Repairing things is a positive practice in several ways: it helps us save money, keep the objects we like for longer, it is a gesture of creativity and, finally, it helps to preserve the environment, generating less garbage and less waste. This workshop will discuss repair practices, how they can be applied in our day-to-day and that of our community and, finally, we will do a gamified experience of collecting samples of repairs in the neighbourhood.
Agenda
10:00-10:15 – Welcome and introduction
10:15-10:45 – Discussion about repair practices in the community and in Brazil in general
10:45-11:30 – Registering group to the “Tales of Care and Repair” website
11:30-14:30 – Break and story collecting in the neighbourhood
14:30-15:30 – Uploading stories to the “Tales of Care and Repair” website
15:30-16:00 – Feedback on activity and close
Facilitator
Fred Paulino is an artist, designer, researcher and curator. He is the catalyst of Gambiologia project, which since 2008 investigates art and technology in dialogue with education and popular culture, especially around the themes of improvisation and reuse. Fred is also the coordinator of “Tales of Care and Repair” in Brazil.
Partner
This workshop will be held in partnership with Eu Amo Minha Quebrada, settled in the community of Morro do Papagaio in Belo Horizonte, Brazil.
What Happened
The fifth Tales of Care and Repair workshop in Brazil took place in person on 10/23/2021, at the headquarters of the Eu Amo Minha Quebrada (“I love my shanty town”) project, a referential project in support of underprivileged communities, based in the Morro do Papagaio favela (slum), in Belo Horizonte.
The workshop’s target audience was originally wide, with no age restrictions, and the expectation was a massive presence of community residents. For this workshop, the first in-person among Tales of Care & Repair’s actions in Brazil, a strategy of gamification was even designed (including awards) to encourage the collection of stories in the favela throughout the entire day on Saturday.
However, despite the broad communication agreed upon, the dissemination carried out by the institution through social networks, in addition to printed posters and flyers, did not work as expected. Only a group of 8 children and 4 adults were present at the workshop. The allegation to the reduced public was that, on Saturday, community residents are busy with housework and informal work.
The meeting, which ended up not being as a workshop per se, began with a sample of repairs carried out by the facilitator Fred Paulino, as well as objects created by the Gambiologia project workshops over the last years, using reused materials and hacking practices. After a little over half an hour, the meeting was interrupted with the arrival of a TV team from Rede Globo, the most popular channel in Brazil, for a journalistic story about the workshop, focusing on repair practices in the context of sustainability and global warming.
From that moment on, it was inevitable that the workspace started to be configured as a TV studio, with attention shifting to the production of TV content, with interviews and mise en scène as requested by the journalists. As the workshop had already disarticulated, we opted to meet the demands, creating, in an improvised way, an immediate project for a workshop for creative production by the participating children, so that it could be documented by the TV cameras.
Despite the change in the original plan, the television production was positive, having been shown in two programs on Saturday: MGTV, a lunchtime television news program that covers the entire state of Minas Gerais, which contains a population of more than 20 million people (with live insertion in the program); and Jornal Hoje, one of the most watched TV news programs in Brazil, broadcast nationally. We estimate that more than 7 million people have watched the story.
After the press left, we started a tour around the Morro do Papagaio community, visiting businesses and homes in the neighborhood, that could be related to the project’s theme. In particular, the visit to the residence of Mr. Alexandre drew attention. He is known by the community as “Electronics-Alex”, and is an intuitive electronics inventor and technician who, even without formal training, performs repairs for countless community residents, in addition to inventing electronic devices for personal use.