Young artist-leaders of Cabelo Seco, an afro-indigenous community that lies between the dying Rivers Tocantins and Itacaiunas, gateway to the Amazon, refused last month to perform on any stage funded by the mining giant VALE to buy ethical credibility. The youth will broadcast their stories & living culture, to explain to other communities, schools and leaders, locally, nationally and internationally, why the preservation & independent production of their own culture is essential to sustaining global eco-systems threatened by the industrialization of this essential and rich Amazonian region.
Topical focus:
Country:
What locality or neighborhood will your project focus on?
Maraba
Describe the specific community with whom you will be working.
Composed of 380 families, this founding community of Marabá city is socially marginalized & ravaged by drug-related violence caused by 100 years of poverty. Some 12 youth are assassinated & 60 women/children are recorded as violated each week in a city of 340,000. Local teachers are desperate, parents afraid. The emerging artist-leaders (14-17 years), face a community silenced by the memory of acute hunger & passified by leaders who offer food, beer & live-shows, as they plunder vast natural wealth. However, the popular culture is rich in story, traditional medicine & social values passed on by generations of fishermen & washerwomen. This wisdom will be videoed to inspire the community & city to unite/network with other communities to practice alternative models of sustainable development.
What kinds of news, stories and other content will be created?
Through short videos of young musicians, dancers & video artists filmed in performance & of elderly guardians of the cultural memory of Cabelo Seco filmed on their two rivers, the young video-makers will broadcast songs & life-stories (about river-work, child-birth, health, schooling, ethical life-choices, children’s songs & dreams), of 10 elderly fishermen & washerwomen & 10 young relatives of executed victims. ORS youth advocates want their videos to show the connections between urban violence, chronic ill-health/depression & the violation of the Amazon. Their rivers will ‘speak out for life’ through social networks/mobile-phones & as raw-material for schools/intercultural collaboration, to also sensitize teachers & parents about the socio-educative potential of youth video.
What technologies and digital tools do you plan to use in the trainings?
Describe the connections that you or your organization have already established that will contribute to the success of the project.
The Transformance Institute is based in Cabelo Seco. Its art educators have lived there since 2009, forming confident youth artist-leaders through arts projects, residencies & festivals, led in collaboration with their families, schools & other Amazonian communities. In 2012, 5 young artists made 4 videos. Last week, they distributed their third artistic-pedagogic calendar to all families in Cabelo Seco, schools, local businesses & politicians. It narrates their project through photo-narratives. Through this history/preparation, the project has the community's confidence to guarantee profound stories. As the Institute contributes to the making of the Pan-Amazonian and World Social Forums and Latin-American Network of Arts for Transformation, ORS has great access to many networked project.
How many participants do you think will be involved in your project?
ORS will train the youth in digital video to see ‘diversely’ and storytell experimentally, mainly through mobile phones. In parallel, 1 youth will train in digital video/a-v language, to create documentary video and guarantee collective development. ORS will edit in Adobe Premier, progressing to free media/Ubuntu studios. Once projected onto the walls of interviewees’ homes in our street cinema, the videos will be posted on Facebook, YouTube & Vimeo, using Web 2.0 to create an interactive website in WordPress. Trainees will use theatre to develop mobilizing & interviewing skills, & study documentaries to learn narrative techniques. The project coordinator has been fully integrated into Cabelo Seco, has these digital & communication skills, & is connected to photography/video networks.
Describe which technologies, tools, and media you will focus on when training participants.
ORS will train the youth in digital video to see ‘diversely’ and storytell experimentally, mainly through mobile phones. In parallel, 1 youth will train in digital video/a-v language, to create documentary video and guarantee collective development. ORS will edit in Adobe Premier, progressing to free media/Ubuntu studios. Once projected onto the walls of interviewees’ homes in our street cinema, the videos will be posted on Facebook, YouTube & Vimeo, using Web 2.0 to create an interactive website in WordPress. Trainees will use theatre to develop mobilizing & interviewing skills, & study documentaries to learn narrative techniques. The project coordinator has been fully integrated into Cabelo Seco, has these digital & communication skills, & is connected to photography/video networks.
Describe the facilities where you will hold the workshops.
The Transformance Institute has reformed & equipped its modest warehouse into a workshop/rehearsal & training studio, inside Cabelo Seco. It's located inside a protected area & medicinal garden, ideal for (filming) open-air/covered performance/interviews, beside the river. Our two project offices (60 meters away), contain 7 computers, good internet access (via USB modems, to become broadband), an arts library & meeting space. These offices can be used for training/interviewing & are secure for stroingequipment. Both sites are close to our village-square & raised side-walks which we use as open-air/covered stages & screens for open-air performance & cinema (see URL video). Both sites & the street culture spaces are surrounded by family homes offering all kinds of technical-cultural support.
What is your current relationship with the community with whom you plan to work? What makes you the most appropriate individual or organization to implement this project?
Some 120 families participate daily through their kids, 240 families participate in our cultural events & all 380 families know the project's history & plans via our photo-narrative calendar. Regular workshops/performances in their children’s local schools & local media reports reach every family regularly. We are the only organization with the skills/methods to implement ORS, respected for practising sustainability through youth arts-leadership. City-wide prejudice has been replaced by respect for a nationally-awarded example of youth-leaders dedicated to a sustainable Amazon. We will plant a physical & virtual arts library & videotech in every home, create a feature film, install solar energy in our centre & youth-led cultural collaborations with four other Amazonian communities in 2014.
What specific challenges do you expect to face when planning and implementing your project?
4 related challenges: to enable poor youth participants to question the appeal of consumerism & imagine the future effects of an industrialized Amazon, as their own project motivation; to enable these youth to face resistance to the project from powerful local families who will pressure their parents & undermine their motivation; to sustain the self-discipline of each young participant in the training/production process, inside a culture of passivity; to maintain their patience in a long process, faced by cries for heavy policing & pressure from families/politicians to deliver immediate outcomes. We’ll meet these challenges through personal mentoring, quality artistic action to sensitize local and global communities & by stimulating global digital solidarity to strengthen their courage.
How will you measure and evaluate the project’s impact, specifically: your primary participants, the wider regional community, or the global digital community?
We will continue to measure/evaluate the impact of the project through existing weekly reflection based on photographic/video diaries, with our youth artist-organizers & their participants, the monthly circle with their mothers & bi-monthly open community wide presentations. Our semester digital photo-narrative will be deepened by the ORS video-stories & once these are posted on social networks/digital media & placed on an interactive site, for dialogue with our Latin American partners and opened for evaluation within the global digital community, we hope this will stimulate knowledge-exchange, digital workshops & collaborations. Success will be defined by our ability to positively respond to the four challenges (described above), & to train artist-leaders to sustain their own projects.
If your project were to be selected as a Rising Voices grantee, what would be the general timeline of project activities in 2013?
Phase 1 (May): Selection/Project Development
Interviews/selection of 2 youth coordinators, 5 youth organizers, 15 youth digital video activists.
Phase 2 (June-July): Training Workshops
16 social journalism/digital media/AV language workshops; 16 communication workshops; 16 Amazon studies workshops (history, culture, sustainability); Selection of 20 (elderly/youth) interviewees;
Storytelling workshops (groups of 2); Selection of locations/experimental filming via mobile-phone;
Phase 3 (August-September): Storytelling/Archiving
Interview 10 elders/10 relatives of executed youth; Organize interviewees’ photo-archives; Decoupage of interviews.
Phase 4 (October-November): Video/Digital Photo Exhibition Production
Edit; Create photo-narratives; Integrate music/dance; Community Video Festival; National/international launch;
Phase 5 (December): Evaluation/Seeding
Evaluate development/impact of each project phase/sphere; Document reflection/plans for 2014.
Detail a specific budget of up to $4,000 USD for operating costs.
Grant for two you coordinators (social journalism and audio-visual for 6 months at USD150 per month: 2 x 6 x USD150 = USD1,800
Travel expenses/refreshments for 5 coordinators for 6 months:
6 x 5 x USD30 = USD900
01 Digital recorder (H4n Next Handy Record/accessories + 2gb): USD500
Internet access: 6 x USD50 = USD300
01 Hard-Drive Memory (01 TB): USD150
Besides the microgrant funding, what other resources and support are you seeking for your project to ensure its success?
Rising Voices could provide access to similar youth-based digital multi-media projects around the world; access to other urban and remote riverside communities facing similar cultural/ecological issues; access to networks dedicated to sustainable development projects; access to videos concerned with related socio-cultural questions to extend our community video library for project training and as resources for schools in this city and the Amazonian region; provide concepts and examples of digital media citizenship in diverse socio-cultural contexts to exchange with local experiences in the northern region of Brazil; inform our project of fundraising ethical opportunities so that we can broaden the participation of Amazonian peoples and communities in citizen media.
Contact name
Manoela Souza
Organization
Transformance Institute: Culture & education