ABOUT THE PROJECT

The “Cultural Territories, Ocoy-Jacutinga Circuit” comes to life from an immersion into Ocoy’s community and from visits to their settlements. That time gave us the opportunity to get closer to the place’s and the people’s history and how it is to live shackled by farmlands and big investment projects. The Guarani people from this region has been afflicted by continuous cycles of violence from all sides and with that comes the weakening and, to an extent, the extermination of their true way of life. Excluding SESAI (Serviço de Saúde Indígena, or Indigenous Health Service) and the Indigenous Education programs, there is little to no investment or equipment aimed at strengthening the community life and belonging links aligned to their culture and identity’s specificities. In the tri-national region we can observe the increase on the creation of “non-places”. Places with the aim of diluting and discontinuing everything that is diverse or plural.

What was also observed was the way in how the lack of life projects and hope is making the indigenous women and young people fall ill. An example is the epidemic of self-extermination that has reached young adult men. Most violence towards the Guarani people happens in veiled, silent ways, such as price hikes on certain products or delivering subpar food to their communities. All that adds up with the low level of autonomy that each territory has, since there are big amounts of interference from the outside world.

With the resumption of arts and culture in Brazil, FUNARTE’s project sponsoring announcements presented a great opportunity of developing a continuous action program. From the project’s approval, we have FUNARTE as our main financier for the activities that will lead to the construction of three cultural and artistic spaces in the territories and producing a schedule of events that will both promote the strengthening of the cultural identity of the people who live in each territory as well as create networks that can bridge the gap with the non-indigenous world and strengthen the internal capabilities of each territory.

We have a team made up of indigenous and non-indigenous people who act on all three protected territories and a network of partners has been developing actions and projects with the communities, specially those related to culture and the social inclusion of the Guarani people of Parana’s West. A Management Council has been appointed, which we plan to keep during the Circuit’s whole life cycle and, moreover, create a collective of indigenous curators who will be responsible for curating the cultural spaces.