Today marks one month since I arrived in Brazil. Quirks of scheduling and the Carnival holiday meant that, while the semester officially began on February 17th, we did not have our first class until March 3. The class meets once a week on Tuesdays for four hours. Dr. Lucinéa Marcelino Villela Ph.D., my intrepid faculty collaborator, is a Professor in the Human Sciences Department of the College of Arts, Architecture and Communication (FAAC) at the State University of São Paulo (UNESP) in Bauru, a smallish city in the interior of São Paulo State. Our class, “Communication for Radio, Television, and Internet,” focuses on translating and subtitling content into English. Dr. Villela’s research stems from her democratic impulse to “give voice” to all. While she works primarily with accessibility features, she is also invested in securing minority rights and engendering respect for others. My project, Palavras na Minha Boca (Words in My Mouth), is an effort to connect people to others with whom they disagree, to remind us that we are in this together. In doing this, we can begin to rethink how freely we currently use divisive language and incendiary rhetoric and relearn how to consider each other again. I believe that people can have an exchange where they don't try to change each other's minds, but instead express their opinions and feelings and still leave feeling respected. I also believe that by collaborating to do something creative, participants will have fun and engage with each other in a way that goes beyond focusing on differences.

I developed my project proposal after reading this article by Ernesto Londoño in the New York Times about an exhibition called, QueerMuseu (Queer Museum). It was briefly shown at Santander Bank’s cultural center in Porto Allegre before being shut down by protests. It re-opened in an art school in Rio de Janeiro the following year. According to the article, people were entrenched in binary reactions for or against the exhibition, mirroring the polarization of attitudes we see in the U.S.A. Seeing these similarities between our two countries is the underlying thesis of my most recent blog posts. The goals of the project are to:

Create a safe space for the exchange of ideas
Promote understanding and respect of different beliefs
Gain insight into our own perspectives
Record audio of one-on-one dialogues with volunteer participants from the community
Collaborate to make a narrative photograph or short experimental video based on a moment from this dialogue
Build a sense of community, collaboration, and shared pride by displaying the resulting works in a public exhibition

So far we’ve been in the classroom only two times, and I’m impressed by how quickly and skillfully we are moving to implement the project. The thing that might derail us now is the coronavirus pandemic. The project requires in-person, facilitated dialogues, so if we find ourselves in a situation where we are holding courses online and quarantining whole cities, I’m not sure what we will do. Hopefully I will be allowed to wait it out and resume after the risk of contagion has passed. I worry about the health of my octogenarian parents in North America, and I hope we all will have jobs to which we can return once the hospital curtains are lifted. But, enough of that.

Our eager students have tackled challenging reading and listening exercises -- in English -- and devised a framework for the dialogue process in Portuguese. We co-created a Contract-cum-Model-Release Form. It includes the Rules of Engagement to which all volunteer participants must assent. The students have also worked with me to generate an Instruction Sheet for Dialogue Facilitators which includes a list of open-ended questions to guide the process. Collaboratively, we’ve generated a Likert scale Questionnaire to help us determine how far to the Left or Right our volunteer participants may be, so we can pair them appropriately. The goal is to create space for people on opposite sides of the political spectrum to have a civil dialogue, and also to help them identify commonalities in each other so they can talk openly without feeling like they have to defend their humanity. If this sounds a little like StoryCorps One Small Step Initiative, then you’re not far off. While I was not aware of One Small Step when I submitted my proposal to the Fulbright Foundation in 2018, I now find that the StoryCorps process and goals mirror my own. It’s been a helpful resource. Thanks, NPR. The dialogues, which will take place between strangers, will be recorded, and we will extract a 30-60 second section for further use. These audio file snippets will become the primary source material in our image-brainstorming-sessions with volunteers. In my role as photographer I will guide participants, encouraging them to emote, pose, play, dream, and make some magic. We will then use the recordings as soundtracks in our short, experimental videos, or to generate wall text for photographs. The students will subtitle the videos in English. Of course, we need to start by recruiting volunteers to participate in the dialogues, and the recruiting and information sessions are scheduled for the end of this month.

Last November, when I explained this process to Megan Hageman at Prizm Magazine, I said,

“Words are typically thought of as our primary signifiers, but before we learn to speak and read, we see and understand that images can be symbolic and stand for other things. With photographs, even in the age of Photoshop, there’s an assumption that what you see was once a real thing in front of the camera’s lens. Photography is indexical, it records what the camera sees, and that accuracy can be creatively used in a storytelling capacity to imagine how things could be.”

I’m hoping the volunteers who dialogue with us on the project will come to have a personal stake in it, regardless of their political stances specifically, or their feelings about LGBTQ+ rights, generally. All the people who participate will be credited as co-creators. I’m hoping the practice of collaboration will lead to more cooperation and mutual respect across social and political divides. To quote my friend, Boston-based video-installation artist, Allison Maria Rodriguez:

“I see the role of the artist as that of a cultural worker, with a responsibility to effect positive social change and create meaningful human interactions... For me, it’s another way to connect and collaborate with people, to share ideas. It’s a kind of community organizing, and offers the power to heal.”

Amen to that, Allison!