Long ReadI joined the arts sector because of its ability to ignite meaning and drive change. Still, I can’t ignore the privileges required to freely and fully enjoy its immense potential for reflection and transformation.
The sector’s past failure to acknowledge the contributions of less traditional voices made me welcome the long-overdue reckoning with inequalities exposed both by Covid’s disproportionate impact on historically marginalised groups and by the global response to George Floyd’s murder. These forced us to stare at the reality.
Aimé Césaire’s prophetic warning, evoking an Orwellian critique of societal and structural failures, accurately described the existential ambition we sought to address when the equality movement re-emerged:
“A civilisation that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilisation. A civilisation that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilisation. A civilisation that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilisation.”
I don’t know a better encapsulation of the deeper goals of the equality movement that urges us to re-centre the value of life over the profit-driven, uncaring and extractive industrialisation of people and nature.
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