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Who are we?
The Artivist Network is a collective of arts activists and facilitators who support organizers and movements to more strategically engage arts, artists, and culture in creating systemic change through the innovation, exchange, and dissemination of new forms of political intervention. We focus on empowering activists and artists with new skills, networks, tactics, and forms of political intervention. We focus specifically on climate justice organizing for its potential to provoke deep, structural, and intersectional change.
We work at the interface of art and activism because of the great potential of creativity and innovation to lift up, visualize and tell new stories; challenge and subvert dominant narratives, and bring new people actively into movement organizing. We understand public-facing activism as a tool to intervene in dominant societal narratives. We teach, encourage, and lift-up forms of creative activism that add new narratives to the public discourse to question, challenge, and reimagine structural norms and injustices by recentering debates around shared societal values.
As artivists are committed to the long-term, deep work of empowering and connecting artivists. Our commitment to unbranded work in support of local leadership, adds important additional capacity and network to bring local projects, initiatives, and stories to an international arena. We are currently scaling up our work and team in order to grow into a diverse and horizontal global network of arts activists with the power and network to execute independent artist-led coordinated global creative projects that tackle the root causes of the climate crisis.
Kevin
Kevin Buckland (he/him) is an artist and activist who has spent the past 14 years working with the international climate justice movement to lift up the role of art, creativity, and artists in creating change. He engages a wide diversity of creative tactics to harness the power of culture to open new space for climate politics and to better assist activists and artists in leveraging transformative creativity. He has trained hundreds of activists on 5 continents, and collaborated on projects, from local grassroots initiatives to international NGOs. He worked for 6 years as the Global Artivist Coordinator with 350.org, is the co-founder of the Gastivists Collective. Based in Barcelona, he is active in Catalan and Iberian climate justice movements including Climacció, Xarxa de Justicia Climatic, and Rebelión por el Clima, and is currently coordinating the campaign for La Casa Dels Futurs to turn an abandoned hospital into an international climate justice center and movement school. He is a painter, novelist, performer, and puppet-maker.
Amalen
Amalen is a coordinator from The Artivist Network, a group of art activists that aim to help push forward the climate change narrative through art. Amalen has worked both in the local and international climate movement in organizing community art spaces and climate marches. He has been integral in several policy lobbies and a coordinator for large protests in and around the UNFCCC. He is also an urban farmer and works with his local communities back in Malaysia.
Daniel
Daniel Rupaszov is a multi-disciplinary artist based in Budapest, Hungary. His work partially experiments with using art as a tool for public intervention, while focusing on the aspect of involving communities. Using techniques borrowed from the street art movement, he is currently holding various art spaces, workshops, and training for people of civil society and several grassroots organizations. Being one of the Co-directors of the Artivist Network, his main work revolves around supporting activist groups with these tools, organizing artist residencies, and trying to integrate the Central Eastern European art activist scene with the global climate movement.
Melike
Melike Futtu (she/her- they/them) is currently based in Budapest and grew up in Turkey. Her activist journey began during the Gezi resistance in 2013. As a former human rights journalist and researcher, she has been particularly active in the women's and LGBTIQ+ movement in Turkey. She has written several film and book reviews and has carried out academic research, particularly on the new waves of cinema and literature in Turkey. As an activist, she sees the performing arts, particularly guerrilla theatre, as a tool for interventionism by believing in the power of interdisciplinary arts to achieve social and political change. She has worked with various theatre of oppressed collectives in Hungary like the Kazinzcy Open Theatre and Magdalenas Budapest. She also has been giving a series of workshops on the theatre of the oppressed method specifically focusing on the empowerment of sexual and gender minorities. As one of the core members of the Artivist Network, she has been working on creative climate communications almost for three years. She is also working as a freelancer to support grassroots groups and campaigns by providing social media and communications support. She believes in the power of creative communications and social media to decolonize the dominant narratives and discourses for climate justice.