About

An Organism Under the Sun

Lara is an organism under the sun.

She is also a climate justice and human rights activist, performance artist, and facilitator of community-oriented projects. She has collaborated with a variety of communities in South Africa, South America, Turkey, Italy, Germany, and so-called Canada worked across borders with international theatre companies and facilitated research projects in development and conflict settings with refugees, prisoners, ethnically diverse, and Indigenous communities.

She is one of the co-founders of AA+A Contemporary Performance Research Project and Ray Performance Collective. Before moving to Canada, she taught first- and second-year acting classes at Beykent University and published individual and collaborative ideas on Conference of the Parties (COP20), civil disobedience, theatre in conflict zones and poems on possibilities of hope.

She is interested in the role of theatre in addressing, organizing, and taking action within the climate justice context through decolonizing methodologies. She finds joy in experimenting with tools of theatre to disturb everyday life.

She is currently working as the Core Artist/Communications Director at The Only Animal Theatre Society while doing her Ph.D. in the Interdisciplinary Program at UBC. Her recent and ongoing collaboration with artist/storyteller Rosemary Georgeson (Sahtu Dene/Coast Salish) Etuaptmumk/Two-Eyed Seeing: Ways of Being and Seeing, brings Indigenous knowledge holders and communities together to talk about the climate crisis.

I sincerely believe and ground my artistic practice and research on the empowerment of people through the arts to initiate discussions on social change. I am interested in the potential of dramatic arts to awaken hope and, more importantly, provide an opportunity to imagine, organize and take action against unjust social, political, economic and ecological issues. My artistic, political and academic interests converge in my commitment to the power of praxis in moving people to take informed action. I collaborated and worked across borders with international theatre companies and facilitated research projects in development and conflict settings with refugees, prisoners, ethnic minorities and Indigenous communities. These experiences have allowed me to associate arts-based practices with actions on social dynamics concerning climate change. I believe that artistic practices can be an effective method that enables environmental actions to take an active role in transformative change. I see this critical moment in history as an opportunity to share, practice and learn from each other about ways in which we can build alternative cultures through creativity and critical thinking.

Art plays a crucial role in understanding modes of thinking around social issues and encourages us to imagine beyond the given present. Specifically, performative inquiry accommodates possibilities of dialogue and praxis through participation-based creative methods. My goal as an artist is to build community-arts engagements that might help facilitate spaces for critical thinking, action and social transformation. I am specifically interested in how performative inquiry, as a medium for dialogue, could stem collaboration between various knowledge systems, communities, organizations and institutions for co-creating collective strategies for social justice.