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e192 julia matamoros - cultural transformation & art
Season 5 Episode 192
- Definitely we need a cultural transformation, and no one’s better positioned to contribute to that than the arts and culture. I think part of the task that we have ahead, as artists and culture makers, is to really question how we got here in the first place, what brought us here and and what are the stories we are being told.
Holà. I decided to begin my conversation with the brilliant Mexican-Canadian cultural worker and climate communicator Julia Matamoros in Spanish so that she could introduce herself in her first language :
‘Bienvenida Julia al podcast consciente. Mi español no es muy bueno pero quiero empezar nuestra conversación en este idioma. Antes de pasar al inglés, ¿por qué no empiezas con una introducción en español y luego un breve resumen de tus antecedentes en inglés y luego hablaremos sobre el arte y la crisis ecológica? ¿VALE?
It worked. Gracias Julia.
I first met Julia in 2022 while I was chair of the board of SCALE and she was the communications lead. I was impressed by her strategies and insights on how to further engage artists in the climate emergency for example :
- I think it's very difficult to build new worlds if we first don't understand what's wrong with the values we abide to right now and that on the one hand, and the second is to start imagining new worlds. That is very hard for a lot of us, when you only know one way of existing and relating to other forms of life. It's very difficult to think there could be other ways. I think arts and culture are perfectly positioned to lead the way for that. Art naturally is a space where we can break the rules, create new ones, question, and resignify. I think we need to resignify a lot and art needs to lead the way there, for sure.
As you can hear, Julia integrates her diverse background in arts, culture, social work, and community development with a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and complex and urgent issues like the climate emergency.
Julia believes these areas are interconnected and essential for societal transformation and she talks about her work with a passion and a type of serenity that is contagious, in a good way.
Our conversation explores a range of environmental challenges such as water scarcity in her native Mexico and highlights innovative climate solutions like rainwater harvesting, the permaculture movement, Mexico’s recent ban on GMO corn, and 'Energising Artivism', a new project that Julia is involved in that elevates the role of arts in social and environmental activism.
Julia also underscores the need for building networks to increase resilience in addressing climate issues, noting that many initiatives lack adequate community-building infrastructure and she explains this gap and how to address it throughout our exchange.
Among other issues, Julia observes a disconnect between climate change understanding and action in the arts and culture sector, particularly among cultural leadership, and she does not hold her punches in her observations of the status quo:
- The arts and culture sector cares. People care. There's a lot of things happening. Where I see the gap is not necessarily in artists, cultural professionals or even organizations. I see it at the leadership level. This has been very shocking to me. Why is that? I think one of the reasons could be perhaps that Canada has started experiencing the impacts of climate change more drastically in recent years. Whereas other parts of the world have been experiencing that for a while. So what has been going on for the last few years, fires, floods, will change the perception around it as a real emergency. There's a reluctance to speak about it as a priority, to talk about it as an emergency, and to devote resources to it.
This section of our conversation brought me back to episode 183 about cultural leadersh
Published on 1 year, 4 months ago