Interview | Suzanne Dhaliwal on climate change and the politics of activism

In the below text, activist and campaigner Suzanne Dhaliwal discusses her work, the role cultural institutions can play in reinventing and shaping the public sphere, especially with regards to activism, and what new challenges the covid19 pandemic presents in regards to challenging systemic violence. Dhaliwal provides a very open and personal account of the multiple struggles that a de-colonial practice implies in the field of activism and in the arts, and of the urge to fight all of them simultaneously.

My involvement in climate justice has always been centred on resistance against multiple forces of colonialism: the state, big oil and the financial sector, as well as what I call  ‘the struggle within the struggle’. 

As a small queer women of colour who is not indigenous and yet working in allyship with indigenous peoples I have been subjected to (and had to challenge) immense racism, lateral violence and systemic blocking of resources, while questioning the very foundations of the non-profit industrial complex itself every step of the way.

In other words I had to be really entrepreneurial in using my communication skills effectively – both through my art practice and in consultancy roles, in order to navigate a system where I was prevented from accessing the power, resources and spaces I needed because of the oppressive approach of the movement itself. 

 

“My involvement in climate justice has always been centred on resistance against multiple forces of colonialism: the state, big oil and the financial sector, as well as what I call  ‘the struggle within the struggle’”. 

 

I embarked on a Masters degree in Social Sculpture as a way of taking some time to reflect on the more subtle elements of my climate activism, focusing specifically on the areas of my work grounded in decolonial praxis, accountability and strategies for recentering BIPOC voices.

Throughout the MA, I continued to organise direct actions; for instance, I led international financial campaigns that laid the foundations for the international divestment movement.

 

The struggle within the struggle: caring strategies and power unevenness

I have always been really open talking about racism in the movement. Initially, being open about how white and middle class the movement is, led to me being excluded from a lot of elite climate funding circles, as well as being bullied. However, I had to challenge the power of the Oxford climate spaces, who refused to take what I said about the oppression in the movement seriously and I felt the urge to decolonise those spaces to keep Indigneous frontline voices at the centre of the work. That meant unpacking deep colonial and white supremacist behaviours which people were only ready to associate with the oil companies and governments that they were challenging while not reflecting on themselves.

Even though I became pretty socially isolated, I still had to find ways to shift the culture of activism itself or my work wouldn't be able to continue: if we didn't address the white supremacy in the climate movement then it might lead to increasing polarisation and exclusion of working-class and PoC in the UK from the climate movement. This was in 2009/2010: now we can see more clearly how the whiteness and middle classness of the climate movement stopped it becoming intersectional at that time, with effects on our contemporary society.  

A lot of the actions we organised at UK Tar Sands Campaign (UKTSN) to challenge the investments of BP and Shell in the highly polluting tar sands resemble those organised by environmental movements like Extinction Rebellion and other big NGOS, but our work is centred on the care that goes into consultations, processes of making and accessibility. 

The black cloth: an artistic strategy to re-define power and safety

For one of our climate actions we had a massive black cloth that we had laid down in front of Canada House in London, which houses the Canadian High Commission. It was a creative action, working with artist Lucy Sparrow to make a felt living installation and show the ‘felt impacts’ of tar sands on communities in the Alberta Tar Sands. 

I have always tried to think about ways in which people who aren’t safe to participate in direct action can take part. I used to hold sewing sessions at my house, where we could sew and talk and make the works and then people would have ways to be involved even if the action itself was arrestable and they couldn't make it due to their legal status, work life or just not feeling like taking that level of risk. I made sure that the tone was strong but not antagonistic to ensure other BIPOC would be safe to do future climate actions and there would not be hostility to indigenous people on the grounds whose issues we were elevating. I also worked with Lucy because I tried to work in an interdisciplinary way, with artists outside the culture of activism to reach new audiences, to be challenged in my understanding of climate awareness and literacy.

 

“I have always tried to think about ways in which people who aren’t safe to participate in direct action can take part”.

 

One day I took that black cloth and I thought about how the issues around power and privilege in the movement were real. Despite the gaslighting and lateral violence I experienced for trying to bring attention to the white supremacy, I knew it was real. I was reading some work by Andrea Smith about recentering our movement and it really resonated with me. With some collaborators at the Social Sculpture studio we cut a giant circle in the black cloth and with chalk created some concentric circles. It was like this cloth, this space would be a pop-up space. When people sat around it, it could be a place to hold my truth from my experience about racism, class and power in the movement and anyone who wanted to join the discussion could; in this space, racism, oppression and white supremacy were realities. We left all the academic language behind and spoke from our lived experience, a literal space in which to embody the way I was already holding these conversations in spaces, in pubs, as it was increasingly being demanded of me. I needed to give it a form and some time and space boundaries. 

I started working with the cloth and developed a process where people would map where they thought they sat in relation to the centre of power, map someone further away and then someone closer to the centre. It was a really simple autobiographical process that I ended up leading with non-profit organisations and activist groups. The process would get people understanding their own power and privilege, their understanding of change, the values and ideals of colleagues. As the process was autobiographical, it generated a level of care and compassion in the groups, in which we were able to have difficult and sensitive conversations. I worked a lot with my own vulnerability, sharing my experiences and this always created a powerful atmosphere in which we could tackle unspoken white privilege, fragility and power. 

The process had room for movement and change, we used small buttons and stickers to move ourselves around the cloth power map. For example, upon listening to a colleague, someone might arrive at the realisation that their home ownership gives them massive privilege and move themselves closer to the centre of power. People would go through powerful shifts. We also used the cloth to map the organisations themselves. People could see how personal power dynamics translated to organisational power dynamics. I would then offer strategies for organisations which would help them to re centre BIPOC using creative communications techniques and relationship building. The work was powerful, but hard to fund because it didn’t follow the NGO model of training: it was about deeply personal and radical change. Also it was very painful and difficult to hold space like this when I was dealing with ongoing racism-related trauma. I still have the cloth and the materials though and would love to hold the process someday again, especially within an art context.

Re-inventing communication strategies on the basis of care and healing

I often work with the strange to create enough of a spectacle to get The Guardian out and into the Canadian press but avoiding associations with violent terrorism. 

Doing all this emotional and internal work alongside the actions and campaigning and fundraising and CEO responsibilities nearly burnt me out. Actions became more and more repetitive - standing outside the same building with the same 90’s throwback aesthetic - which meant that I needed to keep reinventing the forms of activism I took to stay engaged and keep it safe for me while exciting enough to keep the global attention on the issue. At the same time, bigger orgs like 350.org and Greenpeace got turned on to working on tar sands campaigns in Europe. In spite of their good intentions, their ability to fundraise on a much grander scale than us meant resources were siphoned from us and threatened the work we’d done developing a creative and inclusive approach to climate activism. For this reason I began thinking about rebranding myself as an artist to see if I could access arts funding and communities, in order  to continue to resource the work, be supported and cared for. 

 

“I see the sea as my main collaborator. I often say if we are going to decolonise we can't think with the same mind that created the problem.”

 

I decided to turn to the source of why I got involved in climate activism in the first place, which was my love of nature and of the land. I would spend a lot of time in port meadow. I filmed floods and microscopic landscapes. I spent time in prayer at the water looking for respite, spiritual rejuvenation and direction on how to keep the work going. This practice for me centres around biophilia, the love of nature and biognosis, the knowledge that comes from being in a loving relationship with nature. Once I reach the edge of my cognitive capacities, my rational reasoning kicks in: how can I run an entire campaign challenging a massive multinational corporation like Shell when I can barely pay rent and the movement itself was minimising me and my own community?

It was in being with the sea that I healed my body from the PTSD, I recentered myself on why I did this work, the love of the land over the politics of campaigns, activism and the fighting for visibility. I would learn to leave the pain in the sea, brush it off and keep going. For me this is a deep practice I come back to time and time again. I see the sea as my main collaborator. I often say if we are going to decolonise we can't think with the same mind that created the problem. I take that seriously personally too – after I swim I am not in the same headspace as when I was troubled by lateral violence or how on earth will I finance the work in a field that is itself sick and one of the least accessible to WoC? I had to take agency in my life and work by focusing on small acts of self care, aesthetic rejuvenation and being with natural beauty so I could remind myself what we are fighting for. 

Art as a space of possibility

It was getting impossible to get the kind of coverage I used to get in newspapers like The Guardian as Extinction Rebellion was saturating the media and taking all the oxygen out of the movement. Journalists just wanted to talk about what we thought about XR vs the climate campaigns or frontline movements I was working with. I decided to shift my focus and became a digital strategist and producer on podcasts like Mothers of Invention and For the Wild. At the time they were the only few that existed. Through creating content on Instagram, I could move narratives, shift conversations, internationalise the focus. Through this work I got invited by Hollywood producers to input on scripts and open up writing tables with my thoughts on the decolonial framework and the lived impacts of extractivism. Many of the insights I had on race, whiteness and power and privilege were more welcomed in media spaces in the US than in the UK. 

I even took up a new role as a Visiting Research Fellow within the Centre for Spatial Environmental and Cultural Politics at the University of Brighton, which I am trying to complete amidst all this whilst simultaneously recovering from Coronavirus.  

There is a deep spiritual foundation to my work. I trust that if I work on what is being asked of my community, the frontline situations that I cannot ignore even if there is not funding – such as the cyclone Amphan which went unnoticed by both the white climate movement and BIPOC activists alike – I trust that if I continue doing the work and if I keep collaborating with and dreaming with the land, then I will be provided for. 

 

“what’s important to me is doing this work with integrity and authenticity and safety. I use my creative shapeshifting to take other work to fund the core decolonial work.”

 

Currently I am slowly rebuilding the UK Tar Sands Network. I am working with Indigenous Climate Action and the Indigenous Environmental Network to lead strategy both for financial campaigns around tar sands and insurance and digital media strategy. I have to work a million consultancies in order to live – I say yes to every paid opportunity to give a talk – and that enables me to run No Tar Sands as a volunteer. I am trying to find ways to be more visible in my work as a personality as I find eco-celebrity culture difficult; I see how it can turn communities against each other, how people lose their way once they are getting courted by the bigger NGOs and foundations. I simply wouldn't know how to work in that way as I am most interested in working towards a decolonial future which respects the multiple modes of thinking and working that I operate in and which moves from complex financial campaigning to dreaming instructions from the land. But I know visibility leads to resources and am leaning into that reality. 

More than any campaign win, what’s important to me is doing this work with integrity and authenticity and safety. I use my creative shapeshifting to take other work to fund the core decolonial work. 

I return to my collaborator the sea time and time again – to go above the science and the failed climate negotiations to get direction on where our movements need to go when we are faced with the climate crisis and now global pandemics and widespread facism too. I have to be open to working within multiple fields, and to working with new collaborators in order to take on the next project or mission. 

In this time of ecocide, I am learning to frame my ideas around white supremacy and find forms and funding and spaces to do that deep transformative work of decolonisation in a safe environment. The art world has been a space where I have been able to step outside of activism, hear my own thoughts and work through the violence of the movement as a form of research - a space in which to heal myself and to turn that into knowledge about creating safe movements that we can take forward into the future. Art brought me spaces to be a complex thinker and polymath: I was able to be a financial campaigner,a poet and spiritualist simultaneously. Activism is rigid at times and the space to work in multiple modes limited by the white middle class rationalism and hyperbolic scentificism that dominates it. For example, the way it communicates the climate crisis as an apocalyptic future created by a few corporate villains rather than a complex and long colonial history of land grabs and erasure of traditional ecological knowledge and relationship to land.

Art has given me space to talk about the forms of activism themselves, vs the individuals creating the actions, to find frameworks to understand how cultures of activism can create barriers to bringing people in and excludes those who have been doing this work for generations. It's important to recognise that activism has a culture in order for us to change it. We also need to see how funding, power and privilege work to promote false solutions to the climate crisis - doing this as an artist gives me safety, space to reflect and at times resources when there are no resources to do this philosophical, self reflexive work within the movement itself. 

Art needs to continue to support those of us within climate activism who are challenging its culture and who are seeking to revive Traditional Ecological Knowledge into our work; to support interdisciplinary research for climate solutions and communications strategies. Prioritise BIPOC creatives who also work in climate justice to access retreats to heal and research and also don't assume we are all monolithic. Dig deep and look carefully to see who needs resourcing and lifting up; they might not be the most visible people. Art must continue to offer its spaces, its communities. Its grants and networks can provide support for the complex creativity needed to foster the movements required to move forward positively into the future, prioritising those who don't quite fit into art or activism but who shapeshift and move between the two.