União: collective action for our planet
The creation of community Climate Week mosaic "União"
What is art for
and what can we do with it?
Art can be a powerful vehicle for social change and transformation, inspiring people to act, feel, and approach issues with a new lens. Art calls attention, it disrupts, and catalyzes important conversations.
In December 2023, as part of Royal Roads University’s Climate Week, a participatory art event invited attendees to explore the role of art in social transformation and to create a community mosaic for climate. The resulting mural is a powerful reflection of a collective energy and vision for a climate resilient future, and what a world without colonization might look like. The workshop inspired people to see themselves as part of a connected collective, moving towards the world that we want to live in. Each hand-painted tiles each reflect someone’s hopes, fears, and ideas for a better world. Over 700 people were involved in the creation of this mural, including community leaders, the public, students from three public schools from British Columbia, 15 graduate students from the University of Manitoba and pre-service teachers from the University of Victoria.
This community-created mosaic reflects many individual’s expressions that, together, create a collective vision for a climate resilient future. Several hundred were involved in the creation of this mural, including community leaders, the public, secondary and graduate students, and pre-service teachers.
Thank you to artist and art educator Bruno de Oliveria Jayme and the Resilience by Design Lab for leading this project and for all the people who participated in this true community initiative. A special thanks to our partners — at the RRU Resilience by Design Lab, Township of Esquimalt and the University of Victoria making this arts-based conversation on reconciliation, decolonization, and climate justice possible.
“Art should be a scary thing. Art should trouble. Art should make people wonder, question. People should be afraid of art because art has the power to tell stories that no one ever told. To tell stories that have been wrongly told throughout history, through colonization...The arts touch our hearts in ways that help us to reflect and rethink about our own actions.”
Bruno de Oliveira Jayme, artist, educator and session facilitator
“The idea is to inspire others to see themselves as part of this collective of moving towards the world that we want to live in, and addressing climate change, addressing colonization and creating what we hope to offer to our kids and our grandkids and theirs and theirs... “
Robin Cox, Program Head - Climate Action Leadership, Professor and Director - Resilience By Design Lab (RbD) & AdaptatIon Learning Network
More about the artist & facilitator
Dr. Bruno de Oliveira Jayme is a queer activist and award-winning scholar working on the edge of “what’s next?” With such avant-garde teaching and research philosophy, his work aims to benefit seven generations to follow because his practices are anti-oppressive, decolonial, community-based, and action-oriented.
Dr. de Oliveira Jayme says he cannot imagine social change without the arts because the arts surface stories that have been untold, under-told, wrongly told, and suppressed through colonization. Dr. de Oliveira Jayme is a visual artist and art educator with 25 years of dedication to creativity, and commitment to equity, diversity, and inclusion. He is currently an Assistant Professor in Art Education at the University of Manitoba and the coordinator of the Masters in Art Education, where he teaches courses on community art, visual thinking, visual anthropology, and arts-based research.
Driven by a commitment to social and environmental justice through the arts, his work has a global reach, including research projects in Canada, India, South Africa, Jordan, and Brazil. He holds a Social Science and Humanities Research Council Grant titled: Museum Hacking, with the objective to challenge museum Eurocentric narratives. Dr. de Oliveira Jayme has a vast track of academic publications on community art, museum education and arts and activism for social change and he is the co-author of the book: The Nature of Transformation–Environmental Adult Education.
