Going to Places of Most Potential
Part 2 — Cambia Festival in a Societal Transformation Journey
This is the second 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
The first method introduced by the Presencing Institute during u.lab 2x— Societal Transformation Lab is 3D Mapping, a fascinating tool that can bring to light the underlying forces shaping a system you would like to change. The tool also illuminates the first and most critical elements that can shift the system to a higher future possibility.
For team Cambia Festival, our 3D exercise revealed how overcoming violence (represented by a black snake on figure 1) was a key structural element that could allow us to transition to a more desirable society and open up more possibilities for the future. I learned with Otto Scharmer that to change systems and move people to compassionate action, system thinking is not enough. One also needs to “sense” the system.
Sensing Journey #1 — Gift, Samba & Magic (Mar 2019)
From the new layers of perception gained through our 3D workshop, our team was drawn to visit the slums of São Paulo, home to a growing number of pioneering grassroots movements reinventing their realities. A sensing journey is a Theory U tool that allows us to break through patterns of seeing and listening by stepping into an unfamiliar and relevant experience while keeping ourselves curious and completely open to perceive reality through the lens of different stakeholders and gain a systems perspective.
On Sunday, 10th of March 2019, team Cambia Festival went on a full day immersion plus samba night sensing journey and had the opportunity to meet the extraordinary people behind Instituto Favela da Paz. We wanted to sense what they had been doing in Jardim Nakamura, South of São Paulo, once considered the most violent place in the world (UNESCO 90s).
Born into this violent social context, Claudio and Fabio Miranda, the two brothers behind Instituto Favela da Paz, told us how deeply grateful they are to their father. Raised with unconditional parental support, the two brothers were empowered to be whoever they wanted, as long as they were also good to others. Soon they discovered their love for music. From a very young age, they made instruments out of tin cans found in the trash. The education, love and freedom they were given guided them to become their highest future potential.
Our team spent most of the day listening to Claudio’s tales and beautiful ways of wondering and living. He told us about how life in community provided them with the ideal training ground for their everyday self-improvement. Today, seven families live and work at Instituto Favela da Paz and they all share the same bank account. In his view the Institute exists to provoke reflection about our internal values:
“There is no individual evolution. We need to elevate the collective consciousness.” (Claudio Miranda)
Their unique ways of living in community has attracted global interest. Claudio told us about this invisible network of people living a “new energy”. The Tamera Peace Research & Education Centre and the Defend the Sacred Movement conduct research and support the work of Instituto Favela da Paz as “Healing Biotopes”, futuristic centers that model a new planetary culture. Our team was amazed by how innovative and resourceful they could be given their social and material context.
Fabio Miranda is a curious self-taught inventor. He creates all sorts of machines, biodigestors and other low cost functional inventions that can be understood and replicated by everyone. Fabio’s lab, the “Sustainable Periphery”, is located on the rooftop of their house, where most of the furniture and machine parts were collected in the streets. “Trash is not trash. It depends on what you do with it.” Jarvis is his own A.I. assistant, working offline to aid the automation of Fabio’s different systems. Besides his solar energy installations, a vertical organic garden and other fascinating innovations, Fabio teaches children to meditate and shared about the recent emergence of his Tai-Chi body movements and other newly discovered skills.
“Trash is not trash. It depends on what you do with it.”
Music is central to Instituto Favela da Paz. We were lucky to be there for “Samba na 2”, a samba community gathering organised on Sundays once a month. Their most powerful stories always involved music - a ukulele that saved Claudinho’s life from gunpoint, solving social needs, building safer environments in violent places, unleashing collective creativity, touching hearts of over 25.000 people in Palestine and other countless tales of societal transformation.
Our sensing journey allowed us to experience an inspiring culture of sharing, compassion and generosity. We met individuals carrying out meaningful acts of service in favour of life and others in their local community and we learned about the power of trust in nurturing human relationships. We witnessed what it is like to live in an environment with limited resources but filled with life. A bright place of constant learning, of spiritual development, recovering the sense of community, creativity and purpose of life amongst residents of the slums.
With Instituto Favela da Paz, we also learned that their projects exist not only to solve social needs but also to unite people. Since money is so scarce, they have to rely on each other. Building something together is the special ingredient that unites people and strengthens social bonds. We had a wonderful time with our new friends at Instituto Favela da Paz. The desire to build a Cambia Festival together emerged during this first encounter.
Building something together is the special ingredient that unites people and strengthens social bonds.
Sensing Journey #1.5 — Robot Investors & Time Perception (Mar 2019)
To sense the system from a different perspective I decided to visit BOVESPA, São Paulo’ stock exchange. I didn’t find a lively trading floor of people transacting. These days, the stock exchange is pretty much run by machines. Basically, humans could not keep up with the speed of processing, so robot investors came in and exponentially accelerated the number of transactions per second possible.
BOVESPA felt like an empty airport lounge: there was hardly anyone around. No excitement, no nervousness, just silence. I sensed how our capacity to feel and control our financial markets had become disconnected. I wanted to speak to someone and an employee introduced me to a Romanian expat who had been going there almost everyday for many years. We chatted. He shared how he is mainly vegan but he eats ants, which he describes as a rich source of protein. From what I can recall he is a physicist, who worked with Stephen Hawking at the Max Planck Institute.
He said he was really into numbers and was trying to learn everything about gravity, time and the laws and origins of the universe. I asked him why he went to the Stock Exchange everyday and he told me it was just a numbers thing, he wasn't planning to get rich. He told me what he really wanted in life was more time. He felt like he had none. I asked him why he needed more time and he said he still had a lot to learn. I remember thinking about how we can spend our entire lives searching for existential answers with our intellect and still feel like we know nothing…
4D Mapping — An unseen world (Apr 2019)
After sensing the system from different perspectives, we brought our team back together for our second u.lab 2x workshop, gathering all our observations to continue our journey. The Social Presencing Theater (SPT) is a Theory U practice developed by Arawana Hayashi, which allows us to explore what it looks and feels like from within by embodying the various roles of the system. 4D Mapping is an SPT exercise that makes visible the current reality in a social system and explores how its highest aspiration might arise from the wisdom of our own bodies.
Facilitated by the talented Daniela Ferraz, an advanced SPT practitioner in São Paulo, team Cambia Festival entered into a state of mindfulness of our bodies and awareness of the surrounding space. We then let the movement and shape that emerged give us new insights on how to shift the system from a sculpture of our collective body, or current reality, to another sculpture of our highest aspiration.
In this workshop, we noticed how Cambia Festival was the most dynamic player in this system. In a series of touches, the person embodying Cambia connected multiple stakeholders and, in the final shape resulted in standing, holding Media and Regenerative Culture, our highest future potential. We also recognized the role of Children in bringing union to the system. Our second sculpture excluded or only partially included important stakeholders — Government, Corporations, Wealth Accumulators and Closed People (individuals operating with a closed mind, heart, and will), highlighting the importance of paying more attention to these excluded players in our future prototypes.
Learning Journey#2 — Rethinking Education @Instituto Nova União da Arte (Apr 2019)
Team Cambia Festival went on a second learning journey with our friends from the Unidiversidade das Kebradas, an education and unlearning initiative that connects change agents from the different favelas to decolonize our minds. Gisele Paulino, one of the co-founders of the project, has been working closely with Manish Jain, a leading voice in the de-schooling and self-designed learning movement, working towards regenerating people’s diverse knowledge systems and our cultural imagination. Manish is from Rajasthan, India. He has been coming to Brazil and from what we heard, turning things upside down. Manish coordinates Shikshantar, the Peoples’ Institute for Rethinking Education and Development.
That day brought together an incredible group of people, all inspired by Manish’s visits. Everyone was committed to finding alternative solutions to our school systems. Our gathering took place at Instituto Nova União da Arte (NUA), São Miguel Paulista, East of São Paulo. Before starting NUA, Hermes de Souza spent 10 years in prison, where he had a moment of “revelation”. Once out, he started creating art under a bridge. Some youth were also hanging out there, doing drugs and asked if he needed help. Together they built the bricks and later the building where is today NUA’s “headquarters”. All six of those youth have since recovered from their drug addiction, some of them are married and have children of their own. Hermes de Souza is transforming lives by involving the youth in collaborative work.
The area where the community greenhouse/school is located was previously used as a dumping ground. Today that is where they grow their organic food. It is a place where dreams and happiness grow and is where we spent most of our day. We had a delicious meal and then spent our afternoon reflecting together on where to go next, discussing current challenges and new ideas.
We sat in a circle and everyone shared something about their own journey:
(1) “We are moving. I don’t know if we are going to change the whole planet, but our world will be different”
(2) “You meet people doing things and you just feel like you want to do stuff together”
(3) “We will only change if we build a new system. We don’t need to fight, we can build parallel systems”
(4) “Every community has its own power and the solutions to its problems”
(5) “In music that’s where everyone meets. Percussion is the beat of the community”
Cambia Festival’s journeys in the favelas taught us about compassion, creativity and collaboration. Every project starts with a community need. The knowledge to make it happen is already there. Hermes de Souza and the crew from Instituto Favela da Paz showed us how societal transformation can happen, by building things collectively, with minimal resources while having fun and honoring local knowledge and talents.
In the next articles of this series we will continue to tell the story of Cambia Festival’s u.lab 2x journey, what happened in our prototypes for transforming society and where the future is emerging now.
I want to thank Celso Sekiguchi for connecting the dots and for the introduction to Instituto Favela da Paz, Shiliu Wang for the very careful review and helpful comments in this series of articles and the Presencing Institute team for the honour of joining the Field of the Future Blog.
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 & Elem Coelho (Instituto Favela da Paz), Manish Jain (Shikshantar)
