FACILITATORS
MARIANA MOLINA
Borned in São Paulo, I come from a somewhat bewildered way of living and I only started to question this way of living and seeing the world when I first connected with the northern Brazilian culture. During my undergraduate studies in Psychology at Presbiterian University Mackenzie, I’ve participated in a project for the strengthening and recognition of Manacapuru’s riverine community culture, located in Amazonas. The project resulted in a booklet with residents’ life stories. My first time in Rondonia was in 2017, through NAPRA, when I worked on the development of projects with residents of Nazaré, a riverside community in Madeira River. In 2019, I met Elizeu Braga and was delighted with his poetry. At that time, he invited Thais and I to collaborate in some of his projects at Casa de Cultura Arigóca, a cultural center in Porto Velho that is organized by him. In march of the same year, we moved to Porto Velho to start this new phase.
This path has led me to look at the place I occupy in the world with more responsibility and to value the past history in the process of understanding the present. That said, I see the process of attentively listening to these and other stories as a political as well as poetic action that delights me not only by realizing the emotion embedded in the sound of their voices, but also the sound of the silence and how the narrator moves while telling their life experiences like they were dancing with their memories. Telling a life story is like an invitation to their most intimate emotions. In these meetings I have learned to enter the place barefoot and without my wristwatch.
THAÍS ESPINOSA
In 2015, I had my first opportunity to visit Rondonia. Through a research project conducted at that time at FGV- SP (Getulio Vargas Foundation), we studied an agroforestry cooperative (RECA) near the state of Acre. In the same year, I visited Lago do Cuniã and connected with the power of the Madeira River’s water. In Rondonia, there is an old saying that “the person who drinks this water, someday will return”. And it was exactly like that... In the following two years, I’ve returned to Porto Velho as a member of NAPRA, aiming to work in some riverine communities in the lower Madeira River course.
I drank so much water from that river that in 2019 I moved to Rondonia with a friend, who became a sister and collaborator in this project. Through the news agency Amazônia Real, I had the opportunity and challenge to report the situation of students from the riverside communities who spent more than 9 months without classes (link to the report): and also about the fires in the Amazon forest and their impacts in Rondonia from the perspective of the residents, who suffer the most and deal with this recurrent threat (link to the report).
Where boats cross the river I've heard many stories, being difficult to put into words the essence and particularity of each one. Some of them, I am still in the process of assimilation. Organizing this material has been a way of re-accessing some of these meetings. Reading the story of a resident, (re)listening to their memories, looking at the photographs, even if it does not replace the presence of being together, it at least approximates to the feeling that I had when I listened to their stories for the first time. Here, we invite you to enjoy with us some of these encounters.
* Casa de Cultura Arigóca is a cultural space for memory and poetic practices. Founded by the local poet Elizeu Braga, Arigóca runs through a collective effort, promoting actions of integration and cultural incentives, such as poetic soirees, book production workshops, among others.
* NAPRA - Núcleo de Apoio a População Ribeirinha da Amazônia- (An organization that gives support to Riverine people from Amazon.
