A clip from Björk’s upcoming concert film, Cornucopia, made its debut at Climate Week on Friday, according to Deadline. The movie presents the artist’s performance in Lisbon last year on the final leg of her Cornucopia world tour, which supported her activism in fighting the climate crisis. Details about the film’s release are forthcoming.
In a statement, stacked like a poem, that Björk submitted to Deadline, she described the climate crisis as an emergency and called the Paris climate accord “a modern utopia.” “Let’s imagine a world where nature and technology collaborate and make a song about it, a musical mockup, then move into it,” she said. “Let’s write music for our destination. In mythologies around the world, after a disaster, one captures the spirit with a flute and starts anew. … Our past is on loop, turn it off. Let’s be intentional about the light. Imagine a future. Be in it.”
Rolling Stone’s review of the Cornucopia tour in New York described how video of Greta Thunberg, then 16, played during the set. “It was a poignant passing of the torch from artist to activist, and it put the datastorm complexity of what came earlier into stark, simple, fittingly scary perspective,” the review said.
The artist has long thrown her support behind environmental causes. In 2015, she called out the “rednecks” running Iceland at the time, who were looking to capitalize on the country’s natural resources. Last year, she raised awareness for the way that the country’s fish farms were contaminating Iceland’s water supplies with harmful, mutant fish. She believed the damage was reversible, so she released a special single, a poppy duet with Rosalía called “Oral,” to raise money for an effort to lobby against fish farms.
“One of the reasons we’re going on this campaign is we can actually change this,” Björk told Rolling Stone at the time. “We asked all the scientists and environmental lawyers, and it is still possible to reverse the damage. It’s important in all the environmental news that you read: There could be a happy ending.”
