This English subtitled videocast is the latest contribution to our reporting project, “Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas: Deconstructing Social Narratives About Racism in Rio de Janeiro.” Follow our Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas series here.
It is crucial to promote the debate on racism with cultural producers, who use the streets as a stage for their artistic and cultural manifestations to bring people together. D’Versos Videocast is a small example of how, through poetry, street art, and cultural circles, we can recover anti-racist values in peripheral spaces and consequently, persuade a mostly young and black audience to reflect more broadly and deeply on their territories, race, and society.
The idea is to invite guests to talk about themes related to art as survival, influenced by structural racism, mainly by the movement that uses public space as an environment for work and cultural resistance. These are groups that reinvent themselves through independent collective organization, making everything even more organic, especially in the urban context.
In this videocast, we brought together MCs, poets, and cultural agitators Rico Neurótico and Jump Freestyle who are primarily known for their improvised verses in rap battles and for lyrics full of messages in the songs and poems they share with their followers. Rico Neurótico is co-founder of the C.C.R.P. – Carioca Circuit of Rhythm and Poetry and MC for the Olaria Cultural Circle, while Jump Freestyle is a singer, poet and activist, as well as part of Container T. In addition to all this, both are producers who narrate their daily lives and those of others who face racism in order to guarantee their rights to freedom of expression and leisure in the peripheries and favelas of Rio de Janeiro.
Watch the Mini-Documentary by David Amen Above or Here.
About the director and screenwriter: David Amen was born and raised in Complexo do Alemão, is co-founder and communications producer at the Roots in Movement Institute, a journalist, graffiti artist, and illustrator.
This article is the latest contribution to our reporting project, “Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas: Deconstructing Social Narratives About Racism in Rio de Janeiro.” Follow our Rooting Anti-Racism in the Favelas series here.