Building Community in the Face of Ecological Breakdown
Part 4 — Cambia Festival in a Societal Transformation Journey
This is the fourth of a series of five articles recounting the story of Cambia Festival’s u.lab-2x journey in the Societal Transformation Lab, a Presencing Institute Program for teams co-shaping more sustainable and equitable social systems worldwide. The sequence of this series is:
1| Tapping into Something Significant That Wants to Emerge
2| Going to Places of Most Potential
3| Tackling Violence Through Music
4| Building Community in the Face of Ecological Breakdown
5| Spreading Societal Transformation to New Territories
Among the participants who signed up to join Cambia Festival’s u.lab-2x journey was Renata Carvalho Koldewijn, an environmental psychologist who manages one of the 42 reparation programs across the Rio Doce Basin affected by the Fundão dam disaster in Mariana (Brazil, November 2015).
Renata is also a Red Cross volunteer and has had to face the horrors of the Brumadinho dam collapse, an even more deadly mining disaster that happened just a few days before the start of our journey in January 2019. She flew to São Paulo for our workshops and said she had stumbled upon the butterflies of our “Open Innovation Call” online and was coming to meet us, searching for hope.
Moving Down the Iceberg, From Symptoms to Source
Mariana, a historical city in the heart of Minas Gerais, was founded at the end of the 17th century with the discovery of gold. Its economy had been based on mining throughout the last three centuries until November 2015. The Fundão dam, owned by Samarco, Vale and BHP Billiton, burst and released millions of tons of iron ore waste and mud into Rio Doce, the most important river in the region.
Considered the worst environmental disaster in Brazil’s history, it destroyed entire villages and caused widespread environmental damage across 670 kms, spreading to the Atlantic Ocean. The mining disasters in Minas Gerais are very painful portraits of humanity’s converging crises (visible events on figure 1). The Iceberg Model, presented by the Presencing Institute, supports us with observing and addressing the root causes that re-enact our self-destructive behaviours.
Through Cambia Festival’s 3D Mapping we saw how money is a widespread structure driving our patterns of living. Our uncontrolled consumption/extraction system accumulates waste, depletes natural resources and provokes a series of devastating and unintended chain reactions. We need to shift the mindset of infinite growth on a finite planet, an outdated paradigm of thought pushing us beyond planetary boundaries and endangering our life-sustaining systems. Our societal/ecological emergency calls for an adaptation.
A new way of thinking that emerged in many scientific fields during the 20th century is the complex systems perspective. This lens understands the Earth as a self-regulating living system, interacting through a network of relationships and helping to create the conditions for life to thrive. In this worldview we are all interconnected and awakened to our own role in either causing harm to the web of life or in contributing to a planet that is more vibrant and alive.
Exploring the Future by Doing with Key Partners
The recent mining disasters were worrying signs of the urgent need to transform society and Cambia Mariana was the vision that drove Renata Carvalho to join Cambia Festival’s u.lab-2x journey. Our team was eager to support her in materialising her dream.
Besides being a core member of Cambia Festival, Renata is a Renova Foundation employee. This institution is responsible for managing the restoration and reparation programs for the regions impacted by the Fundão dam collapse and is governed by over 70 federal/state institutions and environmental entities. These multi-billion dollar programs are funded by Samarco, Vale and BHP Billiton, the mining companies responsible for the disaster.
Renata had been working directly with the families who suffered losses in the region — mostly people who lived in the rural villages destroyed by the mud and were forced to resettle in the city of Mariana. Thousands of Mariana city residents also lost their mining jobs but did not receive any compensation, creating a divide between them and the displaced rural population who lost everything but received some financial aid. The social field in Mariana was damaged by feelings of separation, sadness, grief and anger.
For Renata, Cambia Festival could bring much needed integration between the different communities, the youth, Mariana residents and other key partners who could all play a role in the festival.
Building something meaningful together could satisfy people’s longing for connection, revive the cultural and artistic heritage Mariana had lost after the disaster and awaken new perspectives for the future.
During our first field trip to Mariana in April 2019, we facilitated a collective visioning exercise at Casa do Jardim, Renata’s main office. Paula (at the center of photo 1) was one of the very first people to know about the Fundão dam burst. She rode around the village of Bento Rodrigues on her famous motorcycle Berenice, shouting to and warning everyone that a tsunami of mud was coming. On that day she saved dozens of lives. On her right side is Julio, the city’s Secretary for Economic Development.
On that evening a very diverse group of close to 30 people shared their visions and aspirations for what they wanted from this transformative gift festival. Over the weekend, our team kept on spreading Cambia Mariana’s dream to different people and all the places we went. We visited one of the city’s most vulnerable neighbourhoods, Santo Antonio, where we formed new connections with the wonderful people from Espaço Prainha, a brand new cultural center that had been built by the local community.
The knot that Cambia helps to untie is this: there is abundance beyond money. Cambia can unleash a lot of creative power and ignite people into action. For this transformational three-day event, residents of Mariana wanted to shift the ongoing disaster narrative and bridge the social, spiritual and ecological divide. They self-organized to continue meeting and formed working groups.
A community enhancing celebration, “made by everyone and for everyone”, was just what Mariana needed. Building Cambia collectively would give them the chance to learn to be together for when they needed each other.
During Cambia Mariana we invited residents and visitors to rediscover “the treasures” of the city’s local culture, connect with its ancient stories, celebrate the beauty that already exists inside their communities and figure out how to meet their needs without destroying our planet.
The multiple converging crises of our times demand radically new ways of living, learning and being. Cam.bi.ar means to change, to (self-)transform. It also refers to the practice of giving and receiving. Cambia is a festival and brings with it the positive associations of a celebration.
Prototype #2: Treasures of Mariana (Aug 2019)
For our opening night the community wanted to sit around a bonfire and play music while the elders told stories to connect us with the legends of Mariana and its past generations. A rainy day led us to improvise and ask the city’s Secretary of Culture to use the public theatre instead. Our master of ceremonies, Wasington Reis, invited us all to the stage: “At Cambia Festival there are no spectators, we are all participants and co-creators of our own reality”.
Four years after the worst environmental disaster Brazil has ever seen, Cambia Mariana was a three-day social experiment in rebuilding communities with around 40 activities spread across 10 different public spaces. In the middle of Praça da Sé, the city’s historical center, we met for a communal breakfast. A group of elderly ladies hosted “Knitting and a Chat” by a sidewalk. A children’s orchestra came on a bus from the nearby rural communities to perform at Praça do Jardim.
One of the treasures we discovered in Mariana was Marlene, who recited the poems that she wrote when the mud left a trail of destruction throughout her village in a session at Casa do Jardim:
“Through this verse, I tell you a story. There was a small town in Mariana district. Where along with the mud, my dreams were buried. To better understand this story, the place I describe was called Paracatu. There, I saw everything grow. Amid simplicity, nothing was missing. Where humility reigned. So here begins all our anxiety. We left Paracatu and went to the city. It was a Thursday afternoon.We were warned that we had to leave in a hurry and abandon our houses. Within minutes all that mud would arrive. This was just the beginning of all our drama…”
Espaço Prainha, a brand new cultural center located in the neighbourhood of Santo Antonio was proudly inaugurated for Cambia Mariana. There was “Black Girls and Women Empowerment” hosted by the Black Pearls Project. Cambia’s official graffiti artist, Alex Romano, brought his unique way of changing and colouring the world to Mariana. At Cambia Festival, child’s play is taken seriously.
Mothers of (r)Existence was one of the gems discovered during Cambia Mariana. Teresa is a black woman, a mother, a nursing technician and has been welcoming of and supporting LGBTQI+ youth from Mariana — targets of aggression and abuse within their own homes. Their team answered questions about gender identity and connected us with the challenges of the LGBTQI+ community.
At Cambia Festival we celebrate our diversity. The present moment invite us to activate a higher level of consciousness and to realize that there are other realities besides our own. In Cambia, we dissolve the boundaries between different movements, ethnicities, social classes and generations.
The “Dance of the Feminicide” was a gift from Mateus, in solidarity with women victims of hate crimes and gender discrimination. This performance happened in the courtyard of a public school in Santo Antonio, Mariana’s district with the highest rates of feminicide. This moment brought emotions and tears to many of us who were blessed to be there:
At Cambia Festival we care deeply about the issues that create imbalances in our relationship with our planet and we are responsible for everything we produce, use and discard at all of our events. In Cambia Mariana the signage was made by the residents with whatever recycled material that they could find at home. And in every edition of Cambia we proved that it is possible to gather many people and generate zero waste during communal meals. Every participant brought their own cup, cutlery and “little pot”. Why not?
On a hilltop by Santo Antonio Chapel, Renata shared about her creative process when bringing life to her book/card-deck O Poder do Feminino (The Power of the Feminine) and facilitated a circle where everyone brought voice to their intimate feminine truths. On our last evening there was dancing and a bonfire counsel to close our festival that shared the “treasures” we had discovered in Mariana.
Societal Experiment #2 Debrief:
The longer duration of Cambia Mariana allowed for deeper levels of self-transformation, strengthened social bonds, new alliances and a few concrete plans of action.
Here are some of the participants’ reactions about Cambia Mariana:
At every edition, Cambia Festival participants unite and live for a special period in the world that we want to live in. A pocket of a society more aligned with human needs, with all life on Earth and our long term future.
In the next articles of this series we will conclude the story of Cambia Festival’s u.lab 2x experience in 2019, the seeds of transformation sprouting and where the future is emerging now.
Special Thanks
I want to thank Shiliu Wang for reviewing and commenting in this series of articles and the Presencing Institute team for welcoming me into the Field of the Future blog.
In deep gratitude to Renata Carvalho Koldewijn, Niels koldewijn, Espaço Prainha, Instituto Elos, Fundação Renova and the incredible: Team Cambia Mariana
Inspiration
Otto Scharmer (Theory U), Charles Einsenstein (Sacred Economics), Daniel Whal (Designing Regenerative Cultures), Frederic Laloux (Reinventing Organisations), Jon Croft (Dragon Dreaming), Harrison Owen (Open Space Technology), Claudio Miranda and Elem Coelho (Instituto Favela da Paz), Manish Jain (Shikshantar)
