Cultural industries and the climate crisis: Insights from Latin America

Hosted by the Centre on Labour, Sustainability and Global Production (CLaSP) and People’s Palace Projects, Queen Mary University of London

The intersections between culture and climate have gained much attention in recent years, with several groundbreaking governmental and sector initiatives and research projects emerging in the UK. The tools resulting from these initiatives, which include policies, toolkits and guides, have been adopted and adapted in countries across the world, including in Latin America. In parallel and sometimes in response to such tools, Latin American artists, cultural workers, policymakers and researchers have developed contextualised approaches that emerge from the particularities of each context in this vast and hugely diverse region. Such approaches respond to the climate crisis in ways that consider local social, material, and symbolic infrastructures, political opportunities and challenges, and the way the climate crisis interlinks with other issues in each territory. While the region has developed innovative and radical tools, dialogues, and practices, these have so far not circulated as widely as outputs produced in the UK.

This event seeks to highlight the ways in which the cultural industries in Latin America are responding to the climate crisis, and bring this into dialogue with approaches in the UK. Acknowledging the different contexts across each continent and within the Latin American region, the event is conceived as a dialogue of experiences between researchers/practitioners who work between the UK and Latin America, with a focus on Argentina, Chile and Brazil. Speakers will reflect on the challenges and opportunities of cultural climate work in each context, the innovations that have emerged from different places, and the lessons that the UK can learn from Latin American approaches.

Speakers:

Virginia Avila. Co-Director at Ñandú/ National University of Rosario (UNR)

Thiago Jesus. Co-Director at People’s Palace Projects, QMUL

Paula Serafini. Senior Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries, QMUL

Graciela Melitsko Thornton, Julie’s Bicycle

Paul Merchant, University of Bristol

The event is free to attend. The panel follows a workshop for cultural organisations titled ‘Intersections between culture and environment: A guide to environmental management in cultural organisations’, taking place earlier the same day (please register for each event separately). For more information contact Paula Serafini p.serafini[at]qmul.ac.uk

Speaker Bios

María Virginia Avila is the co-creator of the Ñandú platform and a PhD candidate in Economics (Universidad Nacional de Rosario - UNR). She holds a Master’s degree in Cultural Organisation Management (Universidad de Buenos Aires - UBA) and a diploma in political ecology, gender, and climate change (CLACSO). She teaches in programmes focusing on climate change, just transitions, and cultural industries from an environmental perspective (CLACSO and UNTREF). She was part of the Circular Culture team, a Julie’s Bicycle initiative for sustainable festivals in Latin America. As a consultant, she has worked on projects linked to cultural sustainability alongside public and private entities in Argentina, as well as international organisations such as the UNDP and the Our World Heritage Foundation.

Thiago Jesus is Co-Director at People’s Palace Projects, QMUL, and a researcher and cultural strategist with more than fifteen years of experience in practice-led research and public engagement across Brazil and the UK. His practice centres on culture-led climate action, emphasising Indigenous leadership, environmental justice, and the creative sector's role in fostering equitable transitions. He collaborates closely with Indigenous communities in the Brazilian Amazon's Upper Xingu Territory, co-creating projects to protect cultural heritage threatened by ecological degradation and the climate crisis. His work bridges local, grassroots initiatives with high-level cultural and environmental policy engagement. Thiago authored the chapter “Tackling Climate Change and Promoting Environmental Sustainability Through Culture” for UNESCO’s 2025 Global Report on Cultural Policies and serves as a knowledge partner to the Group of Friends of Culture-Based Climate Action. Additionally, he advises and curates the Brazilian Ministry of Culture's International Seminar on Culture and Climate Change within the framework of the G20 and COP30.

Graciela Melitsko Thornton. An environmental practitioner, researcher and writer with extensive experience across all sectors, Graciela leads Julie’s Bicycle’s Creative Green team. She works on climate and environmental action with the music, film, theatre, visual arts, and festival sectors in the UK and internationally, combining training with environmental and climate change projects. She led JB’s Circular Culture learning programme for the British Council Americas (three cohorts to date with 114 festivals across 10 countries, now in its fourth iteration). Her focus was on capacity building and consultancy support for cultural organisations, artists, funders and policy-makers. She studied Urban and Environmental Policy at Tufts University in Boston, Massachusetts. She has worked as a researcher, university professor, and environmental public policy designer, authoring reports and materials in this field and leading practical vision projects and policies for a green and just transition.

Paul Merchant is Director of the Cabot Institute for the Environment and Associate Professor in Latin American Film and Visual Culture at the University of Bristol. Merchant is the author of Pacific Poetics: Ecological Experiments in Chilean and Peruvian Culture (forthcoming 2027) and Remaking Home: Domestic Spaces in Argentine and Chilean Film, 2005-2015 (2022). He is the co-editor of Latin American Culture and the Limits of the Human (2020) and El cine de Lucrecia Martel (2025).

Paula Serafini is Senior Lecturer in Creative and Cultural Industries at Queen Mary University of London. Her research is situated in the field of cultural politics, and her interests include extractivism, social movements, art activism, performance, cultural labour and policy, and socioecological transformations. Paula co-convenes MUTUA, a space of knowledge creation and exchange and an innovation hub for culture and environment between Queen Mary University of London, National University of Tres de Febrero, and the cultural sector. She is author of Performance Action: The Politics of Art Activism (Routledge, 2018) and Creating Worlds Otherwise: Art, Collective Action, and (Post)Extractivism (Vanderbilt University Press, 2022), and co-editor of artWORK: Art, Labour and Activism (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2017) and Arte y Ecología Política (IIGG-CLACSO, 2020).

Image: closeup of collective collage during MUTUA Laboratory in Buenos Aires, June 2023