Open Call With the establishment of the Loss and Damage Fund at the COP 27 in Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt, and the operationalisation of the Fund just over a week ago at COP 28 in Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates, the work of integrating knowledge and perspectives of artistic practitioners representing affected communities into conversations on Loss and Damage has never been more urgent.
Following the
Ways of Repair : Loss & Damage open call which received over 740 applications, three project proposals have now been selected for development through the program's artistic research residency. These three successful proposals have been judged upon a criteria including: the artistic potential to radically engage with the Loss and Damage framework, the potential to provoke critical questions and the possibility to create dialogue and impact within the realm of international climate policymaking. Each selected project has the potential to assess how loss and damage can be addressed and expand the understanding of intangible loss and damage to culture, health and mental health, and social cohesion, identity and sense of place. The selected artists will each receive a £10,000 research stipend, mentoring support and will be embedded into the
Loss and Damage Collaboration (L&DC), a global network of climate change researchers, policymakers, advocates, layers, and negotiators working on Loss and Damage — the policies and plans developed to address loss and damage.
Residents Gabriela de Matos (BR)
Candomblé terreiros: Sacred Shields Against Salvador’s Climate Crisis
Candomblé terreiros explores how
terreiros —the sacred spaces of the Afro-Brazilian Candomblé religion— through their ancestral knowledge and their relationship with nature preservation, could address the loss and damage being caused by the climate crisis in the city of Salvador, Brazil. These sacred spaces —which are deeply rooted in Afro-Brazilian heritage— are hypothesised to offer environmental benefits particularly in marginalised communities. This project will study how vulnerable communities in the city of Salvador have been affected by the climate crisis and will assess the role of
terreiros in building resilience and addressing loss and damage. By documenting construction techniques and spatial arrangements, the project aims to quantify the
terreiros' microclimatic influence and their role in enhancing local living conditions in urban spaces in relation to climate intensified events such as heat waves. Utilising fieldwork, interviews, architectural analysis, drawings, and ongoing dialogues with the community, the study will document how ancestral knowledge embedded in
terreiro structures can inform sustainable urban planning and how it can be used as a transformative tool to address loss and damage. The project is part of Gabriela’s ongoing research on Afro-Brazilian architecture examined through an intersectional lens of race, culture, and environmental justice.
Gabriela de Matos is an architect, urban planner, researcher, professor, and curator. Gabriela’s background is in Sustainability and Management of the Built Environment. She was a co-president of the Brazilian Institute of Architects. She founded the
Arquitetas Negras Project, which maps the production of black Brazilian women architects, and is the publisher of the book Arquitetas Negras vol.1, which won the IAB-sp award for Best Architecture Publication. She was the co-curator of the Brazilian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale of Architecture (2023) and won the Golden Lion for Best National Participation. She is currently a Master’s student at the Center for the Study of Diversities, Intolerances and Conflicts at the Faculty of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences.
Nombuso Mathibela & Sibonelo Gumede (ZA)
Phoshoza sunduz’ama bhun’ahambe: Interpreting the (in) tangible planetary futures of bow instrument ecospheres in Kwa-Zulu Natal
Princess Constance Magogo Sibilile Mantithi Ngangezinye kaDinizulu is a musician, ancestor, and senior member of the Zulu royal family who played a traditional bow instrument called the Ugubhu, an unbraced gourd bow instrument that is native to Nguni speaking groups in South Africa and predominantly played by women. By exploring the archives of music makers such as Princess Magogo,
Phoshoza sunduz’ama bhun’ahambe will trace the historical and cultural processes of this music tradition in order to examine the intangible loss and damage that the climate crisis is causing to the life worlds of culture, heritage and identity in the region. The project aims to assess loss and damage through the making tradition of uMakhweyane, an indigenous bow instrument of the Kwa-Zulu Natal province, South Africa, in relation to climate intensified disaster that the province has experienced, including the devastating flooding and landslides of April 2022 which led to the loss of 448 lives, the displacement of 40,000 people and economic cost of $1.6 billion.To Nombuso and Sibonelo, the climate crisis is an ongoing debasement of the relationship between humans and other living organisms constituted by capitalism, a financial, cultural, social and spiritual system of Western invention. Under such conditions, they choose to think about what cultural modes can teach us about revolt and re-invention in the production of this indigenous song tradition. Through this perspective, they seek to comprehend the significance of loss and damage within the context of an environmentally conscious form of music that originates from the roots of trees, barks, and other natural elements.
See the digital restitution prepared by the artists
here.
Nombuso Mathibela is a cultural worker, educator, writer, and vinyl selector based in Johannesburg, working through sound, focusing on anti-colonial liberation histories and cultural ecological behaviours in Africa. She is the founder of Jewel Scents & Song and archivist at the Centre for the Study of Race, Class and Gender at the University of Johannesburg.
Sibonelo Gumede is an urbanist and cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa. Gumede’s practice explores the temporalities of colonial afterlives, in a bid to make connections between aspects of space and relationality through which connective memory and reparative practices can be built. Gumede is also an experienced researcher as well as an Institutional Development and M&E practitioner, specialising in urban environments and issues related to cities, environment and development.
Zahra Malkani (PK)
A Ubiquitous Wetness
A Ubiquitous Wetness explores the instrumentalisation of musical and oral traditions as remembrance and resistance against environmental devastation, dispossession and erasure. At the centre of this project is the Indus, an ancient river that is both deeply revered and immensely brutalised. The cataclysmic climate change intensified Pakistan floods that ravaged this region, submerging one-third of the country, displacing millions and causing over $50 billion in loss and damage. These floods emerged following a long history of extractivist interventions on the aquatic ecology of Pakistan, including: dams, canals, barrages, excessive and unfettered fishing, ceaseless construction along natural aquatic pathways, sand mining, the dispossession of water and land from its custodians, and much more.In
A Ubiquitous Wetness, Zahra explores these themes through sonic practice and oral traditions that bring together devotion and dissent, poetry and protest. She is interested in bringing forth the rich and situated ecological knowledges and the revolutionary spirit contained in these sounds as a kind of eco-pedagogy. She engages these sounds as intimate and embodied teaching tools packed with deep ecological wisdom offering practices that survive, adapt and endure— that invoke and animate endangered worlds.
Zahra Malkani is a multidisciplinary artist. Collaboration, research and pedagogy are at the heart of her practice, exploring sound, dissent and devotion against militarism and infrastructural violence. Working across multiple media —including text, video and sound— she explores the politics of development, displacement and dispossession in Pakistan through the lens of dissident ecological knowledges and traditions of environmental resistance. She is a co-founder with Shahana Rajani of Karachi LaJamia, a lamakan site for study, solidarity and seeking. She was born and raised in/by Karachi.
Selection Process
Over three weeks, an external jury composed of
Sakshi Aravind, Hannah Entwisle-Chapuisat, Thandi Loewenson, Nestor Pestana and
Sarker Proctick, worked tirelessly alongside the
Ways of Repair : Loss & Damage team to review submissions and establish a longlist, reduce this to a shortlist and conduct interviews with shortlisted applicants. With so many excellent proposals covering many important loss and damage issues, narrowing this down to only three was extremely challenging. However, we applaud and recognise the engagement with, and contribution to, the loss and damage discourse of those who were shortlisted and longlisted.
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