Participate in the global creative hug Viva Amazonia Viva!
The 5th Pan Amazonian Social Forum (PASF) will be held between 25-29 November 2010 in Santarém, Pará, northern Brazil, to inspire the peoples and governments of the nine countries of the Pan-Amazon region to embrace a free, protected and sustainable Amazon.
Since 2002, the Forum has been developing an open, pluralistic, non-governmental and non-partisan space, to stimulate debate, the formulation of proposals and coordinated dialogue between organizations and social movements to act locally and internationally to build a solidarity-based, democratic and just world. In this 5th edition, however, the Forum has acquired a greater and immediate global urgency given the Brazilian government plan to build ‘Belo Monte’, the third largest hydroelectric dam in the world, in 2011, in Altamira in Pará. Besides causing appalling cultural, social, economic and environmental problems, the construction and operation of the plant could contaminate the largest subterranean reservoir of drinking water in the world.
‘Belo Monte’ aims to divert water from 100km of the Xingu River, leaving indigenous peoples, river-dwellers, fishermen, miners and all who use the river without their principal means of transportation and livelihood. It would damage the lives of more than 340,000 inhabitants, including 24 ethnic groups from 30 indigenous lands, and flood an area of 668 km2, causing a scarcity of fish, deforestation, migration of non-Indians, land pressure, child prostitution, trafficking and drug addictions, and epidemics such as dengue and malaria.
In addition to this catastrophe, hydro-electric dams are planned on the rivers of Tapajós (Pará), Madeira (Rondônia) and Teles-Pires (Mato Grosso), increasing the total number of hydro-electric dams in the Amazon to over 300 in the next ten years. For this reason, we invite artists and art-educators from all corners of the globe to contribute a creative action to protect the world’s drinking water.
Your group can create an artistic action (or dedicate an existing one) about ‘Living Water’ to demonstrate your involvement in the quest for a sustainable, living planet. Present your theatrical, musical, visual arts, poetic or dance action inside a school, in the community, in the street, in your bedroom – anywhere, and then post a 2 minute fragment on YouTube, on 27 November, with the title: Viva Amazonia Viva!
Your group can also participate virtually on November 26 and November 28 between 2pm and 4pm (according to time in northern Brazil) in a dialogue on ‘culture and education for transformation’, about how the arts of music, image, drama, dance, video and literature (our human languages), can nurture pedagogies, ethics, cooperative economies and sustainable communities.
More information about this global creative hug and virtual dialogue is available via:
Dan Baron (Transformance/Brazilian Network of Arteducators – ABRA), Déa Melo (Manamani /ABRA) and Luana Vilutis (ABRA), via: vivamazoniaviva@gmail.com
Visit www.xinguvivo.org.br to learn about the Xingu Forever Alive Movement, the main coalition against ‘Belo Monte’.
Photo: Xingu Forever Alive Campaign in Altamira