School of Creative
Industries
Abner Torres Delina Jr.
Abner is a Filipino artivist-storyteller, performance-maker, cultural worker, arts educator and founding leader-artistic director of BLACK CANVAS, a multi-arts collective nurturing care culture, global justice and ecological healing.
Abner is an Asian Cultural Council alumnus, Georgetown University’s Laboratory for Global Performance and Politics fellow, International Interdisciplinary Artists Consortium member, and an International Teaching Artists Collaborative IMPACT: Climate Artist.
For two decades, Abner has trained thousands of Filipino youth, artists and educators through arts education, arts therapy and arts for climate action projects in partnership with the Cultural Center of the Philippines, Department of Education, among others. His socially engaged postdramatic practices integrate intersectoral, intercultural and interdisciplinary approaches.
He curated and directed projects such as WOMB (theatre-film), ARTIVISTAYO (collective artivism), SACLAW (Social Action and Community Leadership Arts Workshop), and BALANGAW Children’s Multi-Arts Biennale. He also developed KaMaLayaAn, an eco-consciousness embodiment practice cultivating intersectional, regenerative and collective climate action.
Work
Research interests
Abner’s research interests are rooted in the intersections of care culture, global justice and ecological healing. Interested in bridging local and global gaps, he inquires into arts, culture, education and cultural policies’ role in the anthropogenic climate crisis. His dissertation explores the inter-relations of ecologies of care, precarious labour and eco-artivism.
Thesis abstract
Ecologies of care and the precarity of Global South eco-artivist leadership
Climate crisis is an urgent global problem, and thus, requires urgent global solutions. Artists and cultural workers around the world are responding with creativity, courage and care. However, the gaps between global climate policies and local climate action perpetuate the tensions in the emerging labour of Global South eco-artivist leaders who act as cultural mediators between their communities and wider networks. These leaders are nurturing local initiatives through climate communication, policy-dialogue and collective action.
Concerned mainly with the vulnerabilities of Southeast Asian countries, particularly the Philippines, Malaysia and Indonesia, this study argues that the complex labour of eco-artivist leaders is drowning with precarities and that ecologies of care is the anchor to their survival. The findings show that their precarities are interlocked, mainly caused by inequities, informalities and idiosyncratic isolations. The climate crisis is their major threat but the systemic injustices aggravate their precarious labour. Notwithstanding their precarities, they intrinsically practice and experience care, evident in their rich expressions of care aesthetics (Thompson 2022) and care ethics (Tronto 2013). Guided by local wisdom, they value trust, community and solidarity as their ethical compass towards systemic socio-ecological transformations.
To mitigate and resolve their precarious labour, this study urges various global climate actors, governments and non-government agencies, including the cultural and creative industries and its relevant intermediaries, to nurture a needs-based, context-based and care-based systems of support which honors the interdependence of art, culture and nature. The author concludes that the fulfillment of regenerative climate action, locally or globally, is deeply interdependent with the cultivation of holistic, intersectional, and regenerative care infrastructures, grounded on the ecologies of care and its possibilities.