We Hear You—A Climate Archive on the World Stage

Even at 420 ppm, Stockholm in April can be chilly. But huddled in the morning sleet at Gustav Adolfs Torg, the activists danced together to stay warm. Someone clipped a Bluetooth speaker to a bike. Someone passed out vegan kanelbullar, Swedish cinnamon rolls salvaged from a bakery the day before. And then they marched toward Parliament for the 297th week in a row.

This was Fridays for Future Stockholm—just one facet of the worldwide youth movement fighting for climate justice in the face of escalating crisis. I had the opportunity to join their protest after gathering the night before with an international group of artists and storytellers to celebrate the opening of 77 Messages to the Future at Dramaten, Sweden’s Royal Dramatic Theatre.

Woven from the stories of young activists, 77 Messages to the Future is the latest offering from We Hear You—A Climate Archive, a performance series amplifying and preserving global youth perspectives on the climate emergency. Serving as dramaturg for this series over the last three years, I have seen how sharing climate stories can help orient and ground us in a shifting world while pointing the way to powerful forms of collective action.

“Is my microphone on? Can you hear me?”

Fridays for Future founder Greta Thunberg leveled this question at Britain’s parliament in 2019, and We Hear You—A Climate Archive answers in the affirmative, both to Thunberg herself and, crucially, to the wider movement of which she is a part. After an open call in 2021, we commissioned seventy-seven youth artists and activists around the world, seeking stories that reflect something of what it feels like to come of age at this pivotal moment in the long, long history of the Earth. The responses include individual memories and family histories, ancient legends and records of disaster unfurling in real time.

“When it comes to the climate crisis, we already know the science,” said We Hear You co-conceiver Jacob Hirdwall, who adapted the commissioned works into 77 Messages to the Future, which he also directed. “Instead, with these stories, we wanted to find a way to share what this moment feels like to the current generation of young people, for whom it’s not just science, hard facts—it’s very personal. They know the climate crisis is knocking on the door.”

Project storytellers initially shared their work in a series of digital sessions that I hosted alongside other members of the We Hear You creative team between March 2022 and June 2023. All seventy-seven stories were then published online, and they have since inspired performances at a growing roster of international climate summits, schools, and cultural venues including Dramaten, the Kennedy Center, the Hirshhorn Museum, and the United Nations COP27 conference in Egypt. Later this year, the stories will also be committed to the Stockholm City Archive (Stockholm Stadsarkivet) for long-term preservation.

“Young people’s experiences and perspectives, which have not historically been centered in climate policy conversations, are urgently necessary,” said project director and co-conceiver Caitlin Nasema Cassidy. “These artists and activists are the ones doing the work of imagining more livable futures. And reading their stories, or seeing them performed, is a way of connecting on a personal level to what’s happening on a planetary scale.”

As a dramaturg, I think a lot about structures—the shapes that individual stories take, as well as the wider frameworks of support that allow stories and storytellers to flourish. Through previous collaborations, I’ve learned that the climate crisis demands that we re-think many of the structures by which we once defined our places in the world. Whether it’s wildfire smoke or pathogens or mass migrations, the emergency has a way of mocking human boundaries. The punchline is always an essential porousness of borders and bodies alike—nothing is truly separate.

We wanted to reflect this dynamic in the commission structure of We Hear You, taking care not to identify participants solely by nationality, as can be the case with international work. Instead, we decided to offer commissions according to biome. Commonly defined as ecological communities, biomes are regions of the planet that share similar types of vegetation, soil, climate, and wildlife. Several different biome frameworks exist; in consultation with biologists at Georgetown University’s Earth Commons, we used a system of fourteen eco-regions, striving to commission stories from each. Over 90 percent of the storytellers also represent Most Affected People and Areas (MAPA).

As we shared story after story, we came to appreciate the ways that biomes represent a delicate continuum, rather than a series of distinct and separate spheres. Over and over in the collected tales, what happens in one place mirrors or seesaws with events reported somewhere else. While Tate protests the felling of a grove in urban Singapore, Joy mobilizes her community in coastal Kenya to replant mangroves after a tsunami. As Swedian chronicles the ways that flooding has become a part of life in tropical Jakarta, Raquel and Marwa share firsthand accounts of water scarcity in the desert of Peru and the savannah of Tanzania.

While the acute burdens of climate emergency are repeatedly borne by those least responsible, stories from the Arctic to the Sahara reflect the intersectional, systems-wide nature of the crisis. Big Wind, a Northern Arapaho activist based in the montane grasslands of Wyoming, begins their story by stressing, “We’re gathering here today because our lives depend on it, and we have a duty to act, because our home is on fire.”

The We Hear You creative team put a lot of thought into the structure of our gatherings. In addition to the stories themselves, we wanted to weave generative connections. We thought of fungal networks running deep below the forest floor: beneath the individual “mushroom” of each separate story or performance, we envision a mycelial tapestry of collaboration and exchange. The relationships, we reminded ourselves, are the work. Ashanee Kottage, a storyteller and project facilitator, reflected, “Our storytelling sessions were not just a digital site for telling tales but also a garden where connection, solidarity, and hope flourished.”

For each two-hour session on Zoom, we imagined a community gathered around a campfire in a moment of crisis, swapping tales to make the dark less lonely, inviting mythic perspectives on superstorms and habitat loss and heat waves that go on and on.

For each two-hour session on Zoom, we imagined a community gathered around a campfire in a moment of crisis, swapping tales to make the dark less lonely, inviting mythic perspectives on superstorms and habitat loss and heat waves that go on and on. Even though we convened on a digital platform, we used performing arts strategies to offer an embodied experience of sharing. We began with a shared breath, a full body scan, and a meditation that broadened our focus from our feet to the ground beneath us, then outward to the other species surrounding and sustaining us.

After an opening reflection from the project team, storytellers chimed in one by one, reading, improvising, or performing their pieces for the group. Participants were invited to share in the language of their choice, with live interpretation available as needed. (Our Doha-based producer, Wijdan Al Khateeb, also accomplished marvels in her coordination of time zones; session call times rotated across a twelve-hour window in order to welcome artists from Hawai’i to Nepal.)

Following a break, we led reflections based loosely on Liz Lerman’s Critical Response Process and played word association games designed to highlight mutually resonant images, phrases, and themes. Certain motifs kept popping up, including the wisdom of grandparents and elders; creatures, like butterflies and mermaids, that move between earthly and imagined realms; and the inseparability of the climate fight and other movements for liberation.

From these stories and reflections I learned, viscerally in a way I had not experienced before, the ways that climate and so many “other” issues are inextricably linked. Ilyess, from the temperate grasslands surrounding Kharkiv, Ukraine, and now a refugee in Berlin, calls out the ways that Russia’s invasion is directly funded by continued demand for fossil fuels. Meanwhile, in the Mediterranean forests and scrub of Palestine, Fidaa resists the environmental consequences of occupation. Amid the temperate broadleaf forests of the United States, Yebin documents the ways that white supremacists fetishize the “purity” of national parks. Nothing is truly separate.

While political and business leaders continue to neglect and obfuscate this insight, We Hear You hopes to offer definitive evidence—to present and future audiences alike—of the rising generation’s unshakeable awareness.

The centrality of climate in these pressing current matters contradicts a widespread tendency of imagining the climate crisis (still) as something yet to come. As one character says in the performance at Dramaten, “The future is already here.” While political and business leaders continue to neglect and obfuscate this insight, We Hear You hopes to offer definitive evidence—to present and future audiences alike—of the rising generation’s unshakeable awareness.

“These young people’s stories offer a unique snapshot of an important moment in global history,” said Helene Larsson Pousette, a diplomat and curator who, in her role as cultural counselor at the Embassy of Sweden in Washington, DC, has been instrumental in assembling the international coalition of diplomatic, cultural, and academic institutions behind the project. (We Hear You is a collaboration between Dramaten, the Embassy of Sweden, and Georgetown University’s Earth Commons and Laboratory for Global Performance & Politics.) Helene has also led the project’s partnership with the Stockholm City Archive, which will house the stories and materials from the creative process in perpetuity.

“How history is written is often based on what researchers find in the archive,” she said. “But young people’s voices and engagement are not often preserved—nor, for that matter, are artistic processes.”

As a theatre artist, I often feel resigned to (or occasionally, exhilarated by) the essential ephemerality of our art. But from Helene, I’ve learned that deliberate archiving can be a crucial defense against the transitory nature of both performance and digital publication, as well as a way of extending a hand forward in time to generations of collaborators not yet born. In this respect, archiving reflects the fundamental positivity of the youth movement—its insistence on fighting for a future in the first place.

“For me, archiving is strongly connected to hope,” said Helene. “Archiving rests on the belief that human life will exist in the future and that our stories might serve that future in some way. Therefore, it has been important for us to ensure that this project is available to generations of researchers, artists, and activists to come.”

Meanwhile, in the present, as Dramaten celebrated the closing of 77 Messages to the Future     in May, the stories remain available for presentation and adaptation by other companies and venues. Throughout 2024, Washington-based dance troupe Company | E is using the stories as a base for their Letters to Earth, with performances at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum and in Washington, DC public schools.

“We hope that other artists, producers, and educators will continue to be inspired by these stories and will draw on them for future performances,” said Catlin Nasema Cassidy. “A central part of the project has been to create alliances between activists, artists, researchers, policymakers, and cultural venues, and that work is just beginning.”