The Urca Institute and its founder, Alexandra Joy Forman, have been doing valuable memory work in Rio de Janeiro, gaining trust and rapport with storytellers connected to Guanabara Bay and beyond, collecting and preserving compelling resource-rich life stories from the region. The current large-scale project Alexandra has developed for the Urca Institute she founded in 2017, is “Água!nabara: Território Urca". The objective is to interview and record hundreds of people who live on the shores of Guanabara Bay and make their recollections public about what it was like when the healthy seminal body of water in Rio de Janeiro engaged people in work and leisure. In their collectivity, these interviews have an implicit intention to foment social responsibility and action for a clean Bay!
The non-profit grew out of the belief that personal history, like oral history, is an interdisciplinary and intergenerational field that can be practiced by anyone (with a little guidance) to document the human dimensions of environmental policy and of social and economic and environmental change. This is achieved by writing or recording lives and their peculiarities, their details, their adventures and their emotions. The literary overlay of the Institute's storytelling methodology (Co-memorar: Loving Local Memories) empowers the people UI interviews, students, and collaborators to develop their own narratives, to mobilize their sense of citizenship and share it with others for the public good.
The collaboration with Under the Madness Magazine to publish Brazilian youth who were writing or who would write stories and poetry, fiction and non-fiction for this issue, was an important, delightful and most welcome discovery. The Institute relied on partnerships with Escola Edem, Galpão Aplauso, RioMemorias.org to reach out to youth from different economic and social realities and diverse cities across Brazil. We found young voices that were coherent, political, expressive and most importantly, contained the power to overcome the limitations of a post-pandemic world. These word artists are eager and capable to fight for a brighter and more just future.
The interview by Under the Madness interns, Tessa Millette and Grace Denney, demonstrates a little more directly the range of opinions about what living in Brazil is like for creative youth. Many thanks to Sophie-Rose Riopel who worked early on with Alexandria Peary, Editor-in-Chief, to initiate this important collaboration. We will be posting a new interview of each of the Brazilian youth published in Issue 3 each week.
Alexandra Forman, Brazil, December 2022
