Weaving Networks, Decolonising Worlds

Latin America is Moving Collective joins forces with La Colectiva and the Boas Praticas Project for an experimental event that feeds our collective desire to do things differently.

When?

At the Being Human Festival #BeingHuman2021

What does it mean to be human now? In the mark of COP26, it is vital we listen to the demands of the "global south" in the fight against our common enemy, - global capitalist extractivism, - and pull together to create other worlds.

SOUSA SANTOS, B. Para além do pensamento abissal: das linhas globais a uma ecologia dos saberes. In: SOUSA SANTOS, B.; MENESES, M. P (eds.), Epistemologias do sul. São Paulo: Cortez, 2010. p. 31-83.

Latin America is Moving Collective invited the Boas Praticas project (Brazil) and Somos la Colectiva (Finland) to discuss their projects at the Being Human Festival, on the 18th of November 2021, hosted by the London School of Advanced Study and the British Academy. The webinar was a hybrid event involving two languages and two (or three) worlds presenting their work in their manner, thereby creating decolonial spaces. Raphael chaired the event, while Kika was our technology specialist and Jasmin introduced the guests.

We had a lively discussion that started with Somos La Colectiva's (present at the webinar Roxana, Violeta & Rosamaria) artivist presentation on Latin American diaspora in Finland and their book "Muistikuvat", a collection of the voices and senses of migrants who left their territories. The book was written like a “river” through poems. It involved interviewing over a hundred Latin Americans residing in Finland, and its message is, although we are not many, "we are here".

The Boas Práticas project (the Good Practices project) then continued with the intervention of members of their various collectives ranging from waste collectors to fishermen's collectives and indigenous people's collectives. The project leaders discussed their methods of confronting covid, and their relationship with the nature that they see deteriorating, accompanied by poems and Brazilian oral practice cordels, (scroll down to see translations of the interventions). The principal organisers from Boas Práticas present were Ana Gretel Echazu Böschemeier, Breno Carvalho, Luan Gomes, and the polyvalent Nathalia Maira Cabral de Medeiros performed the role of translator during the whole event.

Rosamaria from Somos La Colectiva pointed out the common struggle we have against extractive capitalism. Towards the end of the discussion, the problematic situation of academics in Brazil was raised. The following questions were posed as something to think about: how can we realise a citizen science with the civil society? How can we go beyond politics to have more creativity and autonomous spaces? What kinds of possible partnerships can be developed with civil society for citizen science? It was agreed that it is important to have communities direct participation when projects are started with social movements. Direct participation should appear in theoretical, methodological and practical questions, already at the stage of the research project’s design. The guiding principle is: “Nothing about us without us.”

As an intervention by a scholar stated, the relationship between academic knowledge and the knowledge from social movements and collectives rethinks methodologies of research and action, allowing to practice "research in movement". The decolonising process happens in dialogue with communities, understanding the world from the communities point of view, understanding their ideas about life, nature, the world. It allows seeing the many things in common we have, sharing the struggle for those plural knowledges. The way territorial knowledge gets carried away to other places and then represented, as done by Somos La Colectiva, is one way to build a dialogue between academia and civil society.

The Soundpalets:

https://somoslacolectiva.bandcamp.com/track/muistikuvat?fbclid=IwAR3IzgSr2e0Rf-0pV0ovop_d6miQ7uIOFC5eGQPtHeH6bs0_QUVMmS9rLvo (Spanish & Finnish)

https://somoslacolectiva.bandcamp.com/album/antipodes

Contact: somoslacolectiva@gmail.com

Translations from the interventions by the collectives of Boas Práticas shared at the event:

No crumbs (Tupinamba, in short, Tupi)

I walk slowly because I’m tired and I’ve lost the rush

I walk slowly because I’m wounded and I’m going as I can

I walk slowly because I’m reeling from so much begging

For love from others, for respect, for a glance

When I’m gone, many will say they’re my parents, my friends, my brothers

But I only had and have loneliness as a companion

I’m a pilgrim, I’m homeless, without a partner, without air

I want to leave, but I don’t know when the bus will pass

Enough of crumbs, of scraps, of used clothes and furniture

Enough of being what you expect of me

Intervention by Luan Gomes:

"The Good Practices in front of COVID-19 in the states of RN (Rio Grande do Norte), PB (Paraíba), and CE (Ceará) together with territories of traditional communities and social movements is configured as a social experience of participatory research and investigation. The project defends a conception of research where the people and movements are recognised as subjects of knowledge (Freire, 1981), far from the colonising notion of research that treats subjects as objects to be manipulated.

The communities and social movements in the Good Practices Project include indigenous people, Roma and Sinti people, recycled material collectors, fishing communities, homeless people and the deaf community. In this participant research, the Good Practices project invites everyone to participate and engage in the struggle for a good living. The Good Practices project is constituted by an ethic of resistance, capable of keeping alive the flame of the daily struggle, which is made and lived in the bodies and the care for life, with the people’s cultures in favour of climate justice".

The world no longer gives

But it only got this way

After the man who wants to put an end

In the natural riches

The ground is getting dry

And our land denying us its fruits

And everyone going hungry

And those who destroy our beauties

Don’t you believe that Mother Nature

Is taking revenge on the man

-Carlos Potiguara

The intervention by Marlucia Potiguara:

Good afternoon, I am Marlucia Potiguara from the Matas region

I am living here not differently from the other indigenous people, we are feeling that the world is sick

Our earth mother is sick

but we are facing this struggle

each shared moment is like a leaf in a tree, flowering our lives

here our land is very dry, there is a lack of water

but we still feel enchanted with the forest

cultivating with good practices, we travel 35 villages, we help each other

We collaborate so that our Mother Earth feels happy

every day things can get harder, but we try to respect and resist

we value the alliances, the collaboration

our territory is the driest, is very hot here

Where we live is one of the driest regions.

We always give thanks

no water, but we use the water we took to shower to water the plants...

The pandemic is not over. The world is very sick.

There are villages with and without COVID-19.

And last, we presented the video by Tupinamba, who was present at the webinar:

-“Canto (I sing)”

I sing

I sing to survive

A song that gives me air

And as long as I breathe, I’ll make my song

I don’t sing just to celebrate

There’s a song that makes me hurt

And I scream until I fall apart while I enchant

A song that speaks for us

Until at last, we have a voice

And if it’s not good enough for us

Make your song

And shout till we shudder

Bleed and dance without fear

Show your face. I want to see all your singing

Come back to the beginning

The song that I sing better, I can see it in my body it’s the sun (breath)

It shines as much as it rains

In my song, it’s all pleasure (breath)

And from corner to corner, I am G-minor

Of the heat that makes it rain (breath)

In my body air

In my song, you see

In my song, only pleasure

Tupinambá is a black, fat, non-binary, bisexual and independent multi-artist transvestite, trained in Popular Singing at ETEC of Arts (São Paulo), a Social Sciences student at UFRN, member of the Tirésias Research Team and Meeting of Knowledge Community Project.

Boas Práticas Covid-19 - Redes sociais:

- https://twitter.com/bpcovid

- www.instagram.com/bpcovid

- https://www.facebook.com/bp.covid.5

Links posted during the webinar:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC-tud_JambBQk7OIAY_r0fA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TBG7ZN5Rvv0