A Counterpoints Arts’ Learning Lab with Ashish Ghadialli, a member of the collective Wretched of the Earth focusing on Racial and Environmental Justice and the Intersectional Politics of Neighbourhoods.
The Learning Lab began with some framing questions to help ground the conversation:
Legacies, Language and Action
- How might legacies of empire and colonialism inform, shape and connect lived experience and public debates surrounding environmental and racial justice?
- Can we find ways to talk about climate justice in order to get beyond identity silos?
- How might the values of ‘cultural democracy’ inform a ground-up policy-making process in the lead up to COP26 in 2021? (United Nations Climate Change Conference).
The Global in the Local: Neighbourhoods, Grassroots and ‘Home’
- How does the language and action around climate justice translate and resonate at local level?
- Can neighbourhood projects – specifically through the filter of socially engaged art – find ways to critically align the local with the global and with fast changing realities around climate justice?
- How are environmental issues practiced and mobilized at local level?
- How might everyday knowledge at this micro, local level create the foundation for wider environmental and racial justice activism and policy work?
- Given the necessary slow-paced nature of this type of work, how might we move beyond typically short-term one-off projects to help support and sustain racial and climate justice programmes within communities of place?
Neighbourhood Case Studies: Gresham Neighbourhood Plan and May Project Gardens
Contributing to this conversation were artists and activists (among others): Isabel Lima (Gresham Neighbourhood Plan); KMT, Dana Olarescu and Abel (May Project Gardens).
Like all Learning Labs, the aim was learn from each other and to share insights and exchange diverse ways of thinking and working.
Ashish Ghadiali
Ash is a writer, filmmaker and activist based in Dartington, South-West England. Current film and TV projects include a short film, The White Days, currently in development with BBC Films and DMC Film, about racial violence in the East End of London in the late 1970s and a series pilot, Kingdom Come, in development with BBC Studios, about the Jacobite Rebellion in 1740s Britain. Previous film credits (as director) include the feature documentary, The Confession (2016), for the BFI and BBC Storyville and distributed by Dogwoof Films and Picturehouse Cinemas, which explored narratives of the War on Terror through the lens of former Guantanamo detainee, Moazzam Begg. A member of the climate justice collective, Wretched of the Earth, Ashish is also a representative for the Political Strategy working group of the COP26 civil society coalition and convenor of the Climate Justice Network. Previous roles include Race Editor then Co-Editor of Red Pepper Magazine (2017-2020), and Founding Director of the Freedom Theatre Film Unit (2012-3) in Jenin Refugee Camp, Palestine.
