Glasgow's Newest Mural Celebrates Indigenous Environmentalism

A group of South Asian women and indigenous leaders have created a 65 foot mural celebrating indigenous environmentalism, amongst the streets of colonial Merchant City.

The new finished mural | Photo by Jack Howse

By Jack Howse

During COP26, indigenous people from all over the world travelled to Glasgow to make their concerns heard showing how the struggle for climate justice is, at the same time, a struggle for the amplification of marginalised voices. 

Two kilometres east of the official COP zone, a global collective of indigenous communities have been sharing their perspectives on the environment through workshops and ritual ceremonies. This collaboration culminated  in the unveiling of a giant new mural for Glasgow that celebrates the cross-cultural similarities between indigenous narratives and how these can aid in the fight for climate justice. 

The workshops and mural painting have been organised by Fearless Collective. Shilo Shiv Suleman is the founder of the group and has described it as: “a community of artists spread across the Global South”. Suleman, a Bangalore based visual artist, set up the collective in response to a horrific gang-rape case in Delhi that shocked the nation in 2012. The victim was known in the media as “Nirbhaya” (निर्भय), a word that literally means Fearless in Hindi. Suleman sees her mural painting as a reclamation of urban spaces that have otherwise been stolen from marginalised communities.

Shilo Shiv Suleman at work on the mural | Photo by Jack Howse

Most of Fearless Collective’s murals can be found in the Global South, with highlights including a memorial to victims of gang violence in Karachi and an ode to queer love in Beirut – the first known public art exploration of queerness in Lebanon. The mural in Merchant City will be the collective’s first in Europe. Fearless worked closely with Hana Lindsay, a Govanhill-based artist and sign-painter, who served as their project manager and found the wall that the mural has been painted on. 

Before each mural painting, the Fearless Collective workshops ideas, symbols and outcomes of the projects with the local community in order to gauge what they want to see represented in the work. 

Tehani Ariyatane, chief operating officer for the group, helped to facilitate this in Glasgow and invited indigenous leaders to share their mythologies, cosmogonies and ritual practices. Creation stories from the Brazilian Amazon, Guyana, Celtic, Navajo Nation, and Peru were heard by the group. 

For Tehani, these mythologies are valuable when considering ideas of climate futurity as they collectively and reverently discuss the symbiotic relationship between humans and nature. From this workshop, the two main subjects for the mural were picked and photographed. 

For Fearless Collective, self-representation for the subjects of their murals is intrinsic to their practice as they seek to amplify the voices of communities that have been unfairly portrayed in the media. As such, the mural’s subjects; two indigenous leaders from the Amazon, got to pick their clothes and stances.

The original photo of one of the indigenous leaders who is a subject of the mural. The photo was taken on his own terms, represented on his own terms.

The mural moves past stereotypical portrayals of indigenous leaders in traditional clothing with raised fists. Instead it highlights, as Suleman puts it:  “The “quiet revolution happening in these communities that is normal and not exoticised”. The mural also combines many of the mythologies of these communities with a particular focus on the natural world. In the mural there are depictions of tigers, rivers, and the Scottish unicorn. These symbols seek to represent indigenous mythologies and how they can be useful in the fight for climate justice. 

The work can be found in Glasgow’s Merchant City on the corner of Brunswick and Wilson Street. It replaced a mural depicting badminton, created for the Commonwealth Games. The top of the feathered shuttlecock makes up part of the new indgenous headdress worn by one of the mural’s subjects. 

The location of the mural is symbolic as it lies right in the heart of Merchant City, an area built on the money of colonial merchants and slave-owners. Wilson Street specifically is named after George Wilson, a huge tobacco merchant in Glasgow. As one indigenous leader remarked: “The mural shows how we were never colonised and continue to refuse to be”. 

Suleman muses how she has heard people commenting that the mural does not represent Glasgow at all and seems completely out of place. To this she responds that in her home-city of Bangalore, there are at least three statues of Queen Victoria that serve as painful reminders of colonial India; this mural acts as a counterbalance to these colonial statues that permeate many cities and communities across the world. 

The mural was officially opened to the public on Wednesday 12 November with an event co-organised with Greenpeace. The ceremony focussed on the idea of rebirth and recreation. This theme was chosen for a number of reasons: rebirth is at the centre of many indigenous creation stories and Fearless believe that for climate justice to be possible, the way that society is structured and how communities are represented needs to be completely destroyed and reborn. During the ceremony, participants could write on the wall what their hopes for the future and what needs to be reborn. The ceremony culminated in a huge feast, organised and cooked by Anjli Vyas, a zero-waste chef who used foraged and donated food to create the meal. 

It is hoped that the mural will stand the test of time (and city redevelopment) to serve as a public ode to COP26, specifically for indigenous and grassroot voices in their fight against both climate change and continued marginalisation. 

More information about Fearless Collective and the work that they do can be found here