Since 1994, the Faculty of Environmental and Urban Change (EUC) (formerly Faculty of Environmental Studies) has been hosting and coordinating the Eco-Arts and Media Festival, an annual week-long event that acknowledges, shares and appreciates environmental and social justice perspectives through creative lens. In previous years, the event has had themes such as Fugitive Ecologies, Mending, and Fracture, where people have been encouraged to explore the lasting impacts of colonialism, environmental damage, repairing relationships, and how humanity heals from rupture and wreckage, and more.
This year, the 32nd Eco-Arts and Media Festival will be taking place from March 2 to 6, 2026 at EUC’s HNES Building. The festival is being organized by EUC undergraduate student Renatta Ramlogan, MES student Sativa Kawakami, and EUC Environmental Arts and Justice coordinator and York Research Chair in Indigenous Art and Curatorial Practice, Lisa Myers. This year’s theme, What We Carry with Us, invites us to reflect on the stories, memories, and objects that shape our sense of place and belonging. Through diverse artistic practices, the festival offers a space for artists, scholars, facilitators, and engaged community members to gather, witness, learn and imagine how what we carry guides how we respond to and transform the world around us.
The organizers of this year’s festival were interviewed by EUC Special Projects Assistant Gurneet Singh to better understand the purpose and significance of the festival’s theme.
Q. What inspired this year’s theme for the Eco-Arts and Media Festival, What We Carry with Us?
Sativa: This year’s theme came out of our first conversation together as festival organizers. Professor Lisa Myers was encouraging me to relate the festival to my master’s research, which is a film project with my grandparents about inheritance, relationships with/on land, and situated responsibilities. I have become increasingly curious about how my Japanese, White (Western European and Hungarian) and Michif families came to Wînipêk/Winnipeg (my hometown) and why they stayed. In our conversation, I brought up my interest in migration and belonging, but clarified that I am most interested in the memories and stories of building relationships with a (new) territory and meeting a place as a person who comes with knowledge and lived experience. Lisa then offered the phrasing of “What we carry with us”. Taken literally and/or metaphorically, this theme invites all kinds of stories, pedagogies, and art practices. In conversations developing the theme further, we began linking “What we carry with us” to a celebration of the banal, asking that we attend to the everyday as a significant site of meaning-making.
Q. What are you hoping the artists and attendees walk away with from this event?
Sativa: I hope that everyone walks away from events during the festival with joy and feeling energized to create. In the process of making things (art), I think we can learn a lot.
Lisa: I hope that students, faculty and staff at EUC learn from the work they see and share in. I hope they can see themselves and their own experiences reflected back to them. That they reflect on what they carry with them, and the value of what that adds to their lives. I also hope that they build an appreciation and understanding of how media and eco-arts is about thinking and building knowledge and ideas.
Renatta: I agree with both Tiva and Lisa. I think the two key words for this would be 1. inspiration and 2. reflection.
Q. What is something you find students often carry with them that shape their academic experience?
Sativa: As students, we show up to the classroom knowing some things and having certain critiques prepared, but also with an openness to learn and have our knowledge transformed. We carry with us recent interactions (like the conversation I just had with a stranger on the subway), as well as more durational relationships. We carry with us a mood, how we’re feeling, and certain goals and motivations. We learn as whole selves.
Lisa: From my experience as a faculty member, students carry a lot of knowledge and experience that they often section off as not as relevant in their academic studies, but I would argue that the knowledge, skills, and understanding derived from their family, what’s passed on is key to how they think critically about the world, how they approach their studies and is something they can dig into to build upon as they pursue their education. What we carry with us, can also be something we take for granted and do not reflect on as important, I would like the festival to inspire digging into that bundle of knowledge and experience.
Q. Why is the theme What We Carry with Us relevant and important at this point in history?
Sativa: I think that the theme of What We Carry with Us is relevant because it encourages us to practice—art, research, etc.—as whole selves. In coming to know ourselves, we might better understand our responsibilities. In a global moment of blatant genocide, Indigenous land theft, extractive capitalism, and White supremacy, we need to communicate, strategize, and enact transformative change. What We Carry with Us invites specificity into our (collective) work and allows for complexity within and between selves. This theme celebrates the everyday, and consequently celebrates the possible as well as the always already acts of desire.
Lisa: I agree with Tiva and emphasize that at this moment we are witnessing and feeling the threat of anti-queer and trans violence where heteropatriarchy and ableism is expanding. This theme is about collective work, collective voice is so important.
This year’s team has organized an exciting line-up of events. They have scheduled workshops on “Soil, Seeds, and Sky”; “Indigenous Environmental Justice”; “From the Present to the Possible: Degrowth World-Building and Collective Design”; and more!
Everyone is welcome and encouraged to join to learn more about themselves and the world around them. Save the date now!
____________________________________
Eco Art & Media Festival’s History: Every spring since 1995, the Wild Garden Media Centre, based in the Faculty of Environmental Studies (now Faculty of Environmental & Urban Change) at York University has coordinated the Eco Art & Media Festival, a multi-day festival to celebrate and share diverse forms of creative expression. With the goal of inspiring public discussion, engagement and dialogue around a yearly environmental/social theme, the festival incorporates: visual arts, dramatic performance, academic fora, film/video/new media, workshops, food, music, dance, public outreach, spoken word, storytelling, and more. As a campus-wide and community event, the Eco Art & Media Festival is co-sponsored with other York University faculties and units, as well as community organizations that share our vision of community art for education and social change.