Artivists and communities call for intersectional justice at the heart of COP30
13/11/2025
The Global Artivism Convening 2025 brought together over 800 artists, activists and funders from around the world last week, culminating in a joint statement to world leaders at COP30 calling to put intersectional justice at the heart of climate action.
Taking place in Salvador – a city with deep Afro-Brazilian heritage and a long history of cultural resistance – the convening tackled the urgent challenges of our time, including the rise of authoritarianism and impacts of the planetary crises. Over three days structured consecutively around the ‘present, past and future’, day two focused on honoring ancestral knowledge and local resistance culture, through immersive workshops which took place in the community.
Speakers included Margareth Menezes, Minister of Culture of Brazil, Guz Guevara, a Mexican artivist recognized for his activism for people with disabilities and LGBTQIA+ rights, Viviene Ferreira, a Brazilian cultural leader and Mundano (Thiago Mota), a Brazilian artivist known for transforming ashes, mud, waste into public artworks.
Through a series of workshops including a participatory mural, Global Artivism, Earth HQ, and the Community Arts Network invited participants to collaborate on a Global Majority-led cultural intervention framework, working toward building collective power through arts and culture.
The timing of the convening a week before COP30 helped position culture, art and activism at the heart of the narrative leading into the world’s climate talks. The joint declaration that emerged at the conclusion of the summit calls on leaders of the world to:
- urgently end the age of fossil fuels
- commit to a fast, fair, and funded transition
- support a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty
- put intersectional justice at the heart of climate action
- protect and resource frontline and Indigenous communities, and cultural workers
- invest in culture and imagination as forces for regeneration and justice.
The statement reiterates the greater impacts of the escalating climate and nature crisis on the Global Majority:
Our songs, stories, and struggles rise from every continent—but especially from the Global South, where the frontlines of climate and nature breakdown, genocidal erasure, are also the frontlines of deep cultural knowledge, courage, creativity, and resistance. We are not merely witnesses to colonial, intergenerational permacrisis; we are midwives of triage, transition and transformation.
[..] The time for empty words without action has passed. The time for policy without humanity must end. Let COP30 mark the turning point—from betrayal to bravery, from extraction to regeneration, from despair to hope. As the artists and activists of this earth, we commit to a Global Majority-led movement and pledge to keep creating, resisting, and rising until justice is done.
A week following the conference, Global Artivism hosted an event called ‘Building Collective Power through Arts and Culture’ which took place in the Arts + Culture Pavilion at COP30. A synthesis workshop will also take place after COP; check GlobalArtivism.org for more info.
