Tackling Violence Through Music
Part 3 — Cambia Festival in a Societal Transformation Journey
This is the third of a series of five articles recounting the story of team 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
For almost 30 years, Instituto Favela da Paz has been blazing a trail for societal transformation, using music as the main tool. This gifted team is constantly creating and implementing a series of initiatives related to art, vegetarian gastronomy, urban permaculture, community development and spirituality to transform the neighborhood where they live, Jardim Nakamura, South of São Paulo, considered in the 90s as the most violent region in the world by the UN.
Cambia Festival’s u.lab 2x journey began to shift once we left the workshop space. In our first sensing journey to Instituto Favela da Paz, it came to my awareness that what we wanted to achieve as a festival was very similar to how their team was already living their daily lives. Our experience there allowed us to sense the system at its margins and form new connections. They taught us the meaning of "sacred activism" — a transforming force of compassion-in-action for regenerating communities and systemic change with wise radical action in the world.
I reconnected with Claudio Miranda, musician and co-founder of Instituto Favela da Paz and over a phone call, he confirmed his desire to build a Cambia Festival in his own neighbourhood. Making a festival without involving money was nothing new to them. Everything they did was with limited material resources, in service of their community and always with the goal of elevating collective consciousness. Something about our deepest sources of knowing connected us and started to move both of our teams into action. Claudio trusted us:
“I don’t enter from the side of fear. This does not exist for me. It will work. It will work and to make it work you need relationships. That is the main point: relationships. When you take care of relationships, things will happen.”
On a Saturday in April 2019, our team joined the family of Instituto Favela da Paz once again. Alongside visitors and residents of Jardim Nakamura we gathered in a circle to dream collectively about what we all wanted from this transformational festival.
Crystallizing Vision and Mobilizing Networks
A unique festival to transform the way we see the world. Dreamed by the community of Jardim Nakamura and visitors from other places. A day for us to discover “how can we, as individuals or as a community, help contribute to a sustainable society and the dissemination of a culture of peace.”
Escola Oscar Pereira Machado is a public school, located just a few meters down the road from Instituto Favela da Paz. It was an ideal location to host our festival and was accessible to the local community. Once the date and venue were chosen, we created an event on facebook and started mobilizing our networks to sign up and share their gifts in our festival.
Cambia is a self-organized festival for societal transformation that depends entirely on people’s generosity and willingness to share and learn from one another. There was no spreadsheet that tracked our costs. We need to rapidly redefine our impact on our planet and so we only use the resources we already have access to or could borrow from others in case we needed something we didn’t own. The festival would be simple in material terms but the magic would happen in the immaterial.
At Cambia Favela da Paz we wanted to discover the wealth that already exists in our communities, be inspired by freer ways to learn and create, discover initiatives that transform lives and communities, experience an environment where there are more important currencies than money, and visualize new systems where success is measured by the well-being of people and nature. On that day we wanted to raise the level of collective consciousness and leave a legacy that could transform Jardim Nakamura in a lasting way.
Many of the activities and events we participate in today ask us to do little more than consume. Cambia Festival is a space free of financial transactions, meaning there would not be food stands or the sale of products or services. For Cambia Favela da Paz, participants were asked to bring a vegetarian contribution so we could share a meal together. Organic waste would later be disposed of at the Institute’s biodigester, which feeds their kitchen with biogas. Participants were also asked to bring their own cups to minimize the waste that would end up in a landfill.
At Cambia we invite people to experiment in a space where they co-create their own reality, experience life in a gift community and for one day, practice what it is like to live zero waste.
Prototype #1 — Cambia Favela da Paz (23 June 2019)
There was a lot of adrenaline in the lead up to the event, but the forces of nature were on our side and on a bright sunny Sunday in June 2019, around 500 people and 50 self-organized activities came together in this regenerative gift festival. Cambia Favela da Paz united people across generations and from all regions of the city. There were economists, politicians, artists, change makers, families from Jardim Nakamura and from other favelas. It was a point of evolution and family conviviality. A place where everyone played a role in service of a collective vision.
Group Check-In
One Billion Rising is an international movement that unites people around the world to stand up and dance to end violence against women. It was the first time that this dance took place in Brazil and was a powerful way to shift the social field during our check-in and boost the energy to start our stunning day together. I feel gratitude for the wonderful Elem, Claudio Miranda’s wife who dreamt and taught us how to move with joy, and for everyone who danced with us and proved that there are many of us committed to resisting and ending violence in all of its forms.
Schedule for the Day
Inspired by an unconference format, at Cambia Favela da Paz we started our day with a blank time table. Participants could choose the time and place to offer their activities. Pre-registration was encouraged, but not required. Everything in the favela is more spontaneous and analog, so we had to let go of sign-up forms, trust their favela processes and let Cambia unfold in its chaordic manner.
The courtyard of Escola Pereira Machado was the center stage for a beautiful performance of three dance groups who came from different regions of the city, including Instituto Movimentarte and Projeto Irmãos, working with the youth with down syndrome to develop their creativity, self-image, motor skills, expression and autonomy. They showed us how societal transformation takes place: by uniting different movements in a thrilling spectacle, dissolving social boundaries and celebrating our diversity.
In an interactive talk led by Debora Degenszejn, a diverse group of people gathered inside a classroom to talk about “Love, Happiness and Spirituality”. It was such a joy to see children, teenagers and entire families learning about these topics together, inside a classroom on a sunny Sunday. This really happened inside a public school at Jardim Nakamura.
Planting our own food is a wonderful way to cultivate our connection to nature. At Ale Nahra’s workshop, everyone learned how to make mini vegetable gardens, which can be implemented in boxes or anywhere.
Art, joy and a lot of color was brought to our day by Cambia’s official graffiti artist and art-educator, Alex Romano. This mural, co-created by many hands, symbolises the collaboration and unity by all who who contributed to the making of our gorgeous festival.
The tour with José Bueno from “Rios e Ruas” (Rivers and Streets) helped us perceive the water mine located in front of Instituto Favela da Paz as a true sanctuary and awakened people’s desire to see our rivers clean, uncovered and flowing back to our city.
The percussion workshop brought the Pequeninos da 2 (The Little ones from 2nd St) and children from other neighbourhoods together to play music, exploring different rhythms and diversity of the beats. Another treasure offered by the Pequeninos da 2 was the theater play “It’s Time!”, honouring the theme of our festival: love and the culture of peace.
Social educator and designer-activist Roger Beat Jesus stimulated the imagination of many children and entire families in the art of creating fanzines. A group of elderly women from a nearby region called “Grupo Flor de Liz” enchanted us with a moment of singing, swirling and celebration of the Brazilian popular culture.
At the closure of Cambia Favela da Paz we moved into the garage of Instituto Favela da Paz for an emotional and unforgettable samba circle, their favourite tool for societal transformation. With:
Jônatas Petróleo (TRÍADE CPF)
Caio Prado (TRÍADE CPF e Samba da Vela)
Eneas Juninho (Samba da Praça Grajaú)
Tombinho (Resenha de Batuqueiros)
Herbert Nogueira (Resenha de Batuqueiros)
Negro Bira
Samanta Santos
Erick (Bloco do Beco)
Kandengo (Oficina do Samba)
Raul Ribeiro Pbssoul (Preto Branco Samba Soul)
Claudinho Miranda Pss (Poesia Samba Soul)
Societal Experiment Debrief
Our partnership with Instituto Favela da Paz has been a rich unlearning opportunity for our team, opening up new possibilities for us to see the world. We had the chance to cultivate skills like trust, compassion, flexibility and improvisation. Without attachments, nothing is lacking. I learned from both local parents and families who brought their children to our festival about how important it was for them to discover diversity at a young age in such a loving way.
We learned that at the scale of the local community, societal transformation can happen through cooperative action and minimal material resources. All we need is human relationships and creativity.
And here is the feedback* we gathered from our friends at Instituto Favela da Paz about Cambia Festival:
Paulinho Torres: “We took people out of the system for a period of time. For the community to see that everything is already there, that a new world is possible”
Rafael Poesia: “This could be the future of the school. Uniting people to contribute and learn from one another. Making Cambia happen was our role, the gift people received is not ours anymore”
Elem Coelho: “I believe the question of value happens when you build something together, you know? I think this was very strong. It’s not a value you can measure. It’s not the price. It is the value of building something, of building together, in favor of nature, in favor of others. I think this was the greatest value created by Cambia”
Claudio Miranda: “Consciousness is not something you can see. Because you gain it and then you continue to live and learn more about it. What we lived will change the way we see and act in the world. The essence of Cambia is rebuilding family, is regeneration. How much love we can feel with so many people at the same time! If this was already incredible, imagine what we could do together in 5 years from now”
*Insights gathered by team member Fernanda Haskel, from her Research Master Thesis about the perceived value of co-creation for beneficiaries of socio-cultural programs, using Cambia Festival as the object of study.
In the next articles of this series we will continue to tell the story of Cambia Festival, what happened in our second u.lab 2x prototype in a disaster zone and where the future is emerging now.
Special Thanks
I want to thank Shiliu Wang for her dedication and comments in this series of articles, the Presencing Institute Team for the honor of joining the Field of the Future Blog and the amazing Cambia Team u.lab-2x.
With sincere gratitute to Claudinho, Elem, Sr. Gerson, Dona Eli, Fabio, Paulinho, Paty, Rafa, Ágata, Pikeno, Deia, Pequeninos da 2 & the community of Jardim Nakamura.
To support the vulnerable community of Jardim Nakamura and the musicians of Cambia Favela da Paz amidst the Covid-19 crisis donate here.
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)
