Escaping Quicksand, Becoming Snowpack: BILYA as a Practice of Sintering

Jen Rae

I am writing this from Belém, where the Amazon River moves with ancestral certainty and COP30¹ swells with the urgency carried by the global majority, crowded by wayward fossil-fuel lobbyists, media, officials and security. In this humid convergence of negotiations and creative resistance, people from more than 194 countries gather to confront the world’s most insistent questions that will determine our survival: deforestation, water security, adaptation, climate finance, just fossil fuel transitions, climate misinformation, and the quiet but significant toll all of this takes on our collective wellbeing. Gone are the rotating images of polar bears perched on icecaps and generic scorched earth.

Earth is now passing the 1.5° threshold, beyond which scientists warn of catastrophic harm to the systems that support life and forcing us to imagine the unimaginable. The slow futility of these gatherings since 1995 haunts Belém despite the ambitions; COP’s frenetic undertow feels like standing waist-deep in quicksand — that moment when overwhelm tightens in the body and instinct urges us to flee, fight or go still, even though every frantic movement only sinks us further.

Brazil’s spirit of mutirão — used by the COP30 presidency to culturally ground the conference – is rooted in the Tupi-Guarani understanding that belonging carries shared responsibility and that everyone has a role. It reminds us that climate work is never done alone; it grows from the ways we hold, and are held by, our communities. This ethic, adaptive under pressure yet strengthened through relation, has long anchored my practice, carrying me from the disconnection of COP15 in Copenhagen (2009) toward the deeply relational climate work I later found at Arts House in projects such as Going Nowhere (2012), COP OUT / CopOut21 (2015) and eventually REFUGE (2016-22).

As Arts House marks its 20th birthday, I keep returning to how this place exemplifies that culture is not a peripheral asset, but an infrastructure of relation — a way of preparing futures through the bonds we build and carry.

REFUGE was the clearest expression of this. That long, improbable refugium we built together was more than a project; it was a place where relationships could survive disturbance and continue to evolve. REFUGE unfolded through a soft choreography of people learning to attune to one another, becoming a kind of snowpack through the dramaturgical methodology Playing in the Dark (coined by Lee Shang Lun in 2016).

REFUGE was prescient, complex and emergent that resonates with Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg scholar, writer and artist Leanne Betasamosake Simpson writing on water and snow. She reminds us that water is a mentor in how to live well together.² Water binds through attention, proximity, the tiniest relational decisions. Snowflakes, she writes, don’t simply form; they bond — crystalline constellations shaped by the conditions they move through. And when snowflakes accumulate, they undergo sintering: a slow, patient fusing of crystals under pressure and time. Sintering is how snow becomes snowpack — how temporary bonds become structural strength. For Simpson, this is a metaphor for Indigenous constellations of care: relationships that deepen through gentle contact, cold, warmth, shift, return.

REFUGE embodies Simpson’s description of sintering. When I arrived at Arts House in 2016, the work didn’t begin with a plan; it began with a shared question that hums underneath COP30 as well: How do we prepare in ways that respond to the inequities of climate change and honour our interdependence?

Under the stewardship of Angharad Wynne-Jones and Tara Prowse — and later held with aligned clarity and compassion by Sarah Rowbottam, Josh Wright and Emily Sexton — REFUGE became a meeting place for people who rarely share space: artists, emergency responders, epidemiologists, Indigenous Elders, teenagers, neighbours, researchers and public servants. What held the work together was the labour rarely acknowledged: many hands transforming the former North Melbourne Town Hall into a 24-hour makeshift disaster relief centre; technicians softening light so Elders could yarn; artists having a ‘safety meeting’ in the kitchen; volunteers tending emotional weather; Aunties grounding us in story and protocol; Lorna pouring endless cuppas of Ruth Crow Tea; and, diverse community members sharing lived wisdom. These were the bonds — gentle and firm — that allowed REFUGE to breathe.

REFUGE moved like water: responsive, attentive to nuance, reshaping itself around the people tending it. It seeped into the concrete norms of disaster management, freezing and expanding in ways that cracked open rigid assumptions with new possibilities. Each year, diverse actors drifted in and out like unique snowflakes—no two alike, each bringing their own shape, texture and temperature to the work. Over time, their accumulation became packing snow — the kind perfect for snowballs, forts and ski trails – integrating fun, constructive critique and other pathways.

And when Angharad and Tara moved on, REFUGE didn’t fracture; it sintered. The work changed state, fusing under the warmth and pressure of collective care. Like frost melting and refreezing, it reorganised around relationships already fused. Artists led artists. Communities reframed the questions. Producers wove disparate threads into a coherent, improvisational whole. The structure didn’t hold the relationships — the relationships held the structure.

From this terrain, PORTAGE (2019-2021)³ emerged — framing a practice of knowledge sharing, care and responsibility across contexts, particularly centring equity-denied communities who many have long navigated climate mitigation and adaptation without recognition. PORTAGE highlighted what many of these communities already know: adaptation begins in relation; resilience forms in the spaces between us.

The deep and long relational work of REFUGE and PORTAGE laid the groundwork for the formation of the Centre for Reworlding and BILYA. Co-created with Claire G. Coleman (Centre for Reworlding), Lee Shang Lun from PlayReactive and Jack Nolan (2024), BILYA asks:

BILYA is an iterative relational map of people, projects, and organisations working at the intersection of climate, art, and culture grounded in Indigenous Cultural and Intellectual Property (ICIP) and Indigenous Data Sovereignty principles. BILYA (Noongar, from the root ‘bily’ meaning ‘river’ and ‘navel’) visualises the living networks behind arts–culture–climate work. It does not freeze knowledge into extractive databases but maps the relationships between people, projects, organisations and the ecosystems supporting the practices. Like a watershed remembering every tributary, BILYA is itself a form of relational sintering — a slow strengthening of ties over time.

As Arts House celebrates 20 years, one truth keeps resurfacing here at COP: culture is not a side narrative — it is the connective tissue for all that it enables and grounds.
The lineage from REFUGE to PORTAGE to the Centre for Reworlding to BILYA carries this truth forward: adaptation is relational, cultural, embodied — a practice of tending to the bonds that hold us. These ‘projects’ offer a way for communities, artists and climate actors to see themselves not as isolated snowflakes but as part of a strengthening snowpack.

And because BILYA is a living system — shaped by reciprocity, consent and care — we invite you to become part of it:
to map your connections, your knowledge flows, your collaborations;
to explore how BILYA might support your communities and your climate practice;
to become a node within this growing watershed as we shape the next currents together.

Over twenty years, Arts House has shown what keeps resurfacing here at COP: culture is not a side narrative — it is the connective tissue that enables, grounds and transforms climate action.

The lineage from REFUGE to PORTAGE to the Centre for Reworlding and now to BILYA carries this truth forward. Adaptation is relational, cultural, embodied — a practice of tending to the bonds that hold us. These works show communities, artists and climate actors that we are not isolated snowflakes, but part of a strengthening snowpack, fused through the slow work of care, pressure and time.

And because BILYA is a relational mapping system — shaped by reciprocity, consent and care — we invite you to become part of it:

• to map your connections, your knowledge flows, your collaborations; and,
• explore how BILYA might support your communities and your climate practice.

Welcome to BILYA: https://bilya.network

What if we could connect the many people working at the intersections of art, culture and climate — those creating, commissioning, researching, funding and resourcing this work?

What if we could strengthen transdisciplinary collaboration across climate action, adaptation, social sciences, justice, Indigenous data sovereignty and the arts?

[1] COP30 is the 30th United Nations Climate Change Conference (Conference of the Parties) held in Belém, Brazil 10-21 November 2025.

[2] Simpson, L.B. (2024) Theory of Water: Nishnaabe Maps to the Times Ahead. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press

[3] Jen Rae, PORTAGE (2019) is a complex multi-platform project in four stages: Raft, Flotilla, Shelter2Camp and the First Assembly of the Centre for Reworlding with intersecting creative works/workshops. Created in collaboration with over 200 collaborators, community members, partners and volunteers. https://www.jenraeis.com/portage-raft-flotilla-shelter2camp

Image credit: Jen Rae
Image description: Three people are wearing life jackets and sitting on a wooden raft in a dark room. An orange light illuminates the space and there is another raft in the background.