I found the text very interesting. I lived in Belgium for a while and so I read the text in the original dutch and it was  interesting to read about the Commons and the general idea of the concept along side my experience and memories of Belgian culture and social structure.


I have seen similar ideas appearing and gaining traction for example with the self sustainable communities, permaculture groups and even in the democratic schools. In Brazil, at least, we see these examples in many places but I believe its a tendency all around the world, as we have the wwoof.net site and other initiatives. 

The democratic schools are just like this, they build a structure of rules together with parents, teachers and students.  Any problem, idea or suggestion are discussed in assembly. Some of these schools apply the "Democratic" part literally and reproduce outside society. The students elect a mayor or a  president and their representatives in the school. The children take responsibility and deal with planning, conflicts and different ways to make things work in a better way. But others are more flexible. They have the assembly structure and the collective approach to problem solving but not necessarily the formal roles. 

I believe that the marjory of commons have arisen today because they are looking for a new way to build a different world. One that has in it more equality and is a fairer society, using things like crowndfounding to organize themselves. But also it got me thinking about a different example of the commons from history, one which today is partly sustained buy the government because of past injustices. Goiás (the state in Brazil where I live) is home to the biggest Quilombo** community in the country. They fought for their freedom and hid themselves in places of difficult access, such as in the mountains to escape the brutality of slavery. These communities where a kind of common and today still work in similar ways, although now they have support from the government (this is always tenuous, but now even more so due to one of the leading presidential candidates promising that if he wins he will strip away their rights to the land they occupy and their self determination). There, they elect their own community representatives, including a president, and decide collectively how resources, infrastructure and their rights will be manage. They have some jurisdiction over their own territory with some finical and infrastructure support from the federal government. 

The basis for these communities and the more recent commons phenomenon is that they are trying to build a new world where people respect each other more and create new rules together to live by. Its funny, but I went to a meeting this week around the same time I started to read this text and I realised that it was like a illustration of what the director of the school was trying to say. She started a school based on "natural learning", a method that was made famous by a school in Ecuador. Basically the facilitator (there are no teachers) is not aloud to interfere in anything or to propose activities to the children, unless the children propose it themselves or ask directly about something. The director, however, is trying to build something beyond the school and to create a kind of "life style" based on creating collectively and on exchange. For example labor and knowhow can be exchanged for a place to stay and meals. But in my opinion this method has limites. We still live in a capitalist society and you will need money at some point to buy necessities or even health care and so on. 


I think the ideas o the commons is a beautiful initiative and I want to live in a world where it is possible to collectively create our own rules and have some self determination. I think there are still many obstacles to achieve this however and we need to overcome these in order to create it. 




** The Quilombos are communities composed of run away slaves who fled from the plantations and mines during the colonial period in Brazil. The Quilombos exited ever since the first African slaves were brought here but they exploded in number between the 18th and 19th centuries. Many communities where organised in similar ways to the traditional methods in Africa.

There was a division of tasks and everyone worked. A leader usually commanded the Quilombo. They lived mainly from subsistence agriculture and fishing. They could practise their cultural and religious traditions freely this way and much of these traditions and rituals survive to this day because of their resistance. ​

​The recycled paper experience was a little laborious with many challenges. The first obstacles was the collection of the material including the paper to recycle and the equipment needed to do the process.
A week ago, I visited the bars, restaurants and stores around my work explaining the project and asking them to collect paper for me but as it is peek vacation season here they all pretty much where too busy to help. 

At the same time I visited the local seamstress looking for fabric to use as a sieve. When I explained the project she told me she had many magazines from the 70's that she was throwing away. So with this visit I was able to acquire two elements of what I needed.  

I had already made recycled paper when I was a kid and more recently I was experimenting with it in relation to zero waste. But when I moved I had to place some of my things in storage and didn't have those materials with me. I wanted to solve this in a way where I did not need to buy anything, making or reusing the materials I needed. 

My first idea was to use a workman's sieve, which is used in here on construction sites to sift the rocks from sand or to sort out beans or coffee on the plantations.

I lost a couple of days thinking how I would do it. Overlapping the screen over itself or with another material. A possible solution was to use the fabric that I got from the seamstress. She had explained to me that it was generally used locally to strain milk to make dairy products or corn to make cornflower. I sewed it onto the workman's sieve and it looked like it was going to work until I realised it was way to big for the plastic basin I was using.

 With time running out and unable to find another container big enough I decided that I would have to go to the market and see if I could find something smaller. I found a kind of pan sieve that came in different sizes and was flat which meant they could fit neatly into each other. 
I cut up the old needlework magazines and used a hand mixer to mix them up. I don't have a blender but the mixer worked (although the outcome wasn't quite what I expected). The final paper had big pieces and it was a little bulky, but I did my best. I also decide to use saffron to give a different coloration, more interesting than dirty grey, and also was the easiest pigment I had to hand.

We are right in the middle of winter vacation in Brazil and I live in a town that is very dependent on tourism. Everybody is working around the clock right now during high season it's hard to get people to participate in workshops and things like this at the moment. But during the afternoons my neighbour babysits in the house next door. We share a garden so as I was preparing to make the paper one of the girls came over to have a look. She was very keen to help and got stuck in with the mission, which means that the results you are seeing was produced by four hands, mine and those of  Luana, 6 years old. 

Three years ago I started to get interested in the zero-waste movement and to change radically my relationship with the world. I started to avoid packaging and plastic whenever possible and realised that it was possible to live comfortably consuming a lot less and producing my own cleaning and beauty products, eating unprocessed foods and looking for organic stuff. With zero waste in my life, I've found that nature has a lot of the answers to daily questions, that they are much simpler than you think and that we can produce the vast majority of things on our own.

I started to try and live with as little waste as possible at home but it lead me to also rethink about the raw materials that I used in my work as a fine artist. I started looking at how the pigments were produced and if it was possible for me to do it myself without having to buy paint, which is mostly toxic and involves massive industrialised process including it's importation, fuel waste, badly paid workers, lots of packaging and all this at a very high cost. In Brazil, good paint is always imported and costs up to four times more than in the US or Europe.

Looking for alternatives and answers I asked my then college professors about natural pigments but they told me that it was impossible, because everything found in nature was dye and not pigment, which would not be useful to make work. I was discouraged but the desire to discover natural dyes and pigments remained with me.

During my final year at university I wrote a thesis combining art and the environment. I encountered some difficulties due to the fact that no one at the university knew much about art and sustainability or environmental education, so I had to discover and research it myself. The zero waste life style gave me a kind of general understanding and made me more conscious about where my products came from and where it goes when it is thrown away. As well as what the product is made of or who is benefiting with my purchase. My intention with my thesis and the workshop I gave, was to provide a "complex reasoning" of the world and enable people to look again at their daily consumption and at the reality we are presented with. I based this on the work of the sociologist Edgar Morin in the "Seven Complex Lessons in Education " and "The introduction to the complex thought".

It was a waste awareness workshop, which utilised artistic observation and self reflection to emphasise the amount of waste each one of us produces. Whilst putting together these workshops the urge to work with the natural pigments resurfaced  but I still didn't know how to produce them. 

After graduating I moved from São Paulo, a huge metropolis of 14 million people to a small town in the middle of Brazil in the hopes of living in closer contact with nature and to live in a more sustainable way. The area is known as the Brazilian savannah and the cradle of rivers as some of the major rivers of the country begin here. It is a place of spectacular scenery with unique plants and animals. The Cerrado (as it is called here) contains natural remedies, surprises and a wealth of traditional knowledge in almost every tree that you walk by. 

Despite being a very beautiful place and also serving as the model of the 17 SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals) there are stark contrasts in wealth, present in the whole country, where very poor people have little to no access to decent education and health services in this small town of around 5,000 inhabitants. The inequality is aparante and has been exacerbated by the buying up of land and houses by foreign investors and the influx of more affluent people form the big cities. This has driven a wedge between the people that where here already and that had a connection to the land and and those coming in now, isolating these groups. This results in people that live here totally unaware of their surroundings and unaware of the knowledge possessed by those that have been working the land for centuries, their traditions and sustainable ways of producing and living. In a more general way it also means that people tend to reproduce the bad habits of the big cities and repeat mistakes in trying to develop the region. 

  As a teacher, fine artist and part of the zero-waste movement, I wanted to try and bring the techniques that I had learnt to raise awareness of these issues and to help people engage more with their surroundings. One way is by combining art and ideias of zero-waste to talk about nature as with the workshops I had given before. Working  with natural pigments is a great way to raise this awareness and also to link to the importance of preserving the Cerrado, promoting integration with the city and nature that surrounds us and showing that these materials are available to everyone in a very    democratic way.
​Working with art is important as it can be used as a transversal subject to get in many important topics. But I'm working with children that have never had an art education before, which makes this dialog even more necessary and somehow, more exciting.

​As soon as I arrived here I looked for natural dyes and found only black dye (mango leaf) and orange dye (saffron) which are already being used here. But with the richness of materials here I know that there must be ways of producing others.

I would like to use the pigments with the children I am teaching now, doing environmental education projects and workshops through art. I hope that one day I can take these workshops to other communities in the area, to encourage more exchange of ideas, workshops and training to help communicate these ideas in the region.. And also learn with them.

Talking about my personal work as an artist (which is not separated from the classes, as a I believe in collaborative classrooms as a collective and individual process) I am developing work with a beeswax (encaustic process), natural ink and wood which I propose to show the reliefs, contrasts of the peaks and troughs, colours and shadows of the landscape of the cerrado.

So for me, in this journey I have been on looking for alternative ways to produce materials, I can not really express in words how enriching it is to participate in the online course of CAES. I believe that it is the missing piece for my growth as a teacher, artist, and to live in a more zero-waste lifestyle.