Fearless Collective

Reflections from Women Deliver 📃

In Melbourne, Australia, Fearless Foundation for the Arts brought to a global audience three of its workshops led by its team members and ambassadors from the global majority 🌹

Through *Tongues*, ***rislit, our lead Storyteller, brought tomes of desire from South Asia, decolonising the way we approach and talk about sexuality and pleasure. Participants read poems from Pakistan and India alongside works by Indigenous women across the Pacific and q***r and trans authors, before finally writing a verse of their own onto red silken banners to carry home as heirlooms of imagined futures.

Through *Border Softer*, .nur, Fearless Ambassador from Uzbekistan, brought traces of her homeland and took the participants through a spiritual journey of remembrance and resistance. Using hair as a repository of embodied histories from South Asia, participants braided strands one after the other, recounting the pain they have been carrying and moving through a process of collective healing.

Through *At the Root*, .koinch , Fearless Ambassador from Nepal, explored our relationships with land and ecology. In a storytelling session, participants reflected on climate change in their countries, and their connections to the land, citing indigenous histories, caste, disability, and more. These reflections were transformed into affirmative climate posters using natural pigments, symbolising a way to return to the land, collective stewardship, and regenerative futures 🍃

Through the patronage of , Fearless raised USD 13,800 to revive the Maniyara beri (मनियारा बेरी), an ancient well in Sanwata village, Degrai Oran, which is one of the largest sacred groves of Rajasthan.

The village sarpanch (headman) and villagers partnered with and in this revival, which ensured they had ownership of the beri and its maintenance.

When the women of Samwata joined us, they showed us how to create mandana, as taught to them by their mothers, and their grandmothers. Mandana paintings using earth, lime, white clay and dung not only cool down houses in the pulsing heat of the desert but are also ritual practice to protect home and hearth ⛅️

Women very often bear the heaviest brunt of their changing landscapes, in walking further to collect water, in eating less to feed the bellies of their children and in fighting patriarchal systems.

This mural highlights the knowledge systems, labour, resilience of the generations of women from the Oran Bachao Movement.

Project in partnership with

📸 by

Ecology

Desert communities in the Thar draw rings around the periphery of orans, with kesar (saffron) and doodh (milk) to mark them as sacred. This ties them to the oran in unspoken promise: no one hacks a single branch from the native trees, or tills a square inch of oran land.

As these communities become increasingly vulnerable to the climate crisis, we spoke to women from Samwata village, to understand how the land shelters them from luu (heatwaves) and akal (famine). This group of intergenerational women form a part of the Oran Bachao Movement, which is fighting to preserve this delicate eco-system from large-scale ‘development’ projects.

Read more about the Oran Bachao movement from our reading list in the bio.

Photo credits: and