CAPS is the Art and Social Promotion Center.
Today, we all call this institution an NGO,
a nongovernmental institution,
and it is the door breach that is open to defend and embrace
people, artists, who are unkown and anonymous.
We are in the far south of São Paulo’s capital,
a district 18 miles away from the city.
And I’ll tell you how it all started.
Grajaú used to be a district that needed many things,
among which the lack of day-care was a big one,
because mothers needed to work
and they had no one to trust their kids.
I used to have a background house and I began to think of maybe
taking in some kids to play with mine while their moms went to work.
But the house was quite precarious.
So I invited a builder to budget the work, which was too expensive.
We split the cost.
I did the first part of the house, which was removing the plaster,
and the builder did the rest.
So the house got beautiful, and the kids’ recreation started.
Very well. Here we have our artists’ meetings. Why?
Because through the experience with kids, we got to know their mothers,
and we found a lot of artisans among the mothers.
So I invited the artisans for a meeting,
which gave birth to a desire of creating
a community artcraft workshop.
So we did that, and then, we kept thinking what we could do with the products.
So we thought of a craftwork fair.
As we worked to produce the fair,
to display those mothers’ art,
we thought of a stage for this fair,
so we began to look for artists, poets, singers,
and we found so many of them.
Then, we began to think about starting an art center,
because Grajaú needed an art center.
So we worked for the fair, and simultaneously,
we worked to establish the Art and Social Promotion Center.
That is a meeting where we –
that is a picture showing people thinking about the statute.
So we did this job,
we created the art center.
Once the art center was created, artists got organized
and created a poets’ nucleus.
And this poets’ nucleus created an event
called Poets Special, by then,
which honored totally anonymous poets, like all of us were.
Once a month, one of us was special,
and all the others would just read and sang our lyrics.
The Poets Special and many other events
were addressed
by virtue of Grajaú being a dorm suburb.
People worked outside all day
and came home only at night just to sleep,
and on the weekend they would be confined in their houses,
totally beleaguered.
That annoyed us a lot,
but we also realized
that people were happy during political campaign seasons,
because candidates would bring sound trucks to the streets,
and that made them happy.
So, we, as artists, from the Art and Social Promotion Center,
articulated and thought of an event that was similar
to the ones of political campaigns,
but without any political or partisan connotation.
We thought and created the Poetic Procession,
whose goal is to promote art
and to honor its artists.
This procession has happened once a year to this day,
but we didn’t create the procession by ourselves,
we invited all collectives of the district to plan,
to think and produce it
and on the big day, to launch the Poetic Procession,
that has a route,
and at a certain point we stop and follow the procession,
and we always honor someone with a special meaning to us.
So, the Poetic Procession
aims to honor
people who make art,
who promote culture,
who echo our subjectivity.
So, the artists organized and created MOCAP,
Movement for Artistic Citizenship of Suburbs.
Why was MOCAP born?
It was born because we realized that artists,
despite making art with great talent,
and great diligence,
they didn’t know the origin
of what they were making.
So, we felt they needed to know…
Artisans should know the origin of how all that started,
that poets should know
the literary movements that existed;
the guitar player would understand
how all that started somewhere in space.
So we created the MOCAP,
Movement for Artistic Citizenship of Suburbs.
The Art and Social Promotion Center
also created the Cultural Forum of Grajaú,
and just as we meet to plan the procession,
we created the Forum with the same goal.
But the Forum has a bigger aim, besides gathering people
so they can interact, so they will know each other,
they also gather up to debate about the district
and fight to improve it.
There is CAPS’ anniversary, which we celebrate once a year,
with the same objective
of getting people together,
so they know each other’s anxieties,
and they can exchange ideas and build a better world together.
MOCAP, Movement for Artistic Citizenship of Suburbs,
created a project called Knowledge Construction Rounds.
These are reunions of people of all ages,
and all academic levels,
to discuss a certain theme.
We have two rounds once a week.
So we have eight knowledge rounds.
The first one we created was the Philosophical Café,
followed by Philosophical Dripping, Law and Citizenship,
Poetry, Shared Life, Art, the History of Women in Brazil,
Psychopedagogy.
That way, people have
more opportunities to choose where they feel better,
what topic attracts them most.
But we see some people going to all rounds.
And what are the impacts on the community?
I will give you some examples.
Luan Siqueira is a 22-year-old boy,
self-taught in philosophy and literature, whose experience with CAPS
turned him into a cultural activist,
and today, he’s one of the mediators of our philosophy rounds.
Luiz Semblantes is also a poet,
who became a cultural activist from his experience at CAPS.
Today he’s the mediator and creator of ComVida Sarau,
and already has a CD on the market.
Ana Paula who is a housekeeper, and was already a poet,
when she got to CAPS, she had a chance to show us her poetry.
She had so much sadness,
because she used to show her poetry to her employers,
and they didn’t care,
they didn’t believe and doubted the lyrics were hers.
From her experience at CAPS,
she became a freer person, and she even published her poems.
She is a cultural activist today.
Márcio Ricardo is also a writer, and he already sang in the community.
From his meetings with Philosophical Café,
and the poetry rounds as well as other rounds,
he became a speaker, published books,
launched a CD.
And he has a very special work at CAPS,
as today he is a mediator of poetry rounds at CAPS,
and he has a project at public and private schools in the neighborhood,
taking poetry round to schools to engage students,
and by doing that he brings students to CAPS’ poetry rounds.
A spectacular work.
Vinícius Rossato, a shy 18-year-old boy, who arrived at CAPS –
I will tell you how he got to CAPS in a while, but I’ll say that –
at the writing studio, because we have one studio, I’ll talk about it in a bit.
He came with a book he had written,
and we have a policy at CAPS,
of just publishing authors who participate in the workshops,
but he came with his book done, a 17-year-old boy,
how could we tell him?
So, we brought his material and used it as educational material,
and he published a spectacular book for a 17-year-old.
Very well.
The writing workshop happens once a week,
alternating Saturdays and Sundays,
and is a job to foster text construction
through philosophy and literature.
And the way we started at CAPS,
by the end of 1989, beginning of 1990,
starting with artisan mothers,
we had to create a community office,
we created a fair to show their work,
and it was no different here.
It wasn’t different now.
We had to create a publishing label to be able to publish books
with the texts created at the writing workshops.
This publishing label’s goal is that people come,
sharpen their literature, and learn to format,
to illustrate, and learn about registering at the National Library,
at the Book Chamber, so they go to the print shop to participate,
to see the whole process, anyway,
to understand all about books.
Here is our publishings.
I was happy to launch the label,
because by the time we got to create this label for CAPS,
I was in the process of writing my book,
“Penteando a Vida,” my fourth one, and I was wondering –
I have a friend who owns a label, I published my third book with them,
I thought about publishing this one too.
But then we got the label, and I could publish this book
through crowdfunding.
It all worked out, we launched the Capsianos label, and I’m very happy,
“Escritos ao Extremo,” “Extreme Writings.”
It has this title
because we live in the far south of São Paulo,
and it was written at the top of our forces,
because we all work all week,
and these workshops happened on Sunday mornings,
and we sometimes stayed there all day long.
“Tudo é problema com o Bruno,” by Vinícius, that I told you about;
and “Filosofia escrita ao extremo,”
because here we had a philosophical job,
that is, we chose some topics and we debated on them.
We got to publish these three books because we got a sponsor.
To wrap up my talk here, I want to tell you
that culture and art can set us free.
Culture and art are the path to freedom.
I also must say that we can dream alone,
but in a community, we make it come true.
Thank you.
(Applause)
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