Image: Ngapartji Ngapartji via Facebook
Filmmaker, producer and activist Alex Kelly has been trying to change the world for 17 years.
Her work includes Big hART’s award-winning Ngapartji Ngapartji, a community development and Indigenous language revitalisation project. She is currently impact producer on This Changes Everything, a book-to-documentary project based Naomi Klein’s landmark book on climate change and capitalism.
Kelly, who presented recently at 2970°: The Boiling Point, a cross-sector forum held on the Gold Coast, warned artists who also want to be activists that the path was an uncertain one. ‘There is no silver bullet or singular mechanism for making change and if there was, everyone would use it.’
Be original
But the positive side of that statement, said Kelly, is that it gives artists opportunity to be creative in pursuit of community change. ‘Because activism is so ungrabbable and unpindownable, we can do something new,’ she said. ‘Arts and culture give us the space to think differently and elastically.’
In Ngapartji Ngapartji, she used audience participation – in the form of singing Heads, Shoulders, Knees and Toes in the Pitjantjatjara language – to connect the audience with the change she wanted to see beyond the performance. The work has had a dozen festival performances, several awards and, more significantly from an activism viewpoint, was instrumental in the Federal Government’s creation of the National Indigenous Languages Policy.
Seek stories
Kelly said change often arises at the intersection of art and story. ‘The arts have a way of communicating that is much more profound than a policy paper. The stories that we include and exclude, listen to, repeat and tell each other, come to define how we see ourselves.’
The stories we tell ourselves also dictate how we engage with change. ‘If we are not taking action, it is because of the comforts and lies we have constructed in the stories we’ve been telling ourselves and each other.’
Imagine the future
Kelly is not a believer in scare tactics. She observes that images of doom and gloom are commonly used as motivators – indeed, an entire genre of climate-based fiction, nicknamed ‘cli-fi’, attempts to arouse participation in the global warming space.
But she thinks the arts are more powerful when they give the audience ‘somewhere to run to’.
‘What we need is stories that allow us to believe that something else is possible.’
Tell tales of success
The Yes Men is a comedy cum documentary about corporate activists who impersonated members of the World T^rade Organisation. Erin Brockovitch won Julia Roberts an Oscar for the true story of a successful campaign against water poisoning by an energy corporation. Frackman tells the first person story of Queenslanders protesting mining on their land.
Each of these stories is not just a record of activism but also an inspiration which shows audiences the possibilities of activism.
Be part of the movement
Art doesn’t change the world alone but it can inspire movement, said Kelly. Just as is there is no definitive format applicable to activist efforts, there is no singular moment that creates change.
Her plea to artists is to take up challenge to create new cause-focused work. A single piece of art may not inspire sweeping differences; however every effort counts.
On the topic of climate change, the forthcoming This Changes Everything will endeavour to reframe the conversation and recapture audiences that suffer from climate change fatigue.
Kelly quotes Klein: ‘The thing about a crisis this big, this all-encompassing, is that it changes everything. It changes what we can do, what we can hope for, and what we demand of ourselves and our leaders.’
Creating something that will heighten engagement is their mission, and while Kelly is under no illusions about the difficulty of her task, that’s the story she is committed to help tell.
‘By our powers combined and our stories retold, we can make change,’ she said.
