ANAIRDA

Transcript by Jayde Stevenson

I am Latin American, I come from a political family that are also quite artistic as well, but umm… so when I was 13… between 13 and 14, we started with our newspaper in the secondary school where we tried to make the… become the voice of the students somehow.

So, for me that was the beginning, where I felt like this responsibility of engaging with the community… uh… selflessly. Uh, so that was the start and then umm… my family also another very strong thing in my past as I was growing up was, uh getting involved with a animal rights movement in Ecuador where I’m from, but in 2005 I moved to the UK. Uh… after a week of being here I got involved with Plymouth Environment Centre. They were needing um… volunteers. And they had this formula that helped me to see things in a different way, where they were… they care about environmental issues but also animal rights and human rights, but with umm… with bigger principles.

So, thanks to them I became vegan, uh, understanding that- you know, the source of oppression is the same for everyone, so, with my love, my experience with animals it just makes sense, so.

Uh, and I worked with them 5 years, so what I did with them was creating community events, uh, supporting campaigns, creating discuss… public discussions and uh yeah… and… and collaborating with other groups, university or local Greenpeace groups, uh… to support them in what they do, fundraising for these groups etc.

But after… after 4 years of that, I started to feel that it was… there was… I… I became very aware about climate change and uh it just felt that what I was doing there wasn’t enough. It’s the biggest threat that we have had to face, at least in my lifetime, so um… I decided I wanted to do more but at the Environment Centre… you know… they didn’t… they weren’t that involved in campaigns or activism at that level, so I left Plymouth Environment Centre and engaged with an international group that was set up in one of the conference of parties international climate change conferences, umm… to… uh… counteract climate change or the climate crisis through popular education and non-violent action.

One of the things that inspired me was to the read the Martin Luther King- he say ‘yes the most important thing in society is to create a dialogue about these issues, but that’s why we take non-violent action because only by taking extreme um… action that draw attention from whole society… through the press… to start the discussion.’

So, I did that for 5 years, and after that came the recession with the Tories and uh… they started to change the law for activism here in the UK, so things get tougher. So that mean… that meant more risks… especially for me being an immigrant and a single mum, and so… I stopped with the group and tried to focus more… go back to my old forever passion, which is art, and decided that now I wanted to use my activism through my art.