{"id":34283,"date":"2016-12-08T08:00:07","date_gmt":"2016-12-08T11:00:07","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.rioonwatch.org\/?p=34283"},"modified":"2017-05-01T15:24:29","modified_gmt":"2017-05-01T18:24:29","slug":"mare-without-borders-exhibits-community-talent-for-photography-film-theatre-and-organizing","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/?p=34283","title":{"rendered":"Mar\u00e9 Without Borders Exhibits Community Talent for Photography, Film, Theatre and Organizing"},"content":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas<\/em><\/strong><\/a><\/p>\n

On Friday, December 2 the project Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras<\/a> (Mar\u00e9 Without Borders), hosted a community event<\/a> featuring bicycle repair workshops, serigraphy t-shirt printing, photo and video exhibition, and a theater performance. The event was organized to showcase the various activities of Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras, and took place in the Herbert Vianna Cultural Center<\/a> in Complexo da Mar\u00e9<\/a>, in Rio’s North Zone<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras is a project founded in partnership with internationally-recognized community NGO\u00a0Redes de Desenvolvimento da Mar\u00e9<\/a> with the aim of breaking both symbolic and geographic borders within the Mar\u00e9 favela, stimulating autonomy and creativity of adolescents and children, and preserving community memory. The project offers workshops for children aged 7 to\u00a016 in audiovisual production, writing, and theater, and encourages mobility and greater access within the community through biweekly communal bike rides for youth. The hope is to connect the various communities of Mar\u00e9 by means of an affordable, sustainable and environmentally friendly mode of transportation. Mar\u00e9 is on flat terrain, and therefore lends itself easily to biking. Indeed, in contrast\u00a0to Rio’s\u00a0first favelas born on hills, early inhabitants of Mar\u00e9 built their homes on stilts above the tide of the sea<\/a>.\u00a0Mar\u00e9\u00a0and neighboring areas were eventually landfilled, allowing the complex to develop and become practically a city of its own made up of 16 different favelas and a total population of over 140,000 residents.<\/p>\n

\"Mar\u00e9<\/a><\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s event was yet another testament to the vibrancy and richness of civil society<\/a> in Complexo da Mar\u00e9, bringing together a web of long-standing projects and actors in the community. Redes da Mar\u00e9 is a community-based human rights organization that serves as a network for sustainable and resident-driven development initiatives. Its predecessor, CEASM<\/a> (Mar\u00e9 Center of Solidarity Studies and Actions), first started in 1997 as a collective of community members responding to the lack of access to university education in the community. These community leaders came together to organize\u00a0a course for students to prepare for the entrance exam for public universities. Since then, Mar\u00e9 has seen a significant rise in young students pursuing higher education. Redes was then formally founded\u00a0in 2007, with a focus on assisting the community in implementing grassroots initiatives.<\/p>\n

\"M\u00e3o<\/p>\n

The photo exhibition featured works from the project M\u00e3o na Lata<\/a>, which partnered with Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras in providing photography workshops for youth. M\u00e3o na Lata was founded in 2003 and was born of a partnership between photographer Tatiana Alberg and Redes da Mar\u00e9. The project offers photography and literature courses for youth between the ages of 11 and 17, including workshops on making\u00a0cameras out of recycled cans and developing photographs.<\/p>\n

\"Fagner<\/a><\/p>\n

Fagner Fran\u00e7a, 25 years, resides in the favela Baixa do Sapateiro<\/a> in Complexo da Mar\u00e9. As a teen\u00a0he participated in the photography workshops of M\u00e3o na Lata. Today he is a professional photographer and teaches workshops to youth in the community. As one of the participants of the project, Fagner reflects on the impact and significance of photography in the favela:<\/p>\n

\u201cMy photography is a photography of resistance, it is a photography directed toward the people in the community where I live, it\u2019s a photography that empowers people who live here, a photography that shows daily life and is therefore different from what is shown in the media\u2026 A long time ago in the early days of photography people were afraid of being photographed because they would say that the soul would be robbed. But even more than the soul, when you are being photographed you are giving yourself. When a person opens a smile for us to photograph, that person is permitting, is opening the heart, the face, for us to be able to reproduce an image, and this is an act of solidarity. To photograph is as if you were taking the person but also holding them and it\u2019s a great responsibility. I feel that my photography empowers because it shows the beauty in people.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The exhibition on Friday night also featured tiles made from children of Mar\u00e9, a result of a partnership between Redes and the social project Azulejeira<\/a>, a collective of artists and specialized artisans who provide educational workshops and combine artistic production with social, cultural and urban action. The tiles created by youth from the community\u00a0reflected on the prompt: \u201cMar\u00e9 is?\u201d Friday\u2019s event also featured a screening of films created by youth in the audiovisual workshops of Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras. These films document the activities of youth and serve as a way of preserving favela community memory.<\/p>\n

\"Azulejeira\"<\/p>\n

Friday\u2019s event culminated in\u00a0a theater performance, which was the result of the theater workshops for youth provided by Mar\u00e9 sem Fronteiras. The theater group premiered their self-authored work \u201cAgora Sei o Ch\u00e3o Que Piso,\u201d or Now I Know the Ground On Which I Walk. The piece addresses the theme of human animality, and is split into four independent segments that approach the topic from separate\u00a0vantage points: work, family, sexuality, and dreams.<\/p>\n

\"Agora<\/p>\n

These theater workshops for youth first began seven years ago, a result of a\u00a0partnership between Redes da Mar\u00e9 and the favela-based theater group Cia Marginal<\/a>. Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras then became a partner more recently in 2013.\u00a0Under the direction of Mar\u00e9 resident and actor Wallace Lino<\/a>, the theater workshops brought\u00a0together youth from the community, and from these workshops a theater group emerged called ATiro. Given that the majority of the youth who participated in the workshops had origins from Brazil’s Northeast (as is the case for the majority of Mar\u00e9 residents), the first work the group created was a piece about Northeastern oral history and cultural memory of Mar\u00e9. The actors collected stories from parents and grandparents about their family’s migration to Rio, and from this created a play\u00a0entitled “Vai” (“Go”). In 2014 the group was awarded the “Pr\u00eamio A\u00e7\u00f5es Locais,” or Local Actions Prize, a city government grant that funds local cultural initiatives. This allowed the group to perform the piece\u00a0throughout Complexo da Mar\u00e9. Shortly after this series of performances, Wallace received an e-mail from one of his students proposing a text for a new play: “I thought the text was fantastic, and when I asked the student what brought him to write this story, he said it was his own. At this point in time I was reading a work of Eduardo Galeano<\/a>,\u00a0‘The Theatre of Good and Evil.’ That was when I asked the group what they thought of working with animality in human relations as a starting point for research. The students loved the idea and started to write about their lived experiences of animality,” explains Wallace. From the collection of writings of the participating actors, four mini dramaturgical works\u00a0emerged to form their newest work\u00a0“Agora Sei O Ch\u00e3o Que Eu Piso.”<\/p>\n

With the neighborhood of Nova Holanda<\/a>\u00a0recovering from a recent military police operation<\/a>\u00a0events like Friday\u2019s remind us of the resilience and wealth of creativity, resourcefulness and cultural production that make up the fabric of favela communities like Mar\u00e9.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Clique aqui para Portugu\u00eas On Friday, December 2 the project Mar\u00e9 Sem Fronteiras (Mar\u00e9 Without Borders), hosted a community event featuring bicycle repair workshops, serigraphy t-shirt printing, photo and video exhibition, and a theater performance. […]<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>","protected":false},"author":133,"featured_media":34295,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1290,1333,1268,1271,329,452,1329],"tags":[1144,522,986,1685,2108,280,2411,2412,37,572,1555,319,1801],"writer":[2210],"translator":[],"illustrator":[],"photographer":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-34283","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-civilsociety","8":"category-event-reports","9":"category-favelaculture","10":"category-favelaqualities","11":"category-solutions","12":"category-rio20","13":"category-by-international-observers","14":"tag-baixa-do-sapateiro","15":"tag-bicycle-friendly","16":"tag-bicycle-use","17":"tag-bike-path","18":"tag-ceasm","19":"tag-complexo-da-mare","20":"tag-culture-secretariat","21":"tag-local-actions-prize","22":"tag-north-zone","23":"tag-photography","24":"tag-redes-de-desenvolvimento-da-mare","25":"tag-theatre","26":"tag-video","27":"writer-nour-el-youssef"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34283","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/133"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34283"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34283\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34295"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34283"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34283"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34283"},{"taxonomy":"writer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fwriter&post=34283"},{"taxonomy":"translator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftranslator&post=34283"},{"taxonomy":"illustrator","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fillustrator&post=34283"},{"taxonomy":"photographer","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/rioonwatch.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fphotographer&post=34283"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}