In the lead-up to the COP30 Climate Summit, which will take place in Belém, Brazil, 10-21 November 2025, LAB joined forces with the NGO Kayeb to host a London Climate Action Week side-event. Linda Etchart reports.
As part of the 2025 London Climate Action Week’s series of 700 events, Casa Kayeb joined with Brazil’s COP30 Committee at Rich Mix in Bethnal Green on 27 June, to bring environmental activists and artists from local, Indigenous, rural, and urban communities of the Amazon region to share their perspectives and wisdom in the discussion of the global climate crisis.
The COP30 committee is a coalition of 99 Brazilian organisations who support creative and just solutions to protect the communities and biodiversity of the Amazon. The aim of the Committee is to call for greater grassroots participation in the organization of COP30 and for the needs of local and Indigenous communities from Belém to be recognized.
The official 2025 London Climate Action Week, which attracted 45,000 climate advocates, was dominated by speeches from high-level UK sustainability consultants, academics, government representatives, and business leaders, who concern themselves with private sector responsibilities towards environmental protection.
Aside from major NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund, World Resources Institute and the Rainforest Alliance, sponsors or partners included EY, Headland, HSBC International, JP Morgan Chase, McKinsey, S&P Global, and Santander. The week’s focus was on green investment: ‘mobilizing finance for nature’, ‘risk avoidance’, and ‘investment readiness’. The City of London’s banks and financial institutions, in sponsoring London Climate Action Week, hope to capitalize on some of the ‘double-digit trillions’ that will be available for sustainable finance by the 2030s, fending off competition from Dubai and Singapore as alternative climate finance hubs.
In the jamborees of Climate Summits, where tens of thousands of governmental, INGO, and corporate delegates from around the world compete with each other to attract attention, local communities’ voices are largely muted.
‘Our chance to postpone the end of the world’
In contrast, Rich Mix’s Voices from the Amazon was a Climate Action Week side-event, effectively devoid of funding, organized by Vanessa Gabriel Robinson of Casa Kayeb, a collective created to provide a platform for Amazonian representatives.
The event was dedicated to presenting alternatives to the corporate perspective that so far has failed to make progress to reduce carbon emissions, despite a London Climate Action Week strapline of ‘Don’t tell me climate action is not happening’.
Voices from the Amazon was one of a series of events organized in anticipation of the global COP30 Climate Summit in November 2025 in the Brazilian city of Belém. It was co-sponsored by the The Bureau of Investigative Journalism (TBIJ), supported by the Latin America Bureau (LAB) and curated by Casa Kayeb in collaboration with the COP30 Committee.
The COP30 Committee is led by five Brazilian Amazon Organisations: the Chico Mendes Committee, the City Laboratory, The Mapinguari Institute, Mandi, and Tapajós de Fato. Together, the participating organizations are demanding greater Brazilian government commitment to protecting the environment, at a time when Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva is expanding the extraction of fossil fuels off the coast around Belém, as well as the paving of roads across the Brazilian Amazon, which in the long term will have devastating consequences for the biodiversity and climate of the Amazon region.
Brazil has become a petrol-state, recently joining OPEC-Plus, a coalition made up of countries belonging to the existing Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC) and 10 non-OPEC oil-producing nations, to better control the global crude oil market. Even the hosting of the COP30 in Belém has occasioned the deforestation of swathes of forest, in the course of building a four-lane access road to the conference venue.
Vanessa Gabriel Robinson, event organiser, who is herself from Amapá in the Brazilian Amazon, and founder of both Casa Kayeb and the Amazon Film Festival, pointed out that the private company Vale, a Brazilian company with a tarnished environmental reputation, is one of the sponsors of COP30, illustrating the urgent need to listen to the real voices of local people in Belém in the lead-up to the November conference.
Slow fashion from the Amazon
At the London event, Larissa Pinto, one of the national directors of youth-led organization Engajamundo and herself from Acre, spoke of the intersectionality of climate and social issues, commenting that communities have been affected by other struggles, some of which are more urgent for them than COP30.
Elijane Nogueira de Vasconcelos, a fashion designer from Manaus, the capital of Amazonas province, has her own company, Yanciã. ‘I like fashion, as it gives us beauty’, she commented. ‘We all have to wear clothes; so we have to ask, where do the materials come from? Who makes the fabric?’ Her company is an example of an existing creative solution to the damage done to the earth by the fast-fashion industry, which is one of the most polluting on the planet.
Eilijane follows the path of ‘slow’ fashion, with an emphasis on the value of craft and art, where even the birds are part of the creative process in their breaking of seeds which can be used in artworks. ‘Yanciã is not just a brand, it is a mechanism for justice and for fair trade, which is fair for workers. It is not just about selling to make money, it is about agro-ecology, a spiritual connection with the earth, and rituals, it is a legacy of the Amazon. Value from exploitation is not value,’ she explains. ‘We are decolonizing our minds …Our art is in harmony within the rhythm of the seasons, unhurried, not bound by time… Nature teaches us about time: it takes two days just to prepare the fibre, so our productivity is low. The solutions are in us and in the forest, not in new technology, not in wind parks that are constructed without consultation with local people.’
No More History Without Us, the documentary
One of the highlights of the Voices from the Amazon event was the European première of the Brazilian film, No More History Without Us (Não Haverá mais História sem Nós, Brazil, 2024), directed by Priscilla Brasil.
In introduction to the film, event organiser Vanessa Robinson explained, ‘What I wanted to do with Kayeb is promote the arts, created by people from the Amazon region. We need to change the narrative, and the only way to do that is to tell our own story. When we are talking about films, one of the problems is how to bring our stories to Europe. Priscilla is one of the few female filmmakers in Brazil. She started making films about the Amazon years ago, like Serra Pelada-Esperanca nao e Sonho (2011), which is amazing.’
Vanessa explains that potential European investors, when they saw No More History without Us, told Priscilla that the film was not suitable for film festivals: ‘What we want to do by showing this film’, says Vanessa, ‘is to contribute to demystifying the narratives about us, people from the Amazon region.’
No More History Without Us, re-labelled by Priscilla as a ‘documentary manifesto’, won the 2024 Environmental Film Festival (FICA) in Brazil for Best Feature Film, and the 2024 Bali International Film Festival (Balinale) for Best Documentary Film. Priscilla explains that Northern film festival selection panels had dismissed the film for not being ‘entertainment’, not being professional, and for risking making Northern audiences ‘uncomfortable’. At the beginning of the film, a film festival gatekeeper is heard saying: ‘What the heck are you trying to explain?… This is not a festival film. Nobody cares how you got there… Who wants to watch a political film right now? People want to know how the Amazon is going to be preserved… [there are] too many ideas, and not enough art.’
Containing footage of 19th- and 20-century Germany and Brazil, the documentary-manifesto is an exposé of the European explorer’s mindset, through which so-called Western scientists strove to define, evaluate, categorize and stratify human beings, using photographs and film footage of Amazonian communities. Their purpose was to produce evidence for asserting white superiority to justify domination and economic extraction. The film shows how Indigenous Amazonian individuals were kidnapped and taken to Europe as trophies; how their artworks were stolen and exhibited in European museums, then hidden from the very people from whom they were extracted. The film demonstrates the continued exploitation and depletion of natural resources and labour in the Amazon, and appropriation of culture via European entertainment industries.
The nature of Amazonian identity
Ecuadorian broadcaster, journalist, and environmental activist, Leo Cerda, of the Kichwa Indigenous community of Serena in Ecuador, engaged in a discussion with Priscilla Brasil about the nature of Amazonian identity. We have transcribed part of this conversation for you below.
Leo Cerda: What struck me about the film was that it demonstrated that colonization was the start of industrialization and the dispossession of Indigenous territories. I saw that under colonization and under capitalism, nature is perceived as a source of wealth, out of which we can industrialize through exploring, exploding, and exploiting… That in the West, people don’t see that we humans are part of nature. What is the inspiration behind the film, Priscilla?
Priscilla: We are finding our Amazonian identity, which is a complex identity, that previously was not permitted. ‘Amazonian’ was not a category that was considered possible, but I think it can be a very powerful political category if we define ourselves as Amazonian.
The Amazonian identity includes people who are not from this region. We did not understand ourselves as Amazonians. It turns out that Amazonians can be Indigenous, we can be Quilombola, we can be traditional people, we can be people from outside, we can be all of those things.
Like my own identity. My surname is Brasil, which means my family did not have a surname. It was given to them because probably there was an Indigenous person, my ancestor, who did not have a last name. So my name is Brasil, but I don’t know anything about this Indigenous ancestor. My own history may sound strange, but it is not uncommon. I do not know the Indigenous culture. My family was in the rubber business in Acre, and they moved with the economic cycles of the Amazon.
Prior to No more history without us, I was working for foreign film companies, writing for them, so they could shoot their documentaries. Everyone [in the foreign film companies] has the Garden of Eden in their mind when they think of the Amazon.
The film industry, like the museum industry, is itself extractive: bringing Indigenous people to the museum is extractive and colonizing, explaining the objects taken is also extractive, as I demonstrate in my documentary.
My employers said of my work: ‘This is not the Amazon I want. It is not Amazonian enough.’ I had to quit working for them, as the reality is more complex. We live in chaos, not in a garden of Eden, we live in a tragedy: it is disturbing for me. There is violence and exploitation, people murdered. I do not want to live like this. I want it to be different. [My employers] were not going to allow me to have complex ideas. But we don’t have to wait any more. We can take the work for ourselves, as no one is going to give it to us. We have to present reality: we have to say it. And if the film festival selection panel says that the film will make some viewers feel uncomfortable, well, under colonial oppression of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas, we have been made to feel uncomfortable for more than 500 years.
Leo: I like the ongoing campaign in Brazil that Brazil is essentially Indigenous land. But in practice, what can we do? What can we do about this for our generation? How can we transform these complexities and turn them into the future we want? I can see the intersectionality of your work, your music, your documentaries, your studies for your PhD. What do you think are the next steps for our generation, to move towards the environmental justice framework that we need as a society, not just as Indigenous people, but as a society, to avert environmental catastrophe?’
Priscilla: While making the film, I asked myself: what is the reality of a child born to a goldminer? How can we approach this child who has known only the reality of the goldmine? The miners belong to the land somehow now. These are the people who are going to maintain the forest. We have to learn how to negotiate with the miners. Colonizers were moved into the land in the 1960s, dispossessing the Indigenous communities. We have to re-learn how they got there. There are entire complex societies that are not just Indigenous and which require a more nuanced analysis.
Leo: Colonization tried to make us into one homogeneous culture, not just in the Amazon, but around the world, as part of globalization. What you are saying, as I see it, is that you are asking for us to become humans again. We talk about Indigenous values, and people say, ‘Are you talking about taking our land back?’ and we say, ‘No, but we want the connection back to our communities.’ Personally, I feel that we have become dehumanised, by colonialism, by capitalism, by institutions that have been systematically oppressing not only Indigenous people, but people of colour, migrant communities, LGBTQ+, all the minorities. In order to move forward, we have to become human.
There is a thing in my community, that we have to drink tea every morning. I used to ask my grandfather, ‘Why are we drinking this tea every day?’ He said it is because you need to remember your dreams…this tea makes you remember your dreams, which is your only connection to the spiritual world. If you forget to dream, you are forgetting how to be human. It connects you to nature, to the spiritual world, to the value system of the territory that you have around you.’
So we ask ourselves: what are the next steps for us? For our generation? To connect the dots and move forward – for climate justice, for environmental justice, for justice around the world?
They [the colonizers] do not want to be incommodated, but they have incommodated us for hundreds of years. We have not had the space to be able to talk openly: but now we can talk about the real ’Open Veins of Latin America’. We are demanding the space to be able to talk openly.
It is the women who are leading the struggle – our grandmothers, our mothers, our sisters. In my own community, it is the women who are leading the struggle against the mining companies. They know what it is to collect the water, to bring food, the importance of the health of the land. Often the men in our community are mesmerized by money. They say, ‘We need the money, we should sell that.’ But it is the women who understand the importance of maintaining our territory, to survive, not just as a family, but as a culture.
We had a campaign saying that we needed to indigenize people, but that did not mean that we were asking people to become Indigenous. We were asking you to listen to Indigenous people, to acknowledge Indigenous people’s values, what we live by, to respect our territories, respect our spiritual world, the need for ecological stability, so we can move forward and survive. We uphold our values to protect our territories, but we also use certain tools, like Priscilla’s documentary, to build our capacity, and speak our own narrative.
We have that capacity to use our phones as a vehicle for change, to call out what is happening in our territories, to call out companies, and people, and to showcase our own perspectives on what is happening in the world. For that I commend you for using your skills to make this documentary.
Priscilla Brasil is an Amazonian filmmaker and executive producer born in Belém do Pará, 1978. She has a degree in architecture, business, and communication, and is a PhD candidate in Post-colonialism and Global Citizenship at the University of Coimbra in Portugal.
Leo Cerda is a leader in the Black and Indigenous Liberation Movement (BILM). He is founder of the Indigenous media organization, Mullu TV, and director and designer at Hakhu Amazon, an Indigenous Amazonian arts enterprise controlled and managed by Indigenous creators and artisans, producing artworks and fashion for sale in the global marketplace.
Dr Linda Etchart is Associate Lecturer in Human Geography at Kingston University, and a correspondent for Latin America Bureau. She is the author of Global Governance of the Environment, the Rights of Nature and Indigenous Peoples: Extractive Industries in the Ecuadorian Amazon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2022).
