Assembly for Culture & Education for
Transformation (CET) is the still ripening fruit of
a world forum and 3 meetings held during the
WSF 2010 year of global actions. This process
generated 10 orientating considerations (below)
for debate at the WSF 2011.
This CET assembly was launched through a
creative postcard (above) for the WSF Opening
which affirmed the need for a sustainable Pan-
Amazonia. In spite of the grave disorganization
caused by the logistical collapse in the Forum,
this was followed by workshop on arts for
transformation with 20 students from the
Department of Pedagogy at the Dioup University
of Senegal; a theatre intervention by young arts
educators from Burkina Faso to an audience of
300; a forum on the aesthetic of the WSF (its
political culture, organization and understanding
of culture and the arts) and the challenges faced
by teachers and arts educators within schools and
universities; a virtual dialogue in Brazil as part of
the Extended WSF; and a workshop on cultural
rights. Regrettably, due to the logistical collapse
of the Forum, it was not possible to integrate the
participants of this final workshop or the results of
the Alternative Media program and the Pan-
Amazonian Social Forum program into the 2nd
Assembly process and outcome.
The 2011 Assembly affirms the following overview
as a context for 09 specific actions for 2011-2012
(oriented by the 2010 Considerations) for local,
national and regional organizations working with
CET in the WSF process:
During the last decade, Culture has been
increasingly recognized as the motivating force
that generates and mediates personal and
collective transformation, and new politics and
practices. Culture is no longer seen as the effects
of economically-determined class struggle, but as
the fertile soil on the thresholds between human
identity and language, memory and self-esteem,
historical vision and imagination, geography and
genetics, and utopia and methodology, in their
diverse manifestations. It is the fear and laughter
caused by paradigm shifts, the painful desire and
daring praxis of making the new, together. The
vital thread that links ethics, aesthetics and an
economics based on solidarity.
During the last decade too, the WSF has been
attempting to transform politics of resistance into
new political cultures of transformation, to create
‘another possible world’. However, despite the
commitment to an experimental process to invent
an open participatory space of convergence, in
practice, the Forum still suffers from an aesthetic
of ideological declaration rather than dialogic
collaboration. This challenges us all – parents,
educators, artists, activists and politicians who
know that now is the time – to rethink politics in
terms of culture and pedagogy. And it challenges
us to free the transformative and pedagogical
power of the human languages of music, image,
gesture, voice, dance and theatre to cultivate new
methods, collaborations, economies, ethics, and
dialogical spaces: a new aesthetic of sustainable
transformation.
Specific Actions for 2011-2012 towards the WSF 2013:
1. Construct a Bridging Platform of CET in every
continent which researches and nurtures practices
of social transformation through the arts and arts-
based pedagogies, to inspire relevant sustainable
public policy;
See: http://plataformapuente.blogspot.com/
2. Organize the creation of a Commission of
Culture inside the International Council of the
WSF to broaden the understanding and
integration of culture as dialogic, participatory and
transformative methodology in the territory and
entire process of the WSF;
3. Organize cultural exchanges (workshops,
courses and artistic and craft products), between
developing countries, before during and after the
WSF, as a practice of solidarity-based economy;
4. Guarantee the visibility and centrality of artistic
manifestations and of the cultures of traditional
communities of the country and region that hosts
the WSF, incorporating them as living experiences
into the methodology of the Forum;
5. Involve local cultural networks and community
artists in the programme of the WSF to reach local
schools, youth, children and teachers in their
artistic-cultural manifestations, to avoid limiting
participation to a few artistic groups and arts
audiences in a parallel or separate evening cultural
programme;
6. Take care that the paradigm of arts for
transformation within the WSF process advances
interdisciplinary into trans-disciplinary praxis,
starting from the rooms in our homes and reaching
classrooms, boardrooms and finally gardens so
that we can cultivate our seeds and roots and
encounter what nourishes and sustains us, on real
and symbolic levels;.
7. Take care that the knowledges and wisdoms of
our popular educators be recognised and present
in the WSF through how they sing, dance, touch,
tell stories, make poetry, body-paint, make craft-
work, speak and pronounce, practice herbs, play
and make community as forms of communication,
in dialogue with the new technologies of
communication;
8. Contribute to the methodology of the 2013 WSF
as a demonstration of a new paradigm of
‘formation’ and capacitating of artists, popular and
formal educators, and experts/professionals in all
areas of civil society;
9. Organize a World Thematic Forum of CET in
2012 through a series of relevant meetings to fulfil
these objectives.
Orientating considerations
1. Artistic languages as languages of sustainable social transformation
Take care to redefine and democratize the arts as languages of all learning and the
collaborative production of knowledges; they nurture our multiple human intelligences,
the collective development of practices that cultivate dialogical and ethical solidarity, to
make possible praxes of cooperation and sustainable transformation, pedagogies of
decolonization, inter- and transcultural projects, to create sustainable communities.
2. Intimate-dialogic aesthetics
Take care when designing the scale and architecture of meetings and projects
continuously to make possible intimate and circular forms of communication; they
guarantee the exchange of knowledges, the democratic meeting between languages
and cultures, and the participatory creation of community.
3. Arts of intercultural and transcultural mediation
Take care continuously to build dialogic bridges
between the current paradigm of competition and
the emerging paradigm of cooperation; they are
needed between social classes, generations,
genders, races, all individuals, their roots and
antennas, and benefit from artistic and cultural
expression that reveals visceral memory and
motivates creative future communities, making the
unknown viable.
4. Collective sustainable production
Take care to develop transformative praxes based
on dialogic, creative and collective cultural
production; these understand culture as a process
of creation and sustainable transformation, based
on the paradigm of cooperation, and cultural
production as the process which sustains the
identity, sovereignty and history of a people.
5. Youth leadership
Take care to educate young people to be able to
creatively express their own perspectives through
a paradigm of education based on the artistic
languages, sustainable technological development
and collaborative production. This process should
be guided by an ethic of co-responsibility, reflexive
solidarity, intergenerational pedagogy of example
and an aesthetic of experimental, dialogic and
cooperative intervention.
6. Traditional cultures & transformative pedagogies
Take care to promote integrative, visceral and
reflexive transformation through traditional cultures
and popular education, to affirm human values and
the guiding principles of community life, reflexive
solidarity-based practice, respect for diversity of
knowledges, cultures and worldviews.
7. Infant aesthetics
Take care to ensure that schools and children’s spaces transform themselves into
pedagogical zones and meeting places of playful encounter with knowledge and
significant learning of social interaction, which foster holistic development
.
8. Memory and self-determination
Take care to protect the rights of all peoples who suffer and suffered conflict to
remember and to transform this living memory into popular, political and institutional
cultures of social justice, equal rights and self-determination.
9. Transdisciplinarity
Take care to integrate the territories, knowledges,
cultures and subjectivities which lie between
disciplines and beyond any specific discipline in
the pedagogical development of the praxis and
discourse of politics, in the search to understand
the world as it is, to transform it through dialogues
between knowledges and unity in diversity.
10. Transformative inclusion
Take care to recognise and value the thresholds between scientific and popular
knowledges, to guarantee the inclusion of all, particularly those who are invisible or
invisibilized in socio-cultural-political activism, like youth alienated from organised
political movements, traditional and native peoples excluded within their own
communities, housewives and children.
Participating organizations/networks:
Brazilian Network of Arteducators
Transformance Institute of Culture & Education
Axis of Culture, Communication & Popular
Education, Pan-Amazonian Social Forum
Aesthetic Interactions Network, Program of Art,
Culture & Citizenship – Cultura Viva, Brazil
Points of Culture, Pará, Brazil
Trade Union of Federal University Teachers of
Belo Horizonte and Montes Claros, Brazil
Latin-American Network of Community Theatre
Bridge Platform for a Latin American Policy of
Community-based Living Culture, Latin-
American Network of Art and Social
Transformation
World Network of Artists
Polis Institute, Brazil
Ashtar Theatre, Palestine
Participating Organizations from the World
Forum of Culture and Education for
Transformations 2009 e 2010