global South, connect us back to the forces of nature, to the phases of the moon, to the beginning of harvest. I think we need contemporary narratives to be able to bring us together, not only with each other in our societies but also with the natural world.
Why do you think it's important to shift the climate narrative away from the doom-and-gloom, end-of-the-world messaging, to move from fear to love?
While the fear in this moment around the climate and our natural systems is palpable and should act as a catalyst, fear can never sustain a generative movement, we shouldn’t just be “saving the planet” because we are afraid of losing it, we should be actively stepping in to creating the world we want to inhabit.‘Black Lives Matter’ and LGBTQI movements remind us that Love is a participative force that is sustainable and creative.
We need to be empowered in creating our future from a space of biophilia, reverence and union, not separation, saviour syndromes and doomsday thinking.
Walking around COP26, we saw posters of giant humans holding bleeding earths and banners saying “save the tigers, save the planet”, and painted an image on the streets with Indigenous communities that stood in contrast and said- bow down, honour the roots.
Wall reveal and Fearless Feast at COP26
Puyr Tembé stands in front of her portrait in Glasgow's Merchant Square
Puyr Tembé at the Fearless workshop in Glasgow
Why is it essential to tell the stories of women, especially in marginalized communities?
Often when we talk about power, we talk about caste, class, gender, race but we don’t talk about visibility. Those who are the most visible and whose stories are the most articulated are most often also the most powerful. While the stories of ministers, kings, queens, colonizers have always been recorded in our histories those who are on the margins are often left behind. And those who are on the margins often play crucial roles in the ecosystems of our societies. So when we work with communities of women especially women who have been made invisible in some way, we make these huge participative monuments with them. We have their histories be recorded as well. We have their contributions be recorded and in the process we shift the scales of power.
How has the pandemic changed your work?
Just before the world came to a complete standstill, we were on our way to work in Sri Lanka, then Kenya and onwards to Mexico. We were dreaming of a time of global expansion. Instead we spent the next 6 months indoors, at our screens trying to find ways to translate our work which is essentially street based and as public as it gets – onto zoom calls. This was initially incredibly frustrating but we learned a lot and in the end managed to connect to artists across the region, and build cross border solidarities.
Our focus quickly shifted to a more local and rapid response approach where we were able to paint 3 massive murals in cities across India just in two months as soon as the first lockdowns opened. We have painted more since. So this has been a sort of home-coming for us. We are now prioritizing our Movement work. Our goal over the next three years is to teach hundreds of women in South Asia, how to use the participative Fearless public art methodology to work with communities in hyperlocal settings, to create, reclaim and represent together and shift narratives.
What drew Fearless Collective to the informal waste workforce in Delhi?
During India’s first lockdown in 2020 (one of the harshest in the world), informal waste workers were deemed ‘non-essential’ and not allowed to step out of their homes and do their work. As a result of which overnight, for over 4 months, they had absolutely no income. Additionally thousands of tonnes of unsegregated waste were going straight into landfills and out water bodies, every day, in every major city in the country.
During this time, at Fearless we started thinking about how we treat land, life, and labour in a social context where ‘essential’ workers are treated as ‘disposable’ lives, and disposable plastics permeate nearly every part of our landscape.
One of the biggest lessons the pandemic was teaching us was just how closely interconnected we all are. Very often in our environmental and social justice movements, we become so focused on one struggle that we don’t see the interconnectedness of our issues (and our movements). Here we started to see the intersections between Disposable Plastics, Disposable Lives, Disposable Incomes, Consumption and Waste Management, Caste and Class, Dignity and Labour, Access to Public Space, Self Representation, Narrative and Power – exposing a framework within which some lives are considered disposable and labour is not valued equally.
What is essential to you?
What is essential to me is decolonization and also magical-realism. I believe that a lot of our cultures in the global south had myths, stories, folktales, ceremonies, rituals that would allow us to view the natural world not as a commodity but as a precious source, as a keeper of magic and possibility. A that kind of reverence that comes with wonder and magic I think is something that we’re missing in the way we treat our contemporary narratives. So with a lot of my work, be it with the Fearless work around gender and the environment, and even in my personal art work, it’s about bringing back that sense of wonder, of imagination, dreaming, possibility, of magical realism and ultimately union between social and natural systems.
Informal waste workers standing in front of a wall that asserts their existence and just how essential they are on one of New Delhi's arterial roads.
“It’s about bringing back that sense of wonder, of imagination, dreaming, possibility, of magical realism and ultimately union between social and natural systems.”
Shilo Shiv Suleman — Fearless Collective
READ MORE
