[ENGLISH VERSION BELOW] 

Apresentação institucional 19ª Flip

A pandemia de Covid-19 fez milhões de vítimas, fechando fronteiras, expondo contradições e mudando sociabilidades. O vírus colocou em evidência os problemas e dilemas atuais da humanidade, a começar pela desigualdade socioeconômica e pela destruição acelerada do meio ambiente. Ganha força, assim, a reflexão sobre outras maneiras de estar no mundo. Seria impossível, e imprudente, minimizar a imensa tragédia vivida, desejando neste momento apenas uma volta ao “normal” – que foi uma das causas do problema. É preciso urgentemente imaginar outras formas de vida, sem a centralidade no “humano”, preparando o terreno para evitar o agravamento da crise climática na qual o planeta já vive.

A Flip – Festa Literária Internacional de Paraty – coloca-se como uma das plataformas possíveis de lançamento imaginativo neste momento. Ao longo dos anos, a Festa se estabeleceu como um dos principais encontros literários mundiais, local de reunião de multidões criativas de todas as origens. A Flip floresceu em um município que tem parte significativa de seu território ocupada por áreas de proteção socioambiental, em região reconhecida como Patrimônio Mundial Misto da Humanidade pela Unesco, título que por si só instiga a obrigação de nunca separar cultura e natureza. 

É a partir dessa perspectiva que a Flip se transforma em laboratório e que busca outras expressões, linguagens, perspectivas e mundos. Olhando a partir de Paraty – sua cidade berço, lugar de encontros das águas com a terra –, buscamos na floresta a inspiração para a Festa deste ano: a diversidade, a colaboração em vez da competição, a capacidade regenerativa, a rede de comunicação estabelecida no ar e na terra entre as raízes das árvores e as hifas dos fungos, as alianças formadas por águas, pedras, plantas, ventos, insetos, pássaros e todos os viventes. Na pandemia, a humanidade reduziu sua mobilidade e experimentou temporalidade menos frenética, que são características mais associadas ao reino vegetal. Chegou a hora de pensar e aprender com as plantas.

Nhe’éry (pronuncia-se nheeri) é como o povo Guarani chama a Mata Atlântica, uma denominação que revela a pluriversalidade da floresta. Como explica o cineasta e liderança do povo Guarani Mbya, Carlos Papá, Nhe’éry quer dizer “onde as almas se banham”. Além disso, Nhe’éry também conduz mensagens através de fios de palavras.

Com esses fios de palavras, enlaçaremos a literatura, essencial para se pensar o mundo e as relações entre humanos e não humanos. A grande importância das plantas nas obras literárias precisa ser destacada: os buritis de Guimarães Rosa, o Jardim Botânico e as flores de Clarice Lispector, as árvores de Fernando Pessoa, as folhas de Mãe Stella de Oxóssi, a bananeira de Bashô, as palmeiras e matas de Amos Tutuola, o herbário de Emily Dickinson, a polinização cruzada de Waly Salomão, o planeta-floresta de Ursula K. Le Guin, “a floresta e a escola” de Oswald de Andrade, seguindo-se novos fios de palavras de ficcionistas e poetas da contemporaneidade. O texto literário, sob forma de narrativa, poesia ou drama, em registro oral ou escrito, tem dado uma contribuição fundamental para o respeito e a valorização das diferentes formas de vida.

Por esse motivo, a Flip, em sua 19ª edição, trabalha pela primeira vez com um coletivo de curadores, uma floresta curatorial.

Hermano Vianna, antropólogo de formação, e misturador geral de informações, coordena o trabalho deste coletivo curatorial integrado por Anna Dantes, colaboradora da Escola Viva Huni Kuin há mais de dez anos e uma das fundadoras do Selvagem – Ciclo de estudos sobre a vida; Evando Nascimento, escritor e filósofo, pioneiro na reflexão sobre literatura e plantas no Brasil; João Paulo Lima Barreto, antropólogo do povo Tukano, do Alto Rio Negro, fundador do Centro de Medicina Indígena em Manaus; e Pedro Meira Monteiro, professor da Princeton University e um dos fundadores da oficina Poéticas Amazônicas, no Brazil LAB da Universidade.

Com datas marcadas entre 27 de novembro e 5 de dezembro, a Flip quer atuar como um laboratório de aprendizagem dos ensinamentos a partir de Nhe’éry. Buscaremos abrir espaço para refletir sobre as questões da contemporaneidade e a superação de suas crises do ponto de vista artístico, semântico, cognitivo, ambiental, político e socioeconômico. Nesse sentido, a programação vai dialogar com criadores, pensadores e conhecedores que têm se voltado para ancestralidades e outros modelos de organização social e visões diferentes do conhecimento.

Na programação geral, as mesas e intervenções videográficas buscarão um formato híbrido, sem presença de público, em um momento ainda delicado da pandemia de Covid-19. Tudo em caráter laboratorial, tudo em construção, tudo na base de experimentações intelectivas e sensoriais. Tudo em busca de novos caminhos que nos conduzam a um mundo mais justo, igualitário, sustentável e criativo. Será então uma Flip em defesa da arte, da vegetação que protege o planeta e, sobretudo, da vida em suas múltiplas configurações. 

Homenagem

Ainda seguindo as lições de Nhe’éry, no lugar de um(a) escritor(a) homenageado(a), neste ano teremos uma homenagem coletiva, para todo(a)s o(a)s pensadore(a)s/conhecedore(a)s/mestre(a)s indígenas que tiveram suas vidas interrompidas pela Covid-19. Gente de várias florestas do Brasil, gente discípula das plantas. A Flip 2021, inspirada em projetos como o emocionante Memorial Vagalumes, quer cultivar e espalhar suas sabedorias por todo o mundo. Trata-se de pessoas-enciclopédias, bibliotecas vivas que não podem desaparecer. Apenas alguns nomes: Higino Tenório, escritor, benzedor, especialista em arte rupestre, professor e fundador da primeira escola indígena do povo Tuyuka; Feliciano Lana, artista plástico e escritor do povo Desana, conhecido internacionalmente; Zé Yté, colaborador central dos mais importantes estudos sobre a etnobiologia Kayapó; Maria de Lurdes, guardiã das plantas de cura do povo Mura; Meriná, mestra de rituais de cura e benzimentos do povo Macuxi; Alípio Xinuli Irantxe, mestre das flautas do povo Manoki; Domingos Venite, Guarani, líder da maior terra indígena do estado do Rio de Janeiro, militante de novas políticas de saúde indígena. Celebraremos a obra de muitas outras pessoas de vários povos indígenas em nosso Ciclo da Homenagem. Através desses nomes, a Flip também homenageia todas as vítimas da pandemia, entre elas gente de outras sabedorias e narrativas como Nelson Sargento, Aldir Blanc e Zé de Paizinho (mestre do samba de aboio sergipano), ou as poetas Olga Savary e Maria Lúcia Alvim, o poeta Vicente Cecim e o ficcionista Sérgio Sant’Anna.

Receita e parcerias

O projeto é apresentado pelo Ministério do Turismo e Associação Casa Azul. Conta com o benefício da Lei Federal de Incentivo à Cultura e Vale+Cultura. Patrocínio oficial do Itaú e Instituto Cultural Vale, e é uma realização da Associação Casa Azul, Secretaria Especial da Cultura, Ministério do Turismo, Governo Federal, Pátria Amada, Brasil.

A direção da Flip estima uma queda significativa de receita, e por isso ainda está sendo realizado o trabalho de busca de apoios e interlocuções com a comunidade local. Apesar de ser uma edição virtual, estão sendo realizados todos os esforços para que a festa traga as características de sempre, que é ser parte da força genuína do território em que está localizada. 

————ENGLISH VERSION————————–

FLIP in the Rainforest

Nhe’éry, Plants and Literature 

(Literary Festival Guidance Document, 19th FLIP, 2021)

The COVID-19 pandemic has claimed millions of victims, closing borders, exposing contradictions and changing social relations. The virus has starkly exposed humanity’s problems and dilemmas, beginning with inequality among people and the increasing destruction of the environment. A consideration of other ways for human beings to be in the world is gaining momentum. 

Planet Earth has been through an immense tragedy. It would be impossible to minimise the suffering this has caused, and imprudent to wish for a simple return to “normality” – a normality that has created the crisis and can only worsen it. Instead, we face an urgent need to imagine other ways of thinking about life on earth, ways of thinking that range more widely than our well-tried anthropocentric attitudes and structures, so that we can prepare the ground for a change that will help us prevent the environmental catastrophe that threatens to engulf us.

This is the starting point for the programme for this year’s Paraty International Literary Festival.

FLIP, the festival that began in Paraty, in the State of Rio de Janeiro, in 2003, and which has quickly become one of the most important cultural gatherings in South America (Annexe 1), is offering itself at this critical moment as a platform for imaginative endeavour. Over the years, FLIP has established itself as one of the main international literary gatherings in the region, a meeting place for writers and thinkers from all over the world (Annexe 2). FLIP has flourished in a town where more than 90% of the territory is occupied by socio-environmentally protected areas, in a region recognised as a UNESCO Mixed World Heritage Site, a title which, in itself, raises the obligation not to separate culture and nature. 

FLIP is therefore well-placed to be a laboratory in which other perspectives, languages and worlds are sought, tried, tested and promoted than those that have led us into the cul de sac we are in. Looking out from Paraty – FLIP’s home town, a place where the waters meet the land – we look for inspiration in the forest. During the pandemic, humanity has reduced its mobility and experienced a less frenetic mode of being. These are characteristics more often associated with the plant kingdom. It’s time we thought with and learned from plants. 

Nhe’éry (pronounced nheeri) is the name the indigenous Guarani people have for the Atlantic Rain Forest. It is a word that conveys the pluriversality of the forest. Also, as the xeramõi (elder) Carlos Papá explains, Nhe’éry means “where souls bathe”. Besides this, Nhe’éry also conveys messages through word threads, or associations, or ideas. 

There is, of course, already a well-established relationship between literature and the world of plants: Guimarães Rosa’s buriti palms, Emily Dickinson’s Herbarium, Clarice Lispector’s Botanical Garden and flowers, Fernando Pessoa’s forests, Ursula K Le Guin’s Forest-planet, Mãe Stella de Oxóss’s sacred leaves, Basho’s banana tree, Amos Tutuola’s palm trees and jungles, Waly Salomão’s cross pollination, Oswald de Andrade’s “the school and the forest” are examples. So literature already points the way for us to place a higher value on forms of life other than the human. We need to follow that way a bit further to discover whether it can help us find a path away from planetary disaster. 

A collective of curators 

In the forest we see diversity rather than homogeneity, collaboration rather than competition, regenerative capacity, communications networks established in the air and on the land between tree roots and fungal hyphae, alliances formed by waters, stones, plants, winds, insects, birds and all other living things. So the 19th FLIP will be arranged for the first time by a “curatorial forest” – a collective of curators. 

Hermano Vianna, an anthropologist by training (he has a doctorate in social anthropology from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), author, journalist, television producer, music festival curator and master mixer of information, will coordinate the work of this curators’ collective. Its other members are: 

Anna Dantes, a book publisher who for the past decade has collaborated in projects at Escola Viva Huni Kuin and is one of the founders of Selvagem – Study cycle on life, an academic investigation into the relationships between indigenous, scientific and artistic knowledge.

Evando Nascimento, writer and philosopher, pioneer in the reflection on literature and plants in Brazil. He was a student of Jacques Derrida at EHESS and Sarah Kofman at the Sorbonne. An award-winning novelist, he has also taught at the Federal University of Juiz de Fora and at the University Stendhal de Grenoble.

João Paulo Lima Barreto, a native Tukano anthropologist and founder of the Centro de Medicina Indígena in Manaus. He has a degree in philosophy and was the first indigenous person to gain a Master’s in Social Anthropology from the Federal University of Amazonas in Manaus.

Pedro Meira Monteiro, professor of Brazilian literature and culture at Princeton University and one of the founders of the Poéticas Amazônicas Workshop, at the University’s Brazil LAB, which focuses on media, fine arts, literature, photography and cinema produced in the Amazon. He has a Master’s in sociology and a PhD in Theory and Literary History from the State University of Campinas, as well as a DEA [spell out] from the University of Versailles Saint-Quentin-en-Yvelines.

The programme

With dates set for 27th November to 5th December 2021, FLIP will be a laboratory designed to examine teachings from the perspective of Nhe’éry. The Festival will offer space for reflection on the issues of the contemporary world and on ways in which we might sensibly address our planet’s crisis. Our investigations will range across the artistic, literary, semantic, cognitive, environmental, political and socio-economic. We will (as gently as possible) bang together the heads of creators, thinkers and knowledge-holders who have turned to the past, to ancestries and other models of social organisation and different views on knowledge, to help us find a way to reverse out of our cul de sac. 

In the general programme, round table meetings and video presentations will attempt a hybrid format, between the real and the virtual, at this still delicate moment in the COVID-19 pandemic. Everything will be laboratorial in character, in construction, based on intellectual and sensory experimentation. Everything will be a search for new paths that might lead us to a fairer, more equal, sustainable and creative world. It will be, as it has been since its inception, a FLIP in defence of art and literature, but also an enquiry into and celebration of the vegetation that creates, sustains and protects the planet and life in its multiple configurations. 

Proposed authors

“As the writer Mário de Andrade, one of the founders of Brazilian modernism, said, each person needs to be 300 or more. Each person pulls a tram full of people, several trams, several networks, many other collectives. Therefore, the work of Flip’s curatorial collective seeks to dialogue with as many voices as possible that are looking at contemporary issues and overcoming their crises. The idea is to turn to thoughts and actions that have proposed other models of social organization and different visions of knowledge,” says the curatorial collective through coordinator Hermano Vianna.

Some of the authors who are being invited to join us in Paraty, digitally:

Stefano Mancuso, born in Catanzaro, Italy, in 1965, is an Italian botanist, professor of the Agriculture, Food, Environment and Forestry department at the University of Florence. He is the director of the International Laboratory of Plant Neurobiology, editor-in-chief of the Plant Signaling & Behavior journal and a member of the Accademia dei Georgofili. LINV is a laboratory dedicated to plant neurobiology that explores signaling and communication between plants at all levels of biological organization. In 2012, he participated in the Plantoid project and designed a robot to act and grow like a plant. He is the founder of the field of studies known as plant neurobiology. In 2018, he received the XII Galileo Prize for literary writing for scientific dissemination for the book The Revolutionary Genius of Plants.

Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida was born in Luanda in 1982. She has a degree in Portuguese Studies from the Faculdade de Ciências Sociais e Humanas da Universidade Nova de Lisboa, a Master in Literary Theory and a PhD in Literary Studies, both by the Faculdade de Letras da Universidade de Lisboa. She works at the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia and has been, since March 2021, consultant to the Casa Civil of the President of the Republic, Marcelo Rebelo de Sousa. She is the author of That hair; Luanda, Lisboa, Paraíso; and A visão das Plantas, books awarded with literary prizes.

Homage

Following the wisdom of Nhe’éry, this year, instead of one honored writer, FLIP will conduct a collective homage to all the thinkers, knowledge-holders and indigenous leaders whose lives were cut short by COVID-19: people of the forests of Brazil, disciples of plants. FLIP 2021, inspired by such projects as the moving Memorial Vagalumes (Firefly Memorial), hopes to cultivate and spread their knowledge throughout the world. They were human encyclopaedias, living libraries who must not disappear. To name but a few:

Higino Tenório, writer, healer, specialist in cave and rock art, teacher and founder of the first school for the Tuyuka people; 

Feliciano Lana, internationally recognised visual artist and writer, a member of the Desana people; 

Zé Yté, key collaborator on the most important studies on Kayapó ethnobiology; 

Maria de Lurdes, guardian of the healing plants of the Mura people; 

Meriná, teacher of the healing and blessing rituals of the Macuxi people;

Alípio Xinuli Irantxe, flute-master of the Manoki people; 

Domingos Venite, Guarani leader of the largest indigenous reserve in the state of Rio de Janeiro, campaigner for a new indigenous health policy. 

We will also celebrate, in our annual homage, the work of many other members of indigenous peoples. By honouring their names, FLIP will honour all other victims of the pandemic. 

Annexe 1: Leading authors, Brazilian and international, who have attended FLIP

Flip has hosted a wide variety of authors from a wealth of origins, trends and languages. Among the international names are Svetlana Aleksiévitch, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, J. M. Coetzee, Anne Enright, Jonathan Safran Foer, Nadine Gordimer, Karl Ove Knausgård, Ian McEwan, Toni Morrison, Amós Oz, Paul B. Preciado, Salman Rushdie. Among the Brazilian guests, we are lucky to have Adélia Prado, Antonio Candido, Caetano Veloso, Conceição Evaristo, Davi Kopenawa, Ferreira Gullar, Milton Hatoum, plus several young writers.

Annexe 2: A brief history of Flip

Flip was created in 2003 to promote, in Paraty, a gathering experience permeated by a broader concept of literature – considering that fiction shares common ground and nurtures itself from architecture, design, journalism, urbanism, science, education, basically everything written in a book. 

Each detail in Flip is thought to have the public space’s transformation as a departure point. As time passes, each one of these interventions assumes a deeper emotional meaning by its relation with its visitors and the local community. In such a way, Flip stretches its presence throughout the year. 

“The open city as an experience of Flip in Paraty is an exchange that encourages, for nineteen years now, a continuous communal dialogue. In such encounters, the narratives are incomplete because they are made from the experiences of each person”, says Mauro Munhoz, Flip’s creative director. 

As the Covid-19 pandemic demanded from us the search for new paths, Flip sought to expand its means of action. In 2020, with its first virtual edition, it became clear that working with the community of Paraty was not only possible during the pandemic as it was profoundly necessary.