Living Culture Project - En Route
Updated March 2006
Brasilia, Brazil
The Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz is signing an agreement with the Ministry of Culture to realize a work tour of Brazil in 2006.
Back in 2003 the Ministry of Culture (Mincl) created a national network of Living Culture Points, (PCV) with the purpose to empower and potentialize existing groups that are working in favelas (city slums), quilombos (afrocaribean communities), indigenous villages, and in urban and rural centres all over the country.
Today, nearly 500 of these Centres are receiving funds and digital equipment to produce their own documentaries and ameliorate their infrastructures.
The Caravan presented a Project last November to the Brazilian Ministry of Culture, in order to further its purpose as a nomadic training and living center, producing all sorts of multicultural activities, as we have done in the last nine years in 17 different countries of Central and South America .
This Project was officially approved, with the support of a local Indigenous Xingu Organization, and we have committed to visit between 40 and 50 different PCVs in the year 2006.
OBJECTIVE
La Caravana proposes in the year 2006 to visit a variety of Culture Points, following a previously established plan, passing through all of Brazil and offering to exchange with it's inhabitants:
Practical information about healthy eating.
Workshops in Consensus decision making and Group Conflict Resolution.
Ecofeminism (work focused on the personal, spiritual, and social development of women) .
Workshops in massage and self-healing.
Workshops in recycling and use of natural materials for handicraft work.
Bioconstruction knowledge.
Courses in permaculture and ecovillage design.
Strengthing of networks in the Bioregional movement.
Learning exchange with indigenous cultures and participation in ancestral ceremonies of North, South, and Central America.
Theater and multimedia presentations for all audiences.
Audiovisual productions and documentary reports.
Publication of an illustrated book with testimonies of the cultural and educative work of La Caravana.
Immediate Needs
In order to implement this project, La Caravana needs:
Resolve fundamental mechanical needs and improve vehicle resources.
Repair manual transmission and adjust Mercedes Benz motor in Chevrolet bus.
Fix steering, chassis, paintjob, and do a tune up of Mercedes Benz motor in Ford bus.
Repair or replace Toyota Bandeirante truck (Currently with Mercedes Benz motor waiting to be rebuilt in Cordoba, Argentina).
Acquire a closed cargo vehicle for carrying circus tent equipment, theater equipment, light and sound equipment, audiovisual projection equipment, and other tools.
Repair suspension and axis of trailer.
Caravana Arcoiris por la Paz
55-61-81382253
info@lacaravana.org
The Living Culture program was conceived as an organic network of cultural creation and management mediated by Culture Points, its main action. The program´s implementation was designed as an ongoing and dynamic process similar to the development of a living organism, which links up with pre-existing elements. Instead of dictating (or imposing) local actions and behaviors, the program stimulates creativity, empowering wishes and setting the scene for people to be enchanted.
Enchanting people entails engaging them intellectually and emotionally, setting a magical scene that stimulates them to create and participate. If however, "..,people know what they want, they also want what they don't know"*. Knowing requires becoming acquainted, acquiring tastes, developing the ability to interpret signs and codes. The program coordination will play the role of fostering this process of cultural reinterpretation, by stimulating the convergence of different forms of artistic representation and worldviews.
"Culture is what we make here", could be one of the mottos of the Culture Points. As the Points are recognized as active creators, they will also recognize others and heighten this mutual exchange. The role of the Ministry of Culture will be to fund and build the capacity of already existing projects and facilities, providing equipment that widens the horizons of cultural production through community-based actions.
The goals of Living Culture are to:
. widen and ensure access to means of appreciating, producing, and spreading culture;
. identify partners and promote agreements between various government, nongovernmental, national, and foreign social sector players with a view to sustainable human development, adopting an approach to culture as "the main form of building and expressing national identity, a way for people to reinvent themselves and think critically";
. incorporate symbolic references and artistic languages into the process of building citizenship, increasing the capacity of communities and Brazilian society as a whole to take creative advantage of their cultural heritage;
. empower social and cultural forces, tapping in to the innate dynamism of communities and bringing together actions and support aimed at developing cooperative, harmonious, transformative culture;
.foster a horizontal network of "transformation, invention, making and re-making, so as to weave a web of meanings that involves us all";
.encourage within educational processes the exploration, use, and appropriation of codes pertaining to different media, artistic and playoriented languages, while aIso using museums, cultural centers, and public areas in different teaching situations and developing a critical reflection on the situation in which citizens find themselves;. promote culture as expression and symbolic representation, as rights, and as an economics
WHAT IS LIVING CULTURE'S PRIORITY PUBLIC?
. low-income groups in areas where there is scant provision of public services, both in big cities and in small towns;
.teenagers and young adults who live in socially vulnerable conditions;
.students enrolled in public elementary schools;
. those living in regions and municipalities that are highly relevant to the preservation of Brazil's historical, cultural, and environmental heritage;. indigenous, rural, and quilombola [remnant runaway slave] communities;
.cultural agents, artists, and producers, teachers and coordinators of primary education, as well as social activists who are carrying out actions aimed at combating social and cultural exclusion; all Brazilians who dream of a Living Culture.
*all phrases within quotatian marks were taken from Minister of Culture
Gilberto Gil's inaugural address