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The Favela Climate Memory Exhibition, organized by museums and memory projects associated with the Sustainable Favela Network (SFN)*, is on display from March 1-31 at the Palacete Princesa Isabel, Santa Cruz Cultural Center, in the West Zone of Rio de Janeiro. Organized by the Historic Orientation and Research Nucleus of Santa Cruz (NOPH), the exhibition’s opening event took place on Friday, March 1, in the presence of NOPH members, and elementary school students and teachers from the Aldebarã Municipal School. Besides visiting the exhibition, students attended a presentation on the process of building climate memory circles and an artistic slam performance by the Favela Has a Voice Collective.
The Favela Climate Memory Exhibition emerged as the final product of five favela climate memory circles held by community museum members of the Sustainable Favela Network in 2023, including Complexo da Maré‘s Maré Museum, the Sankofa Museum in Rocinha, the Historic Orientation and Research Nucleus of Santa Cruz (NOPH) in Antares, the Favela Museum (MUF) in Pavão-Pavãozinho/Cantagalo, and the Vidigal Memories Nucleus in Vidigal.
The exhibition consists of an array of narratives depicting memories recounted by residents of five favelas in Rio de Janeiro. It is presented in the form of banners and a timeline, allowing for the visualization of significant events in the histories of the participating favelas. In addition to these structures, the exhibition also features the artistic installation “Well of Memories,” created by visual artist Evânia de Paula from Vidigal. Inside the well are approximately 100 historical photographs of the five favelas, which can be handled and studied by visitors.
Before the exhibition opening, around 30 students from the Aldebarã Municipal School, located within Antares, participated in a presentation where a video of the original exhibition was shown, blending exchanges from the five participating favelas. Leonardo Ribeiro, a historian born and raised in Antares, and former president of the community’s residents’ association, along with Bruno Almeida, coordinator of the Historic Orientation and Research Nucleus of Santa Cruz, talked about the impact of the work carried out in the discussion circles, capturing the students’ attention.
Asked about the significance of the exhibition coming to Santa Cruz, Ribeiro, who organized the climate memory circle in his community of Antares, commented:
“After experiencing two major floods here in 2017 and 2018, it was crucial to bring this initiative to the neighborhood of Santa Cruz. While we often saw flood and landslide cases on TV, they rarely happened here. It was quite unsettling, but we had significant floods two years in a row… I thought it was interesting to show to the neighborhood and favelas what happens when we don’t do our work, when we’re not aware of our surroundings, when we fail to notice that small changes in our environment can alter the entire landscape. So, I fully supported the event as a means of showing the neighborhood the importance of our climate memory, allowing us to understand how these events unfolded in the past and how they continue to occur today. The primary aim is to understand and recognize changes… Weather events that used to take place every eight years are now happening every year. It’s a fast change.”
After this initial moment, students were invited to visit the exhibition, where they were able to explore the show’s structures. Some interacted with the timeline, especially the posters containing the climate memories of their own region of Antares. Despite their young age, participants remembered the floods of 2017 and 2018. Another point of interest for them was the “Well of Memories,” where they interacted with the photos placed inside the installation.
After visiting the exhibition, the students were invited to participate in a poetry slam organized by the Favela Has a Voice Collective, represented by artists NATITUDE, OCotta and ANNASOL, who performed a poetic intervention, concluding the activities of the official opening of the climate memory exhibition at Palacete Princesa Isabel. The collective hails from the Urucânia neighborhood, also located in the West Zone. NATITUDE shared that “it’s truly wonderful to connect with the young crowd because they are our future. Bringing our ideas to them gives us a sense of accomplishment.” OCotta, also from the Favela Has a Voice Collective, added that:
“I believe that the importance of bringing poetry to schools and places like this, a historical site, is that children will absorb [history] in a different way. Sometimes when we present content like this in written form, it’s difficult for people to read and absorb it all. But if we introduce it in the form of art, sometimes a rhyme can carry a historical weight of years.”
ANNASOL also spoke of the experience of participating in the opening of the exhibition, bringing rhymes that talk about history and sustainability in an engaging manner to youth:
“In schools, knowledge is often presented in a boxed-in, repetitive, overwhelming format. So we present it to them in a way that encourages interaction, shouting, listening, recognizing themselves in what we’re saying. Many times what is being mentioned in class is relevant… but in half an hour we manage to create something much more interactive, drawing the child, the student into what we’re saying.”
At the closing of activities, Bruno Almeida, NOPH coordinator, observed that it was extremely satisfying to help put together the exhibition and to be able to take it to his neighborhood:
“It was a pleasure to participate in the climate memory circles, which generated the exhibition opening here today in Santa Cruz. [The process] of visiting and getting to know other communities and finding out that we have many things in common in terms of impact, of creativity for problem-solving, and also in terms of identity… Another aspect is being able to connect with the city, with another [kind of] history, not just political history, but one that speaks and shares with people, with people who are just like us… a brotherhood with other communities and favelas, which turns all of us into a huge collective. That’s what working within a network is all about!”
The Favela Climate Memory Exhibition is on display at Palacete Princesa Isabel, Santa Cruz Municipal Cultural Center, Dr. Antônio Nicolau Jorge, from Tuesday to Saturday, 10am to 3pm, until March 31, with free admission. Do not miss this chance to immerse yourself in the memories of the favelas that created narratives from the stories, identities, resistances, and affections of their residents and territories. And if you are part of an institution or space that would like to host the exhibition, please access the document with guidelines for requesting the Favela Climate Memory Exhibition.
Don’t miss the photo album by Bárbara Dias on Flickr:
About the author and photographer: Bárbara Dias was born and raised in Bangu, in Rio’s West Zone. She has a degree in Biological Sciences, a master’s in Environmental Education, and has been a public school teacher since 2006. She is a photojournalist and also works with documentary photography. She is a popular communicator for Núcleo Piratininga de Comunicação (NPC) and co-founder of Coletivo Fotoguerrilha.
*The Sustainable Favela Network (SFN) and RioOnWatch are both projects realized by not-for-profit organization Catalytic Communities (CatComm).