‘Dreaming the river’: project encourages the production of art about the

Under the title “Dreaming about the river: from the right to the fight for the landscape”, a call for proposals open until April 21 invites artists, professional or not, from anywhere in the world, to produce visual arts that encourage reflection on the importance of preservation of the Amazon rivers, contributing to cultural promotion, artistic enjoyment, environmental education and Latin-Brazilian memory.

Initiative by Muluca, an independent non-profit art project, born in Porto Velho (RO) and with institutional support from the Bienal das Amazônias, the project will award up to ten works, which will be exhibited in the lick format in the five capitals Brazilians.

Muluca is a tensioning agent for arts and museology based on the concept of collective activation. / Reproduction

Project coordinator, Gabriel Bicho explains that the inspiration came from the intensification of the water crisis in the Amazon recorded in September 2023, with the drying up of rivers and extreme heat in the region, triggering alarms of hot spots and fires never seen before in the region. history.

“The scarcity of water in the rivers led riverside communities, the Arigós, for example, the caboclos, to live for many months suffering, and this provoked me and affected me in a way… because I have family members who are riverside dwellers, it provoked me in a way that made me think about the project, the open call and the Sonhar o Rio notice”, explains Bicho.

“Dreaming the River” will receive proposals in different formats, such as digital poetry, digital and manual collage, analogue and digital photography, screen prints, digital illustration and others, related to the theme and inspired by questions such as: How to dream about the memories of rivers? How can we dream about the bodies of rivers without disassociating them from our bodies? How can we guarantee our right to dream about rivers? How to dream of a river museum? How to fable lives based on river currents?

The Muluca experience has been developing since 2021, with the city of Porto Velho (RO) as its starting point. / Reproduction

The questions, according to the coordinator, came from the work Ancestral Futureby Ailton Krenak, an inspiring work that addresses the relationship between the river and human beings and points out, through rivers, the possibility of a possible future life.

“When he talks about greetings to rivers. He invites us to greet the rivers, to dream about the rivers, so based on that, we came up with this call”, adds Bicho.

The result of the call will be announced on April 28th and the applications for the works will take place between May and December 2024. In addition, the call will provide those selected with a prize of R$ 100.00 and a kit with risography, adhesive, magnet, lambe-lambe and Muluca’s handmade notebook and one of the artists will be invited to participate in person, with tickets paid for by the call, in the project’s actions within the program of Experimenta 2024, an art and culture festival to be held by SeCArtE, at the Federal University of Santa Catarina, in Florianópolis (SC).

Registration is free and can be done online between March 19 and April 21, 2024.

Editing: Matheus Alves de Almeida