Since the first WSF in Porto Alegre, 2001, Social Fora
have aroused great interest from people working in areas we can loosely
define as ‘cultural’. There have also been since the beginning
many discussions at Social Fora on the role and the present condition
of ‘culture’ in our society; as well as cultural programmes
that have accompanied the events. If one reads the statements issued
by the culture working groups (or their equivalents) in different editions
including their different spaces (Youth Camps , autonomous spaces etc.)
it is easy to notice one common thread running throughout, quite often
stated in similar words: that culture must be at the heart of the event,
and must inform it as a whole, both in the discussions and the programme,
and the way it is organised – it must not be ‘the icing
on the cake’.
However, these texts also usually include evaluations
of previous efforts in organising the cultural side of such events,
and one can easily see another commonality here: they end up recognising
that the preceding attempt has to a certain extent failed, and say that
‘next time’ culture will not be ‘the icing on the
cake’. In other words, what we have is a diagnosis and an ideal
that remain the same, with an apparently also persistent gap between
the two that falls short of being closed.
Having taken part for two years of the culture working
groups of both the Youth Camp and the WSF, and also following the discussion
in relation to the Brazilian Social Forum , I have come to be annoyed
by this: too many grand statements on the ‘whats’ and ‘whys’
(some of which I have co-written myself!), and very little to be said
on the ‘hows’. It is to the achievements and shortcomings
of some of the ‘hows’ employed in 2003 that we shall turn,
after shortly presenting the organisational structure behind them.
In fact, in the first two editions of the WSF there
was very little discussion on how to integrate culture into the process
as a whole. The cultural programme was basically arranged by the Culture
Bureau of the Rio Grande do Sul state government, aided by the Culture
Bureau of the Porto Alegre local authority. It consisted of a few exhibitions
and film screenings spread around town (not in the space occupied by
the WSF, the main campus of the Catholic University), seminars and pleanries
on the subject, and most remarkably the concerts at the Por-do-Sol Amphitheatre,
near the Youth Camp, on the bank of Lake Guaiba. In 2002, as a matter
of fact, the organisation of the concerts was subcontracted out to an
events manager. The Brazilian Organising Committee (BOC) would only
have a culture working group after the 2002 edition, when one person
was hired to be responsible for the area and organise the group. It
worked closely with the Rio Grande do Sul Culture Bureau, which was
still in charge of most of the executive decisions – the BOC culture
working group, mostly composed by NGOs and a few local authorities,
was based in Sao Paulo, therefore having little contact with the reality
‘on the ground’ in Porto Alegre. This group subsisted ‘autonomously’
for a while after the WSF 2003, and became somewhat involved in organising
the Brazilian Social Forum. In the run up to Porto Alegre 2005, it was
(in theory) subsumed by an international BOC/ International Council
methodology working group; however, it has remained exclusively Brazilian
and largely unchanged in its composition.
The Youth Camp, on the other hand, has had a culture
working group since 2001, which has been essentially Porto Alegre-based
and suffered many changes in its composition, even though a few elements
have remained invariable: the hip hop, LGBT and student movements. In
2001, the cultural programme was restricted to a few workshops and a
small stage; in 2002, it included street theatre, a large stage, outdoor
film screenings, workshops (graffiti, zines etc.) and visits to MST
and MTD settlements.
During the preparations for 2003, both the Youth Camp
and the WSF working groups had already fallen into the pattern of diagnosis-negative
evaluation, and were again asking themselves the question of how to
bring culture centre stage. Their papers essentially covered the same
ground – the forum was a privileged space for cultural exchange
and creation; ‘culture’ should be understood not as art
or spectacle, but as the whole of symbolic and material production of
different societies; the commoditisation and homogenisation brought
about by capitalist globalisation were the main enemies to be practically
opposed; the cultural question was transversal to all discussions in
the forum. The Youth Camp project, inspired by the language of the Zapatistas,
spoke of a transnational ‘community’ of all the groups and
people who resisted and struggled, whose symbolic and material production
should be affirmed in their diversity.
These ideals were played out in different forms in
the main event and the Youth Camp. The former, besides keeping the big
concerts at Por-do-Sol and the exhibitions and film screenings (which
again took place in other spaces than were most of the activities took
place), introduced three new projects: Instantaneous Memory, Street
Dialogues, and the Live Museum of Diversity. The first was a space for
videomakers who were active at the WSF to log and edit the material
they were producing, while at the same time copies of it could be made
so as to be stored by the organisation of the event. The Street Dialogues
were events that took place in different public spaces in Porto Alegre
and tried to engage the local population – which to a great extent
did not take part in the WSF – in the debates that were happening,
while also tying them to artistic manifestations such as music and street
theatre, with the help of the Decentralisation Department of the Porto
Alegre Culture Bureau. The Live Museum of Diversity was a space for
exhibitions, workshops and collective on-the-spot productions, such
as a mural produced by the MST.
The Youth Camp enlarged its film programme, with a
film cycle that went on for ten days in all different formats (digital,
VHS, 8mm, 35mm) and had two stages of different sizes, appropriately
named ‘Another World’ and ‘Is Possible’ –
the latter, in keeping with the collective management proposal of the
camp, was supposed to be managed by the musicians themselves, who should
only show up to play and discuss and decide the programme. The street
theatre, cultural workshops and visits to MST and MTD settlements were
also maintained. Besides, the Youth Camp saw the First National Hip
Hop Encounter, out of which the Brazilian Organised Hip Hop Movement
emerged – and also produced many cultural interventions, such
as the graffiti in the warehouses where some of the WSF seminars were
taking place. The innovations were in the form of installations, performances
and ‘invisible theatre’; a library (set up with the help
of the Porto Alegre government Culture Bureau) where the campers could
read the latest newspapers from all over the world, and which also provided
space for visual arts’ exhibitions, video screenings and a meeting
point for story-tellers; the Cultural Barter Fair; the World Social
Soiree; and the production of the Flag of the Flags.
The first was inspired by experiences in solidarity
economy that were taking place at the time in Rio Grande do Sul and
especially neighbouring Argentina, were an expressive movement of barter
trade networks had appeared after the 2001-2002 crisis. At the Cultural
Barter Fair, the participants could exchange both goods (either characteristic
objects they had brought from their countries or things like t-shirts,
crafts, cds etc. that they owned or had produced themselves) and services
(such as hairdressing, skill-sharing etc.), either on a one-to-one basis,
i.e., a product for a product or a product for a service, or using the
social currency that circulated within the fair – called, in a
rather hippy fashion, ‘Moon’. The World Social Soiree was
an open-mic, open-stage, two-hour, ten-day event were anyone could show
up and ‘do their thing’; the only guiding lines were a certain
theme for the day, and the fact that each day was supposed to have a
different movement or group as the convenor. The Flag of the Flags was
produced with all the flags collected throughout the WSF, sewn together
in one by a local solidarity economy enterprise, Grife do Morro da Cruz.
A development of the idea of the Mosaics in the first two WSF –
the Mosaic of Stones (where movements and individuals donated stones
with their messages or names engraved) and the Mosaic of Books (where
people were invited to donate books for a non-specified reason; later
it was decided that the books would form a library that, to this day,
still does not exist) – it was interesting not only for its symbolic
aspect, an affirmation of unity in diversity which dissolved all particular
‘logos’ in one which, at the same time, was none; but also
for the very discussion on art and culture it carried. Firstly, it was
the ‘work of art’ without an artist – for who could
be said to have created it, those who had the original idea, those who
donated the flags, or those who sewed it? Secondly, because, unlike
a ‘work of art’ (like the material produced at the Live
Museum of Diversity), it was made not to be hung or shown, but to be
used: to be carried in the streets, to be draped from high places in
direct actions etc.
The success of these experiments was perhaps not great,
although they did point ways forward. In general, it could be said that
both working groups suffered, in different degrees and manners, from
the same problem: the WSF one, being a small, geographically limited
group with few connections, had to rely mostly on itself – all
the spaces and activities were to a certain extent both proposed and
occupied by its members; the Youth Camp one, also geographically limited
and having made a decision to control and organise the spaces as little
as possible so as to keep them open, had to rely heavily on the participants
knowing about the existence, purpose and location of these spaces –
which, owing to lots of organisational problems, did not actually happen.
This meant that, on the one hand, the groups that were more involved
in the organisation – like the hip hop movement – were the
ones who more effectively appropriated them and were the most visible.
The story-telling space functioned just once, the World Social Soiree
and the Cultural Barter Fair only three times; the Instantaneous Memory
space and the Living Museum of Diversity functioned for four days, but
not many people knew about them as they had been placed in not very
visible corners. The transversality we spoke about never really materialised;
ideas such as having musical and other artistic interventions –
including full-fledged decoration – in the halls where plenaries
and seminars took place were never pushed forward, and if cultural issues
were present in the debates and speeches, it was only in very vague
and inconclusive terms. In the end, the Youth Camp was the living proof
of the somewhat pointless nature of our efforts: while the spaces where
activities of cultural exchange and production were supposed to happen
hardly functioned at all, a short stroll around the Harmonia Park or
through its central square showed that what we wanted to do was happening
anyway – people sat around, chatted, played music, shared skills,
exchanged gifts.
Needless to say, what was pointed out in subsequent
evaluations is that the cultural side of the WSF/Youth Camp was once
again restricted to the stages and concerts. Of course, that had not
been the intention, but it is evident that, in a situation were people
hardly know their way around, the only spaces that need no divulgation
– because they pretty much divulge themselves – are the
stages, and that is where people are bound to go; once more, culture
had been ‘a bit on the side’, ‘the icing on the cake’.
However, I believe those attempts, however failed they may have been,
are still defensible in what they had set out to do, and even the failures
themselves pose certain lessons and challenges which I will try to summarise
below.
First of all, I believe that however clear an understanding
of culture both the WSF and the Youth Camp started from, there was still
one flaw in their general way of thinking, which could be phrased as
the tension between specificity and particularity. It is clear that
the both working groups, when speaking of culture in the sense of the
whole of material and symbolic production, still considered it in specific
terms; thus, there would be a ‘Brazilian culture’, an ‘Argentinean
culture’, an ‘MST culture’ etc. While that is in a
sense true, there is a problem in believing that this is what has to
be expressed. A member of the MST will express his culture in his way
of speaking, of walking, in his worldview, food etc.; this not only
cannot be tapped into as something to be exposed, it probably should
not be either – otherwise, we would fall into some sort of ethnological
voyeurism, usually with the cultural background of the organisers appearing
as the unspoken norm. What can be shown is films made by the MST, or
we can listen to some of the movement’s story-tellers, or some
of their many (and extremely accomplished) musicians, all particular
cases of the MST specificity. What this means is that, when organising
open spaces, some level of ‘closing’ must happen so that
it is made sure that these people will occupy it – it is not ‘the
movement’, but these particular individuals that must be contacted;
it is not enough to create space and expect this or that ‘culture’
to occupy it, while at the same time the spaces must remain open to
whatever can happen. Of course, this element of openness is much more
effective in something like the Youth Camp, which is a living space
before being a space for activities.
Besides, it shows that openness towards specificity
can be a closing towards particularity: if we expect everyone to be
‘typical’, there is no place for the hybrid, for the multiple,
for the atypical. This is not a way of affirming diversity, and it also
proves that more than a turn towards the specific is necessary to break
the dichotomy between culture and art.
Secondly, and this is one point were I think both the
WSF and the Youth Camp got it right at least in their intentions, is
the need to eliminate mediation – a point to be taken up again
in the end. By moving the emphasis from ‘seeing’ to ‘doing’
– that is, by creating spaces for on-the-spot collective production,
however failed these first attempt may have been, one eliminates the
distinctions at the heart of our concept of ‘art’. There
are no producers and consumers anymore, no isolated creators but rather
collective intelligences that produce. Not only is this a much more
participatory way of experiencing culture, in keeping with the ideals
expressed in the Charter of Principles – this may also prove to
be the central question to any cultural debate. The WSF 2005 for the
first time will have no concerts at Por-do-Sol (although a small stage
on a much less central area will still exist); unfortunately, the Youth
Camp has not pressed ahead with ideas of doing away with the stage altogether
– but it will also experiment with a different space, in a circus
format, where the stage is at the same level as the audience, and which
is set out to be a full sensory experience, with bands providing the
background for poets to perform with a video playing above them while
dancers, jugglers, clowns move in the middle of the crowd and the mic
remains open for interventions from the ground. Potentially great fun.
Thirdly, it is easy to see that there is still a serious
barrier when talking about culture to many groups and individuals in
the left. Many people still treat it as either equal to art, or as exotic
specificities; and art is still treated as something with, at best,
a pedagogic quality (and therefore only a medium, not a form of its
own) and, at worst, a mere instrument (for mobilisation, for publicity,
for propaganda).
Since the first WSF one has heard many cries about
culture being left out of the discussions, about it not being transversal
to the debates etc. While this is certainly true in the sense of the
previous paragraph, it is also a bit nonsensical: if we understand culture
in the broader sense used above, how could it be outside? This normally
means that the people making these demands want more discussion on the
specificities of culture in a globalised capitalist world – which
ends meaning equalling culture and art or the industry of entertainment,
and this can be as much a part of the problem as it is a part of the
solution. All the debates I remember at the first three WSFs which were
‘on culture’ had to do with protections for the national
audiovisual industries against Hollywood, or politics of national exception,
or politics of national protection to endangered cultural heritage,
particularly that of minorities. Although these may of course still
be useful instruments in a struggle of resistance against homogenisation,
they do not tackle the problem of commodification as such, nor do they
tackle the ‘lateral’ importance given to cultural debates
in the left. By treating culture as art, they assume without question
distinctions we have shown to be very characteristic of the society
we want to transform. By placing culture as an exception that can only
be adequately dealt with by the nation-state, they not only close more
questions than they open, but also compartmentalise ‘culture’
as a subject for specialists, as one of the many issues – and
not a particularly vital one – to be debated at a forum. This
is mirrored by the way, for instance, free software is also ‘a
bit on the side’, something for those who use or develop it to
discuss; while in some other corner some people talk about digital inclusion,
and yet another group somewhere else talks about the persecution and
criminalisation of social movements by the mass media, or the monopoly
of information held by big transnational conglomerates.
These are not isolated issues, and we can only lose
while we discuss them as such. Knowledge is a common par excellence
– i.e., a non-scarce good that can be shared without any part
having less of it than before – and not only do we have a society
and an economy whose functioning is increasingly dependent on it, we
also have today the technological means to develop a society where each
and everyone is at once producer and consumer – ‘sharer’
– of it. Issues ranging from the medicinal knowledge of indigenous
peoples to digital inclusion, intellectual property to art, alternative
to mass media – all of these have essentially to do with knowledge,
which is one of the most important questions for the years to come.
In culture, this tends to translate as the end of mediation –
the distinction between high and low art, artist and audience, producers
and consumers. Perhaps a new world will see the suppression of art as
we have come to know it since we have known it for the last centuries.
All the better: it makes room for culture.