Laura Baqué, Louis Letters and other visual artists work on murals that the Climate Reality Project plans to present at the COP27 climate conference later this year. Photo by Gaïa Febvre.
As featured on National Observer
Using art to connect disparate communities, the Climate Reality Project wants to uplift the voices of those most dramatically affected by the warming of our planet and hopefully get world leaders at the next global climate conference to take notice.
“We strongly believe that through the medium of art, we’re able to bring conversation that can be polarizing and … reduce those elements of our polarization by just being able to connect with the beauty of a poem, the beauty of a mural,” she said, adding another goal is to build compassionate communities standing in solidarity.
The poems are the second stage of a project that kicked off with the creation of murals last month in Montreal; Johannesburg, South Africa; and the Philippines (where Agam Agenda is also involved in the collaboration) that riffed on words from poems, which the visual artists also used as inspiration.
Starting this week and running throughout August, the project will host five virtual workshops featuring poet-mentors from the three participating countries and regions. Each will focus on a different type of biome — forest, freshwater, ocean and coastal, alpine and grasslands.
