COP30 in Belém: Between the Blue Zone, the People’s Summit, and the Fall of the CEO
- Nov 24, 2025
- 2 min read
Updated: Aug 28
Flavio Barollo: "In November 2025, I was in Belém to attend COP30 as a delegate and member of the Brazilian delegation, following an invitation and accreditation by the Federal Government, with access to the Blue Zone, the official area of the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
My participation in COP30 was also part of an artistic and political research process I have been developing with the (se)cura humana collective, focusing on the climate crisis, water, territories, extractivism, and the contradictions embedded in the so-called green transition.
During my time in Belém, I moved through different spaces of the conference. In the Blue Zone, I attended debates, side events, demonstrations, negotiations, and witnessed the simultaneous presence of governments, corporations, international organizations, social movements, and Indigenous representatives.
One of my strongest impressions was precisely the contrast between the institutional structure of COP and what was happening outside it. The Blue Zone, highly controlled, air-conditioned, and organized much like a large international trade fair, often felt distant from the territorial and concrete dimensions of the climate crisis.
This contrast became even more evident at the People’s Summit, a space that brought together social movements, Indigenous peoples, Quilombola communities, riverine communities, grassroots organizations, and activists from different parts of the world.
There, the climate debate was connected much more directly to land, water, agrarian reform, agroecology, food sovereignty, energy, transportation, sanitation, territorial rights, and the defense of the commons.
It was between these two territories that I developed my artistic interventions during COP30.
One of them was the presence of CEO Secura, a character created by (se)cura humana as a satire of corporate discourse on sustainability and energy transition.
The CEO openly embraces the logic of capital: he speaks about mining, critical minerals, oil, consumption, artificial intelligence, data centers, and economic expansion as business opportunities. His speech pushes to the extreme ideas that often appear in more polished and sophisticated forms within climate agendas themselves.
After watching The Falling Sky in Belém, in dialogue with the thought of Davi Kopenawa, another provocation emerged: The Fall of the CEO.
In the video made during COP30, the character argues that his downfall is unlikely to come from within the official negotiations. What could actually threaten him is precisely what was gaining strength at the People’s Summit: grassroots organization, alliances between territories and movements, and the defense of water, land, energy, and food as rights and common goods.
My time at COP30 therefore became less an attempt to find definitive answers and more an experience of observation, documentation, and intervention.
Moving between the Blue Zone and the People’s Summit made visible two very different ways of imagining responses to the climate crisis.
On one side: international negotiations, targets, financing, markets, technological innovation, and energy transition.
On the other: territories, social movements, and communities discussing who controls land, water, energy, and the concrete conditions of life.
It was within this space between the two that I sought to act artistically.
Not to represent COP30 from the outside, but to move through it, document its contradictions, and use performance to raise questions about what kind of transition we are building and who will ultimately have the power to shape its direction."
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