Naomi Leung 梁珮恩(they/them) is a Han Cantonese Malaysian settler occupying ancestral and stolen xʷməθkʷəy̓əm and scəw̓aθən territories in colonially named “Richmond, BC.” Naomi has a background in organizing for climate justice education, harm reduction, and policy change with Climate Education Reform BC and Sustainabiliteens, and now works with the UBC Sustainability Hub as a workshop facilitator and organizer. As a queer and genderqueer racialized artist and organizer, Naomi knows that the environmental movement must de-center the white perspective and actively dismantle elitism, white supremacy, and all forms of colonial violence so everyone is prioritized and no one is left behind. This includes neurodivergent, disabled, undocumented, unhoused, lower-income, Global South, and IBPOC queer and transgender peoples impacted hardest by marginalization and climate change. Naomi aims to translate their love for community into visual storytelling for collective liberation. Naomi is studying Global Resource Systems and Psychology at the UBC where they are integrating climate change studies with global health, the study of climate emotions, and the Asian diaspora.
Sagorika Haque সাগরিকা (they/she) is a student of Gender, Race and social justice and Political Science at the University of British Columbia from Dhaka, Bangladesh. They are a facilitator, community organizer, and poet with publications across journals such as Decomp, Ignite, UJAH, the Garden Statuary, URNCST, and Solastalgia. Their research experiences and practices are at the intersections of political education, gender-based violence, intergenerational trauma/healing, embodied knowledges, transnational solidarities, art, and political accountability, as well as spatial, disability, and transformative justices across ongoing histories and presents with/in and beyond Global South contexts. Sagorika’s work is rooted in exploring & embodying trauma-informed, systems thinking, and community interventions in/beyond policy and curricula to erode cultures of colonial heteropatriarchal capitalist violences towards more just, equitable, and tender futures.
Artist Statement
In a time of so much global and local fragmentation, this project emerges from our collective grief, fatigue, anger, and hope around moving towards climate justice as racialized organizers.
In our grief, we think of the ocean, all consuming and coming in waves, asking us to navigate the tumultuous waters. In our grief, we question what are the ways must we (un)mask our selves in order to be seen as part of definitions of climate justice? Who decides what is history? Who decides what isn’t history?
In our grief, we turn to the land as we learn to both catalyze and mobilize our grief and rage.
Through our work we confront and invite ourselves and others to consider the ways we are woven from and with each other, by multiple lands in and beyond us. We invite considerations on how a funeral is also a celebration of life; we are so often taught to numb ourselves and escape; when we are together, our capacity grows so we can be a little less numb, the desensitization is a response to long term trauma, so when you have a strong community we are able to be less desensitized and emotive when you have people to support you and relate to what you are feeling – when you grieve together, you may be witnessed, you may be seen; letting ourselves feel. We want to honor how healing is non-linear and in community there is catharsis. Our fatigue and our work speaks to confront the systemic silencing and disempowerment of femme of colour in the environmental and climate movement. Our images and words speak to deeper desires and yearnings for more just worlds, asking questions like how do we catalyze and mobilize our grief and rage?
When we grieve together we are able to resist dehumanisation. Our images confront and comfort, speaking to how legacy is present in current bodies, and just futures are as much about ensuring just histories. When we mourn futures, we are also caring for histories. When we are confronting erasure of histories and futures, we are confronting the erasure of possibilities and allowing ourselves to ask questions of institutions we are taught to accept, to desire and to dream in a world that is built on certain dreams dying and remaining dead.
Reflection and Connection to "Imagination for Liberation"
By imagining, hoping, writing, creating, and holding each other we are able to metabolize our grief/anger into healing and justice. Situated in a body on the frontlines of climate crisis, with these images being taken on land also on the frontlines of climate crisis but across the world, speak to and negotiate the arbritrary borders across time and space.
We invite readers to listen, invest, and mourn with femme of colour at the frontlines of climate crisis, to walk with us in our grief, our rage, our love, and our urgent calls to honour and diffuse the immense disproportionate labor imposed on our bodies, so often little to no supports for the costs or responsibilities.
Lastly, our work urgently invites readers to consider how when we recognize the comrades holding us, past, present, future, non-human, we are able to organize deeper together, so we can all metabolize our sacred, ancestral grief and anger at enduring colonial violences collectively so we can catalyze actions towards more loving, just, intergenerationally healing solidarities, spaces, relations, and thus futures.
